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Methamphetamine (MA) use disorder is a chronic neurotoxic brain disease characterized by a high risk of relapse driven by intense cravings. However, the neurobiological signatures of cravings remain unclear, limiting the effectiveness of various treatment methods. Diffusion MRI (dMRI) scans from 62 MA users and 57 healthy controls (HC) were used in this study. The MA users were longitudinally followed up during their period of long-term abstinence (duration of long-term abstinence: 347.52±99.25 days). We systematically quantified the control ability of each brain region for craving-associated state transitions using network control theory from a causal perspective. Craving-associated structural alterations (CSA) were investigated through multivariate group comparisons and biological relevance analysis. The neural mechanisms underlying CSA were elucidated using transcriptomic and neurochemical analyses. We observed that long-term abstinence-induced structural alterations significantly influenced the state transition energy involved in the cognitive control response to external information, which correlated with changes in craving scores (r ∼ 0.35, P <0.01). Our causal network analysis further supported the crucial role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in craving mechanisms. Notably, while the PFC is central to the craving, the CSAs were distributed widely across multiple brain regions (P FDR <0.05), with strong alterations in somatomotor regions (P FDR <0.05) and moderate alterations in high-level association networks (P FDR <0.05). Additionally, transcriptomic, chemical compounds, cell-type analyses, and molecular imaging collectively highlight the influence of neuro-immune communication on human craving modulation. Our results offer an integrative, multi-scale perspective on unraveling the neural underpinnings of craving and suggest that neuro-immune signaling may be a promising target for future human addiction therapeutics., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have shown encouraging treatment efficacy for upper gastrointestinal cancers (UGICs). However, durable clinical responses only existed in a minority of patients. We evaluated evidence predicting survival benefits to identify the optimal population followed by ICI-based therapy., Methods: A comprehensive search was performed using PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science to identify clinical trials for UGICs with ICI-based therapy. The outcomes were objective response rate (ORR), progression-free survival (PFS), and overall survival (OS). The quality of evidence was evaluated using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation System (GRADE)., Results: Thirty-six studies comprising 12,440 patients were included for quantitative synthesis. Patients with PD-L1-positive (OR = 2.08, p < 0.00001), EBV+ (OR = 8.47, p = 0.003) tumors were more likely to respond to ICI treatment. Moreover, OS was significantly improved with the statistical subgroup difference concerning sex (p = 0.02) and region (p = 0.02). An exploratory subgroup analysis showed significantly improved OS with ICI plus chemotherapy in patients with CPS ≥ 10 (HR = 0.66, p = 0.001) and CPS ≥ 1 (HR = 0.75, p < 0.00001)., Conclusion: UGIC patients with PD-L1-positive, EBV + status are associated with a better therapeutic response to ICI-based therapy. The male patients and Asian patients could derive more survival benefits following ICI treatment than female and non-Asian ones. A combination of prognostic and predictive factors was suggested to help guide immunotherapy decision-making in UGIC patients., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Background: Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder. The prevalence of TS in 2016-2017 has been reported; however, little is known about the current prevalence and trend in children and adolescents with TS. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence and trend of Tourette syndrome (TS) among US children and adolescents aged 0-17 years from 2016 to 2022., Methods: We analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of 278,472 children and adolescents aged 0-17 years who participated in the 2016-2022 National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH), a nationwide, population-based, cross-sectional survey of US children and adolescents. TS was defined as the affirmative response in the questionnaire completed by a parent or guardian., Results: Among the 278,472 children and adolescents enrolled, 754 had been diagnosed with TS, with an overall prevalence of 0.23% in all children and adolescents aged 0-17 years. The weighted prevalence by age group was lower than 0.01% in children aged 0-2 years, 0.05% in children aged 3-5 years, 0.28% in children aged 6-11 years, and 0.38% in adolescents aged 12-17 years. There were significant sex and racial/ethnic differences in the overall prevalence of diagnosed TS (i.e., 0.35% in boys and 0.11% in girls, 0.22% in Hispanics, 0.28% in non-Hispanic whites and 0.16% in non-Hispanic blacks). There was no significant change in the estimated prevalence of TS from 2016 to 2022., Conclusion: Based on nationally representative data, this study found that the national prevalence of TS among the US children and adolescents differed by sex and race/ethnicity but remained stable from 2016 to 2022., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Observational studies have suggested associations between multiple inflammatory factors and tobacco and alcohol use, but establishing causation is challenging in epidemiological investigations. We employed genetic association data about the circulating levels of 41 cytokines obtained from the genome-wide association study (GWAS), which contained 8293 Finnish participants. Genetic data on 5 substance use phenotypes were obtained from the GWAS dataset containing 1.2 million European subjects. Then, we conducted a bidirectional mendelian randomization (MR) study. The forward results indicated that smoking cessation was positively correlated with hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), interleukin-10 (IL-10), and stem cell factor (SCF); cigarettes per day was a risk factor associated with high expression in stromal cell-derived factor 1α (SDF-1 A), interferon-γ (IFN-G), IL-4, and granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF); drinks per week and smoking initiation were risk factors respectively correlated with reduced HGF and IL-2RA levels. During inverse MR analysis, the findings revealed that both IL-16 and IL-18 increased the risk of cigarettes per day; macrophage inflammatory protein-1β (MIP-1B) and tumor necrosis factor-β (TNF-B) inhibited and promoted smoking cessation, respectively; macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF) elevated the risk of drinks per week, while interferon inducible protein 10 (IP-10) had a contrary role; IL-7 and M-CSF respectively prolonged and shortened age of initiation of regular smoking. This study provides genetic proof supporting a causal relationship between various inflammatory factors and addiction phenotypes. Further comprehensive investigations are required to uncover underlying biological mechanisms. In addition, bibliometric studies have shown that oxidative stress is one of the most important orientations in alcohol and tobacco addiction research, where an in-depth investigation of its pro-inflammatory mechanisms would facilitate the development of potential therapeutic biological targets and drugs., (© 2024. Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Ultrasound image super-resolution (SR) aims to transform low-resolution images into high-resolution ones, thereby restoring intricate details crucial for improved diagnostic accuracy. However, prevailing methods relying solely on image modality guidance and pixel-wise loss functions struggle to capture the distinct characteristics of medical images, such as unique texture patterns and specific colors harboring critical diagnostic information. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces the Multi-Modal Regularized Coarse-to-fine Transformer (M2Trans) for Ultrasound Image SR. By integrating the text modality, we establish joint image-text guidance during training, leveraging the medical CLIP model to incorporate richer priors from text descriptions into the SR optimization process, enhancing detail, structure, and semantic recovery. Furthermore, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine transformer comprising multiple branches infused with self-attention and frequency transforms to efficiently capture signal dependencies across different scales. Extensive experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets, including CCA-US, US-CASE, and our newly created dataset MMUS1K, with a minimum improvement of 0.17dB, 0.30dB, and 0.28dB in terms of PSNR. Our code and dataset will be available at: https://github.com/eezkni/M2Trans.

The variation in improvement among individuals with addiction after abstinence is a critical issue. Here, we aimed to identify robust multimodal markers associated with high response to 8-month abstinence in the individuals with heroin use disorder (HUD) and explore whether the identified markers could be generalized to the individuals with methamphetamine use disorder (MUD). According to the median of craving changes, 53 individuals with HUD with 8-month abstinence were divided into two groups: higher craving reduction and lower craving reduction. At baseline, clinical variables, cortical thickness and subcortical volume, fractional anisotropy (FA) of fibers and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) were extracted. Different strategies (single metric, multimodal neuroimaging fusion and multimodal neuroimaging-clinical data fusion) were used to identify reliable features for discriminating the individuals with HUD with higher craving reduction from those with lower reduction. The generalization ability of the identified features was validated in the 21 individuals with MUD. Multimodal neuroimaging-clinical fusion features with best performance was achieved an 87.1 ± 3.89% average accuracy in individuals with HUD, with a moderate accuracy of 66.7% when generalizing to individuals with MUD. The multimodal neuroimaging features, primarily converging in frontal regions (e.g., the left superior frontal (LSF) thickness, FA of the LSF-occipital tract, and RSFC of left middle frontal-right superior temporal lobe), collectively contributed to prediction alongside dosage and attention impulsiveness. In this study, we identified the validated multimodal frontal neuroimaging markers associated with higher response to long-term abstinence and revealed insights for the neural mechanisms of addiction abstinence, contributing to clinical strategies and treatment for addiction., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest No conflicts of interest in current study., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Insufficient lighting poses challenges to both human and machine visual analytics. While existing low-light enhancement methods prioritize human visual perception, they often neglect machine vision and high-level semantics. In this paper, we make pioneering efforts to build an illumination enhancement model for high-level vision. Drawing inspiration from camera response functions, our model could enhance images from the machine vision perspective despite being lightweight in architecture and simple in formulation. We also introduce two approaches that leverage knowledge from base enhancement curves and self-supervised pretext tasks to train for different downstream normal-to-low-light adaptation scenarios. Our proposed framework overcomes the limitations of existing algorithms without requiring access to labeled data in low-light conditions. It facilitates more effective illumination restoration and feature alignment, significantly improving the performance of downstream tasks in a plug-and-play manner. This research advances the field of low-light machine analytics and broadly applies to various high-level vision tasks, including classification, face detection, optical flow estimation, and video action recognition.

