Search

Purpose: Investigating the changes of regional homogeneity (ReHo) values and both static and dynamic functional connectivity (FC) before and after Traditional Chinese Manual Therapy (Tuina) in patients with lumbar disk herniation (LDH) through resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI). Based on this, we observe the effect of Tuina on the above abnormal changes. Methods: Patients with LDH (n = 27) and healthy controls (HCs) (n = 28) were recruited. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning was performed two times in LDH patients, before Tuina (time point 1, LDH-pre) and after the sixth Tuina (time point 2, LDH-pos). And for one time in HCs which received no intervention. The ReHo values were compared between LDH-pre and HCs. The significant clusters detected by ReHo analysis were selected as seeds to calculate static functional connectivity (sFC). We also applied the sliding-window to perform dynamic functional connectivity (dFC). To evaluate the Tuina effect, the mean ReHo and FC values (both static and dynamic) were extracted from significant clusters and compared between LDH and HCs. Results: In comparison to HCs, LDH patients displayed decreased ReHo in the left orbital part middle frontal gyrus (LO-MFG). For sFC analysis, no significant difference was found. However, we found decreased dFC variance between LOMFG and the left Fusiform, and increased dFC variance in the left orbital inferior frontal gyrus and left precuneus. Both ReHo and dFC values revealed after Tuina, the brain activities in LDH patients were similar to HCs. Conclusion: The present study characterized the altered patterns of regional homogeneity in spontaneous brain activity and those of functional connectivity in patients with LDH. Tuina can reshape the function of the default mode network (DMN) in LDH patients, which may contribute to the analgesic effect of Tuina in LDH patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Lumbar disc herniation (LDH) is one of the leading causes of low-back pain and results in a series of clinical symptoms, including pain, reflex loss, and muscle weakness. Spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) can relieve pain and promote internal and external stabilization of the lumbar spine. In this study, we investigated whether the brain alterations of LDH patients with SMT were frequency-dependent based on the calculation of Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations (ALFF) and fractional ALFF (fALFF). Further, we established a cohort of LDH patients to evaluate the contribution of SMT treatments to brain functional reorganization. Methods: A total of 55 participants, including 27 LDH patients and 28 health controls (HCs), were collected. All LDH patients underwent two fMRI scans (before SMT and after the sixth SMT session). To represent LDH-related brain oscillatory activities, we calculated the ALFF and fALFF in the conventional band (0.01-0.08 Hz), the slow-4 band (0.027-0.073 Hz), and the slow-5 band (0.01-0.027 Hz). Moreover, we extracted ALFF and fALFF values in clusters with significant differences to evaluate the SMT effect. Results: Compared with HCs, the LDH patients before SMT (LDH-pre) exhibited increased fALFF in right lingual gyri in the conventional band, and showed increased fALFF in left Cerebelum_Crus1 in the slow-4 band. We further examined the abnormal brain activities changes before and after the SMT intervention. The ALFF and fALFF values of LDH-pre group were higher than those of the HCs and LDH-pos groups. After SMT, the increased ALFF and fALFF values were suppressed for patients in conventional band and slow-4 band. Conclusion: The present study characterized the altered regional patterns in spontaneous neural activity in patients with LDH. Meanwhile, SMT is an effective treatment of LDH, and we supposed that it might have been involved in modulating dysfunctional brain regions which are important for the processing of pain. The findings of the current study may provide new insights to understand pathological mechanism of LDH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has become a global pandemic, which has had a huge impact on the lives of people around the world and has caused huge impacts and losses on global economic development. To now, there is still no effective drug or therapy against coronavirus. A large number of studies have shown that vaccines are the ultimate weapon to eliminate major infectious diseases. The development of new vaccines against new coronaviruses is the best way to prevent new coronavirus infections. In this study, we developed a new vaccine against the new coronavirus by combining our self-developed nano adjuvant loaded with carnosine graphene oxide adjuvant with loaded with CpG molecule and RBD protein antigen. Our results showed that this vaccine can produce high titer anti- SARS-CoV-2 RBD antibody neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 in mice within 2 weeks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was designed to develop a novel method for identifying significant pathways associated with human hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), based on gene co-expression analysis. The microarray dataset associated with HCM (E-GEOD-36961) was obtained from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute database. Informative pathways were selected based on the Reactome pathway database and screening treatments. An empirical Bayes method was utilized to construct co-expression networks for informative pathways, and a weight value was assigned to each pathway. Differential pathways were extracted based on weight threshold, which was calculated using a random model. In order to assess whether the co-expression method was feasible, it was compared with traditional pathway enrichment analysis of differentially expressed genes, which were identified using the significance analysis of microarrays package. A total of 1,074 informative pathways were screened out for subsequent investigations and their weight values were also obtained. According to the threshold of weight value of 0.01057, 447 differential pathways, including folding of actin by chaperonin containing T-complex protein 1 (CCT)/T-complex protein 1 ring complex (TRiC), purine ribonucleoside monophosphate biosynthesis and ubiquinol biosynthesis, were obtained. Compared with traditional pathway enrichment analysis, the number of pathways obtained from the co-expression approach was increased. The results of the present study demonstrated that this method may be useful to predict marker pathways for HCM. The pathways of folding of actin by CCT/TRiC and purine ribonucleoside monophosphate biosynthesis may provide evidence of the underlying molecular mechanisms of HCM, and offer novel therapeutic directions for HCM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flow softening behaviors of a nickel-based superalloy with δ phase are investigated by hot compression tests over wide ranges of deformation temperature and strain rate. Electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD), optical microscopy (OM), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) are employed to study the flow softening mechanisms of the studied superalloy. It is found that the flow softening behaviors of the studied superalloy are sensitive to deformation temperature and strain rate. At high strain rate and low deformation temperature, the obvious flow softening behaviors occur. With the increase of deformation temperature or decrease of strain rate, the flow softening degree becomes weaken. At high strain rate (1s-1), the flow softening is mostly induced by the plastic deformation heating and flow localization. However, at low strain rate domains (0.001-0.01s-1), the effects of deformation heating on flow softening are slight. Moreover, the flow softening at low strain rates is mainly induced by the discontinuous dynamic recrystallization and the dissolution of δ phase (Ni3Nb). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urapidil has been proposed to be an effective vasodilator for the treatment of acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF); however, its effect on cardiac function, as compared with that of nitroglycerin, in elderly patients with hypertension and ADHF has yet to be determined. In the present study, a multicenter, open-label clinical trial was performed, in which 120 elderly patients with hypertension and ADHF were randomly assigned to the treatment (50-400 μg/min intravenous urapidil) or control group (5-40 μg/min intravenous nitroglycerin). The dosages of the medications were adjusted according to the blood pressure of the patients. The systolic and diastolic blood pressure, heart rate and serum level of N-terminal pro B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) were evaluated at hospital admission and at days 1, 2, 3 and 7 after treatment. In addition, the left ventricular function was assessed by measuring the left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) and left ventricular end-diastolic volume at hospital admission and at days 2 and 7 after treatment. The results indicated that intravenous administration of urapidil and nitroglycerin were effective in lowering the blood pressure and heart rate within 7 days, with no significant differences observed between the two groups (P>0.05). By contrast, greater reduction in the serum NT-proBNP level (2,410.4±546.1 vs. 4,234.1±876.4 pg/ml; P<0.05) and greater improvement in the LVEF (55.3±3.4 vs. 45.2±2.4%; P<0.05) were observed in the urapidil-treated group, as compared with the nitroglycerin-treated group. No adverse events were reported during the treatment period in the two groups. The clinical outcomes at 6 months following discharge were evaluated and were not found to be significantly different between the two groups. In conclusion, the present results of the present study suggested that urapidil was as effective as nitroglycerin in controlling blood pressure and heart rate and was more effective in improving cardiac systolic function in elderly patients with hypertension and ADHF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scinderin is a Ca2+-dependent filamentous actin (F-actin) severing and capping protein, which has a key role in regulated secretion. However, little is known regarding the function and mechanism of scinderin in human carcinoma development and progression. In the present study, the biological function of scinderin was investigated using a cell proliferation assay, flow cytometric analysis and a Transwell assay in highly tumorigenic and the metastatic human gastric cancer cell line SGC-7901 transfected with scinderin-small hairpin RNA lentivirus. The changes in the expression of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) markers were also investigated. The results indicated that scinderin knockdown effectively suppressed proliferation, reduced migration and arrested the cell cycle of the SGC-7901 cells at G2/M phase. Furthermore, scinderin knockdown altered the expression of EMT markers; the expression of E-cadherin was significantly upregulated, along with an evident decrease in N-cadherin and β-catenin expression. In conclusion, the present study suggested that suppression of scinderin impaired proliferation and migration of gastric cancer SGC-7901 cells and attenuates its EMT process. Scinderin may therefore be a potential target for tumor EMT and therapy against gastric cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new generation method for spatial and temporal correlated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Nakagami fading channel is proposed, which has low complexity and is applicable for arbitrary fading parameters and prespecified correlation coefficients of different subchannel. The new scheme can be divided into two steps: (1) generate independent Nakagami fading sequences for each subchannel based on a novel rejection method; (2) introduce the temporal and spatial correlation based on the relationships between Rayleigh, Gamma, andNakagami random processes. The analysis and simulation results show that the proposed simulator has a good agreement with the theoretical model on fading envelope distribution, spatial-temporal correlation characteristic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first two equations of the Volterra lattice hierarchy and the first two equations of its non-autonomous (non-isospectral) extension, we present Riccati systems for functions cj(t), , such that an expression in terms of Hankel determinants built from them solves these equations on the right half of the lattice. This actually achieves a complete linearization of these equations of the extended Volterra lattice hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a generalized Toeplitz determinant solution for the generalized Schur flow and propose a mixed form of the two known relativistic Toda chains together with its generalized Toeplitz determinant solution. In addition, we also give a Hankel type determinant solution for a nonisospectral Toda lattice. All these results are obtained by technical determinant operations. As a bonus, we finally obtain some new combinatorial numbers based on the moment relations with respect to these semi-discrete integrable systems and give the corresponding combinatorial interpretations by means of the lattice paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By introducing some special bi-orthogonal polynomials, we derive the so-called discrete hungry quotient-difference (dhQD) algorithm and a system related to the QD-type discrete hungry Lotka–Volterra (QD-type dhLV) system, together with their Lax pairs. These two known equations can be regarded as extensions of the QD algorithm. When this idea is applied to a higher analogue of the discrete-time Toda (HADT) equation and the quotient–quotient-difference (QQD) scheme proposed by Spicer, Nijhoff and van der Kamp, two extended systems are constructed. We call these systems the hungry forms of the higher analogue discrete-time Toda (hHADT) equation and the quotient-quotient-difference (hQQD) scheme, respectively. In addition, the corresponding Lax pairs are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]