Deep-level traps at the buried interface of perovskite and energy mismatch problems between the perovskite layer and heterogeneous interfaces restrict the development of ideal homogenized films and efficient perovskite solar cells (PSCs) using the one-step spin-coating method. Here, we strategically employed sparingly soluble germanium iodide as a homogenized bulk in-situ reconstruction inducing material preferentially aggregated at the perovskite buried interface with gradient doping, markedly reducing deep-level traps and withstanding local lattice strain, while minimizing non-radiative recombination losses and enhancing the charge carrier lifetime over 9 µs. Furthermore, this gradient doping assisted in modifying the band diagram at the buried interface into a desirable flattened alignment, substantially mitigating the energy loss of charge carriers within perovskite films and improving the carrier extraction equilibrium. As a result, the optimized device achieved a champion power conversion efficiency of 25.24% with a fill factor of up to 84.65%, and the unencapsulated device also demonstrated excellent light stability and humidity stability. This work provides a straightforward and reliable homogenization strategy of perovskite components for obtaining efficient and stable PSCs., (Copyright © 2024 Science China Press. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Additive engineering plays a pivotal role in achieving high-quality light-absorbing layers for high-performance and stable perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Various functional groups within the additives exert distinct regulatory effects on the perovskite layer. However, few additive molecules can synergistically fulfill the dual functions of regulating crystallization and passivating defects. Here, we custom-synthesized 2-ureido-4-pyrimidone (UPy) organic small molecules with diverse functional groups as additives to modulate crystallization and defects in perovskite films via the Michael addition reaction. Theoretical and experimental investigations demonstrate that the -OH groups in UPy exhibit significant effects in fixing uncoordinated Pb 2+ ions, passivation of lead-iodide antisite defects, alleviating hysteresis, and reducing non-radiative recombination. Furthermore, the enhanced C=O and -NH 2 motifs interact with the A-site cation via hydrogen bonding, which relieves residual strain and adjusts crystal orientation. This strategy effectively controls perovskite crystallization and passivates defects, ultimately enhancing the quality of perovskite films. Consequently, the open-circuit voltage of the UPy-based p-i-n PSCs reaches 1.20 V, and the fill factor surpasses 84 %. The champion device delivers a power conversion efficiency of 25.75 %. Remarkably, the unencapsulated device maintained 96.9 % and 94.5 % of its initial efficiency following 3,360 hours of dark storage and 1,866 hours of 1-sun illumination, respectively., (© 2024 Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

Background: The increasing prevalence of allergies and asthma has led to a growing global socioeconomic burden. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health and lifestyles of children and adolescents have changed dramatically. It's unclear how this shift impacted allergy and asthma, with limited studies addressing this question. We aim to explore the difference of the prevalence of allergies and asthma among US children and adolescents during and before the COVID-19 pandemic using a nationally representative sample of US children and adolescents., Methods: This cross-sectional study included 31,503 participants in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) between 2018 and 2021. Allergies and asthma were defined on an affirmative response in the questionnaire by a parent or guardian. Chi-square tests were used to compare baseline characteristics with allergies and asthma for categorical variables. Differences in prevalence during and before the COVID-19 pandemic were estimated with weighted logistic regression, adjusting for demographic factors. Interaction analyses explored variations across strata., Results: In US children and adolescents aged 0 to 17, prevalence of any allergy was 26.1% (95% CI, 24.8%- 27.4%) in 2018 and 27.1% (95% CI, 25.9%- 28.2%) in 2021. Thereinto, in 2018, prevalence of respiratory allergies, food allergies and skin allergies were 14.0% (95% CI, 13.1%- 15.0%), 6.5% (95% CI, 5.8%- 7.1%) and 12.6% (95% CI, 11.6%- 13.5%), respectively, and in 2021, 18.8% (95% CI, 17.8%- 19.9%), 5.8% (95% CI, 5.2%- 6.4%) and 10.7% (95% CI, 9.9%- 11.5%), respectively. And prevalence of asthma was 11.1% (95% CI, 10.5%- 11.7%) in 2018-2019 and 9.8% (95% CI, 9.2%- 10.4%) in 2020-2021. Prevalence of respiratory allergies, skin allergies and asthma during and before the COVID-19 pandemic in children and adolescents had statistically significant differences. The differences persisted after adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic variables., Conclusion: Prevalence of respiratory allergies increased and the prevalence of both skin allergies and asthma decreased among US children and adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with the pre-COVID-19 pandemic. Further research is required to explore the association between allergic diseases and the pandemic, with a particular emphasis on the impact of lifestyle changes resulting from measures to prevent COVID-19 infection., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Accurate evaluation of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) severity is vital for screening and proper treatment. Current deep-learning-based automated AI systems for assessing ROP severity do not follow clinical guidelines and are opaque. The aim of this study is to develop an interpretable AI system by mimicking the clinical screening process to determine ROP severity level. A total of 6100 RetCam Ⅲ wide-field digital retinal images were collected from Guangdong Women and Children Hospital at Panyu (PY) and Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center (ZOC). A total of 3330 images of 520 pediatric patients from PY were annotated to train an object detection model to detect lesion type and location. A total of 2770 images of 81 pediatric patients from ZOC were annotated for stage, zone, and the presence of plus disease. Integrating stage, zone, and the presence of plus disease according to clinical guidelines yields ROP severity such that an interpretable AI system was developed to provide the stage from the lesion type, the zone from the lesion location, and the presence of plus disease from a plus disease classification model. The ROP severity was calculated accordingly and compared with the assessment of a human expert. Our method achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.95 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.90-0.98) in assessing the severity level of ROP. Compared with clinical doctors, our method achieved the highest F1 score value of 0.76 in assessing the severity level of ROP. In conclusion, we developed an interpretable AI system for assessing the severity level of ROP that shows significant potential for use in clinical practice for ROP severity level screening.

Two-terminal (2T) perovskite-based tandem solar cells (TSCs) arouse burgeoning interest in breaking the Shockley-Queisser (S-Q) limit of single-junction solar cells by combining two subcells with different bandgaps. However, the highest certified efficiency of 2T perovskite-based TSCs (33.9%) lags behind the theoretical limit (42-43%). A vital challenge limiting the development of 2T perovskite-based TSCs is the transparent recombination layers/interconnecting layers (RLs) design between two subcells. To improve the performance of 2T perovskite-based TSCs, RLs simultaneously fulfill the optical loss, contact resistance, carrier mobility, stress management, and conformal coverage requirements. In this review, the definition, functions, and requirements of RLs in 2T perovskite-based TSCs are presented. The insightful characterization methods applicable to RLs, which are inspiring for further research on the RLs both in 2T perovskite-based two-junction and multi-junction TSCs, are also highlighted. Finally, the key factors that currently limit the performance enhancement of RLs and the future directions that should be continuously focused on are summarized., (© 2024 Wiley‐VCH GmbH.)

Background: Diabetes mellitus (DM) affects up to one-third of breast cancer (BC) patients. Patients with co-existing BC and DM (BC-DM) have worsened BC prognosis. Nevertheless, the molecular mechanisms orchestrating BC-DM prognosis remain poorly understood. tRNA-derived fragments (tRFs) have been shown to regulate cancer progression. However, the biological role of tRFs in BC-DM has not been explored., Methods: tRF levels in tumor tissues and cells were detected by tRF sequencing and qRT-PCR. The effects of tRF on BC cell malignancy were assessed under euglycemic and hyperglycemic conditions in vitro. Metabolic changes were assessed by lactate, pyruvate, and extracellular acidification rate (ECAR) assays. Diabetic animal model was used to evaluate the impacts of tRF on BC tumor growth. RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), qRT-PCR, Western blot, polysome profiling, luciferase reporter assay, and rescue experiments were performed to explore the regulatory mechanisms of tRF in BC-DM., Results: We identified that tRF-Cys-GCA-029 was downregulated in BC-DM tissues and under hyperglycemia conditions in BC cells. Functionally, downregulation of tRF-Cys-GCA-029 promoted BC cell proliferation and migration in a glucose level-dependent manner. tRF-Cys-GCA-029 knockdown also enhanced glycolysis metabolism in BC cells, indicated by increasing lactate/pyruvate production and ECAR levels. Notably, injection of tRF-Cys-GCA-029 mimic significantly suppressed BC tumor growth in diabetic-mice. Mechanistically, tRF-Cys-GCA-029 regulated BC cell malignancy and glycolysis via interacting with PRKCG in two ways: binding to the coding sequence (CDS) of PRKCG mRNA to regulate its transcription and altering polysomal PRKCG mRNA expression to modify its translation., Conclusions: Hyperglycemia-downregulated tRF-Cys-GCA-029 enhances the malignancy and glycolysis of BC cells. tRF-Cys-GCA-029-PRKCG-glycolysis axis may be a potential therapeutic target against BC-DM., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Obtaining high-quality data sets from raw data is a key step before data exploration and analysis. Nowadays, in the medical domain, a large amount of data is in need of quality improvement before being used to analyze the health condition of patients. There have been many researches in data extraction, data cleaning and data imputation, respectively. However, there are seldom frameworks integrating with these three techniques, making the dataset suffer in accuracy, consistency and integrity. In this paper, a multi-source heterogeneous data enhancement framework based on a lakehouse MHDP is proposed, which includes three steps of data extraction, data cleaning and data imputation. In the data extraction step, a data fusion technique is offered to handle multi-modal and multi-source heterogeneous data. In the data cleaning step, we propose HoloCleanX, which provides a convenient interactive procedure. In the data imputation step, multiple imputation (MI) and the SOTA algorithm SAITS, are applied for different situations. We evaluate our framework via three tasks: clustering, classification and strategy prediction. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of our data enhancement framework., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestAll authors declare that there is no Conflict of interest., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)

As an emerging research practice leveraging recent advanced AI techniques, e.g. deep models based prediction and generation, Video Coding for Machines (VCM) is committed to bridging to an extent separate research tracks of video/image compression and feature compression, and attempts to optimize compactness and efficiency jointly from a unified perspective of high accuracy machine vision and full fidelity human vision. With the rapid advances of deep feature representation and visual data compression in mind, in this paper, we summarize VCM methodology and philosophy based on existing academia and industrial efforts. The development of VCM follows a general rate-distortion optimization, and the categorization of key modules or techniques is established including feature-assisted coding, scalable coding, intermediate feature compression/optimization, and machine vision targeted codec, from broader perspectives of vision tasks, analytics resources, etc. From previous works, it is demonstrated that, although existing works attempt to reveal the nature of scalable representation in bits when dealing with machine and human vision tasks, there remains a rare study in the generality of low bit rate representation, and accordingly how to support a variety of visual analytic tasks. Therefore, we investigate a novel visual information compression for the analytics taxonomy problem to strengthen the capability of compact visual representations extracted from multiple tasks for visual analytics. A new perspective of task relationships versus compression is revisited. By keeping in mind the transferability among different machine vision tasks (e.g. high-level semantic and mid-level geometry-related), we aim to support multiple tasks jointly at low bit rates. In particular, to narrow the dimensionality gap between neural network generated features extracted from pixels and a variety of machine vision features/labels (e.g. scene class, segmentation labels), a codebook hyperprior is designed to compress the neural network-generated features. As demonstrated in our experiments, this new hyperprior model is expected to improve feature compression efficiency by estimating the signal entropy more accurately, which enables further investigation of the granularity of abstracting compact features among different tasks.

Retinal diseases stand as a primary cause of childhood blindness. Analyzing the progression of these diseases requires close attention to lesion morphology and spatial information. Standard image registration methods fail to accurately reconstruct pediatric fundus images containing significant distortion and blurring. To address this challenge, we proposed a robust deep learning-based image registration method (RDLR). The method consisted of two modules: registration module (RM) and panoramic view module (PVM). RM effectively integrated global and local feature information and learned prior information related to the orientation of images. PVM was capable of reconstructing spatial information in panoramic images. Furthermore, as the registration model was trained on over 280,000 pediatric fundus images, we introduced a registration annotation automatic generation process coupled with a quality control module to ensure the reliability of training data. We compared the performance of RDLR to the other methods, including conventional registration pipeline (CRP), voxel morph (WM), generalizable image matcher (GIM), and self-supervised techniques (SS). RDLR achieved significantly higher registration accuracy (average Dice score of 0.948) than the other methods (ranging from 0.491 to 0.802). The resulting panoramic retinal maps reconstructed by RDLR also demonstrated substantially higher fidelity (average Dice score of 0.960) compared to the other methods (ranging from 0.720 to 0.783). Overall, the proposed method addressed key challenges in pediatric retinal imaging, providing an effective solution to enhance disease diagnosis. Our source code is available at https://github.com/wuwusky/RobustDeepLeraningRegistration ., (© 2024. The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine.)

Aims: Abuse of methamphetamine has aroused concern worldwide. Stimulant use and sexual behaviours have been linked in behavioural and epidemiological studies. Although methamphetamine-related neurofunctional differences are reported in previous studies, only few studies have examined neurofunctional changes related to methamphetamine and sexual cues in methamphetamine dependence from short- to long-term abstinence., Methods: Neurofunctional changes were measured using a cue-reactivity task involving methamphetamine, sexual, and neutral cues in 20 methamphetamine abusers who were evaluated after a short- (1 week to 3 months) and long-term (10-15 months) abstinence., Results: Five brain regions mainly involved in the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe were found with the group-by-condition interaction. Region-of-interest analyses found higher sexual-cue-related activation than other two activations in all five brain regions in the long-term methamphetamine abstinence group while no group differences were found. Negative relationships between motor impulsivity and methamphetamine- or sexual-cue-related activations in the left middle occipital gyrus, the superior parietal gyrus and the right angular gyrus were found., Conclusions: The findings suggested that methamphetamine abstinence may change the neural response of methamphetamine abusers to methamphetamine and sexual cues, and the neurofunction of the five brain regions reported in this study may partly recover with long-term methamphetamine abstinence. Given the use and relapse of methamphetamine for sexual purposes, the findings of this study may have particular clinical relevance., (© 2024 The Author(s). Addiction Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for the Study of Addiction.)

Background: The relationship between physical activity and hyperuricemia (HUA) remains inconsistent, and the dose-response association between moderate-to- vigorous physical activity (MVPA) level and HUA still unclear. In this study, we aimed to investigate the dose-response association of MVPA with HUA, and to explore an appropriate range of MVPA level for preventing HUA., Methods: Data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2007-2018 were used, including 28740 non-gout adult Americans. MVPA level was self-reported using the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire and serum uric acid was measured using timed endpoint method. The dose-response relationship between MVPA level and HUA was modeled with restricted cubic spline analysis. Logistic regression analysis were applied to estimate odd ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of the relationships between MVPA level and HUA., Results: A total of 28740 adults were included in the study (weighted mean age, 47.3 years; 46.5% men), with a prevalence rate of HUA was 17.6%. The restricted cubic spline functions depicted a general U-shaped relationship between MVPA level and HUA. The MVPA level of 933 and 3423 metabolic equivalent (MET) -min/wk were the cut-off discriminating for the risk of HUA. Participants with MVPA levels in the range of 933-3423 MET-min/wk had lower risk of HUA and they had the lowest risk when MVPA levels at around 1556 MET-min/wk. Compared with the moderate-activity group (600-2999 Met-min/wk), the low-activity group (< 600 Met-min/wk) had a greater risk of HUA (OR, 1.13 [95%CI, 1.02-1.26]) after fully adjusting for potential confounders., Conclusions: Compared with the moderate MVPA level, the low MVPA level was associated with the higher risk of HUA. And there may be a U-shaped dose-response relationship between MVPA level and HUA. When MVPA level was approximately 933-3423 MET-min/wk, the risk of HUA may at a lower level and the risk reached the lowest when MVPA level at around 1556 MET-min/wk., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Zeng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Purpose: The prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among children and adolescents seem to be high in countries around the world, and it's worth understanding the latest prevalence and trends of ASD in children and adolescents. The purpose of this study was to examine the latest prevalence and decade trend of ASD among individuals aged 3-17 years in the United States., Methods: A total of 13,198 individuals aged 3-17 years were included. Annual data were examined from the National Health Interview Survey (2021-2022). Weighted prevalence for each of the selected developmental disabilities were calculated., Results: This cross-sectional study estimated the weighted prevalence of autism spectrum disorder were 3.05, 3.79, and 3.42% among individuals aged 3-17 years in the US in 2021, 2022, and the 2-year overall, respectively. We also observed a decade-long upward trend even after adjusting for demographic characteristics (P for trend < .05)., Conclusion: The results of this study showed that the prevalence of ASD among children and adolescents aged 3-17 years in the United States remained high and has increased over the past decade. The further investigation is necessary to evaluate potential modifiable risk factors and causes of ASD., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Background: A better understanding of how the prevalence of hearing loss and its associated factors change over time could help in developing an appropriate program to prevent the development of hearing loss., Methods: Population-representative cross-sectional data from the United States National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) were used to estimate the trends in the prevalence of hearing loss among adults in the USA over the period 1999-2018. A total of 15,498 adult participants aged 20 years or older had complete audiometric examination data. Logistic regression was employed to evaluate the trend in hearing loss; weighted Rao-Scott χ2 tests and univariate logistic regression analyses were used to examine the association between hearing loss and relevant factors., Results: The overall hearing loss prevalence in 1999-2018 was 19.1% 19.1 (95% CI, 18.0-20.2%). The prevalence of hearing loss decreased in cycles (P for trend < 0.001). For participants aged 20-69 years, the prevalence decreased from 15.6% (95% CI, 12.9-18.4%) in 1999-2000 to 14.9% (95% CI, 13.2- 16.6%) in 2015-2016; for participants aged > 70 years the prevalence decreased from 79.9% (95% CI, 76.1-83.8%) in 2005-2006 to 64.5% (95% CI, 58.8-70.2%) in 2017-2018. Participants with hearing loss were likely to be older, male, non-Hispanic white, and to have not completed high school. Mild hearing loss was more prevalent among those aged 20-79 years; in those aged over 80 years the prevalence of moderate hearing loss exceeded that of mild loss. Among all otologically normal participants, hearing thresholds increased with age across the entire frequency range., Conclusions: The prevalence of hearing loss in USA adults changed over the period 1999-2018. The trends observed provide valuable insight for making public health plans and allocating resources to hearing care. Further investigation is necessary to monitor hearing loss and its potential risk factors., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Higher sensitivity to reward (SR) and weaker sensitivity to punishment (SP) construct the fundamental craving characteristics of methamphetamine abuse. However, few studies have appraised relationships between SR/SP (SR or SP) and cortical morphological alterations in methamphetamine abusers and whether hereditary factors take effects on SR/SP is unclear. Based on surface-based morphometric analysis, cortical discrepancy was investigated between 38 methamphetamine abusers and 37 healthy controls. Within methamphetamine abusers, correlation profiling was performed to discover associations among aberrant neuroimaging substrates, SR, SP, and craving. According to nine single nucleotide polymorphism sites of dopamine-related genes, we conducted univariate general linear model to find different effects of genotypes on cortical alterations and SR/SP/craving (SR, SP, or craving). Ultimately, mediation analyses were conducted among single nucleotide polymorphism sites, SR/SP/craving, and cortical morphological alterations to discover their association pathways. Compared to healthy controls, thinner cortices in inferior temporal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, medial orbitofrontal cortex, inferior parietal lobule, and lateral occipital cortex in the left hemisphere were found in methamphetamine abusers (P < 0.05, family-wise error corrected). Cortical thickness in the inferior temporal gyrus was negatively correlated with SR scores. We found that rs1800497 A-containing genotypes had lower cortical thickness in the left inferior parietal lobule than the GG genotype. The rs5751876 had effects on SR scores. This study would provide convincing biomarkers for SR in methamphetamine abusers and offer potential genetic targets for personalizing relapse prevention., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permission@oup.com.)

Background: Depression is associated with greater functional impairment and high societal costs than many other mental disorders. Research on the association between plasma polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) levels and depression have yielded inconsistent results., Objective: To evaluate whether plasma n-3 and n-6 PUFAs levels are associated with depression in American adults., Methods: A cross-sectional study included 2053 adults (aged ≥20 y) in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 2011-2012. The level of plasma n-3 and n-6 PUFAs were obtained for analysis. Self-reported Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) was used to identify the depression status. Binary logistic regression analysis was performed to evaluate the association between quartiles of plasma n-3 and n-6 PUFAs and depression after adjustments for confounders., Results: The study of 2053 respondents over 20 years of age with a weighted depression prevalence of 7.29% comprised 1,043 men (weighted proportion, 49.13%) and 1,010 women (weighted, 50.87%), with a weighted mean (SE) age of 47.58 (0.67) years. Significantly increased risks of depression over non-depression were observed in the third quartiles (OR = 1.65, 95% CI = 1.05-2.62) for arachidonic acid (AA; 20:4n-6); the third quartiles (OR = 2.20, 95% CI = 1.20-4.05) for docosatetraenoic acid (DTA; 22:4n-6); the third (OR = 2.33, 95% CI = 1.34-4.07), and highest quartiles (OR = 1.83, 95% CI = 1.03-3.26) for docosapentaenoic acid (DPAn-6; 22:5n-6); and the third (OR = 2.18, 95% CI = 1.18-4.03) and highest quartiles (OR = 2.47, 95% CI = 1.31-4.68) for docosapentaenoic acid (DPAn-3; 22:5n-3); the second (OR = 2.13, 95% CI = 1.24-3.66), third (OR = 2.40, 95% CI = 1.28-4.50), and highest quartiles (OR = 2.24, 95% CI = 1.08-4.69) for AA/docosahexaenoic acid (DHA; 22:6n-3) ratio compared with the lowest quartile after adjusting for confounding factors., Conclusion: Higher plasma levels of AA, DTA, DPAn-6, DPAn-3 PUFAs, and AA/DHA ratio may be potential risk factors for depression in US adults., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Wang, Yan, Li, Li, Xu, Huang, Gan and Yang.)

Background: Because of the significantly higher demand for nutrients during pregnancy, pregnant women are more likely to have nutrient deficiencies, which may adversely affect maternal and fetal health. The influence of nutritional supplements on the immune effects of inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccines during pregnancy is not clear., Methods: In a multicenter cross-sectional study, we enrolled 873 pregnant women aged 18-45 y in Guangdong, China. The general demographic characteristics of pregnant women and their use of nutritional supplements were investigated, and the serum antibody levels induced by inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were measured. A logistic regression model was used to analyze the association between nutritional supplements and SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels., Results: Of the 873 pregnant women enrolled, 825 (94.5%) took folic acid during pregnancy, 165 (18.9%) took iron supplements, and 197 (22.6%) took DHA. All pregnant women received at least one dose of inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and the positive rates of serum SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) and immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies were 44.7% and 46.4%, respectively. After adjustment for confounding factors, whether pregnant women took folic acid, iron supplements, or DHA did not influence NAb positivity or IgG positivity (P > 0.05). Compared with pregnant women who did not take folic acid, the odds ratios (ORs) for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 NAb and IgG antibody in pregnant women who took folic acid were 0.67 (P = 0.255; 95% CI, 0.34-1.32) and 1.24 (P = 0.547; 95% CI, 0.60-2.55), respectively. Compared with pregnant women who did not take iron supplements, the ORs for the presence of NAb and IgG antibody in pregnant women who took iron supplements were 1.16(P = 0.465; 95% CI, 0.77-1.76) and 0.98 (P = 0.931; 95% CI, 0.64-1.49), respectively. Similarly, the ORs for NAb and IgG antibody were 0.71 (P = 0.085; 95% CI, 0.49-1.04) and 0.95 (P = 0.801; 95% CI, 0.65-1.38) in pregnant women who took DHA compared with those who did not., Conclusions: Nutritional supplementation with folic acid, iron, or DHA during pregnancy was not associated with antibody levels in pregnant women who received inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccines., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

In heavy rain video, rain streak and rain accumulation are the most common causes of degradation. They occlude background information and can significantly impair the visibility. Most existing methods rely heavily on the synthetic training data, and thus raise the domain gap problem that prevents the trained models from performing adequately in real testing cases. Unlike these methods, we introduce a self-learning method to remove both rain streaks and rain accumulation without using any ground-truth clean images in training our model, which consequently can alleviate the domain gap issue. The main idea is based on the assumptions that (1) adjacent clean frames can be aligned or warped from one frame to another frame, (2) rain streaks are distributed randomly in the temporal domain, (3) the rain streak/accumulation related variables/priors can be inferred reliably from the information within the images/sequences. Based on these assumptions, we construct an augmented Self-Learned Deraining Network (SLDNet+) to remove both rain streaks and rain accumulation by utilizing temporal correlation, consistency, and rain-related priors. For the temporal correlation, our SLDNet+ takes rain degraded adjacent frames as its input, aligns them, and learns to predict the clean version of the current frame. For the temporal consistency, a new loss is designed to build a robust mapping between the predicted clean frame and non-rain regions from the adjacent rain frames. For the rain-streak-related prior, the rain streak removal network is optimized jointly with motion estimation and rain region detection; while for the rain-accumulation-related prior, a novel non-local video rain accumulation removal method is developed to estimate the accumulation-lines from the whole input video and to offer better color constancy and temporal smoothness. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach, which provides superior results compared with the existing state of the art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The source code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/flyywh/CVPR-2020-Self-Rain-Removal-Journal.

Abnormal genetic polymorphism of trace amine-associated receptor 1 (TAAR1) rs8192620 site has been confirmed to induce methamphetamine (MA) use and drug craving. However, the genetic susceptibility difference between MA addicts and heroin addicts is unknown. This study evaluated genetic heterogeneity of TAAR1 rs8192620 between MA and heroin addicts and elucidated whether rs8192620 genotypes associated with discrepancy in emotional impulsivity, which would help to instruct individualized treatment in addiction via acting on TAAR1 and evaluate risk of varied drug addiction. Participants consisting of gender-matched 63 MA and 71 heroin abusers were enrolled in the study. Due to mixed drug usage in some MA addicts, MA users were further subdivided into 41 only-MA (only MA taking) and 22 mixed-drug (Magu composed of about 20% MA and 70% caffeine) abusers. Via inter-individual single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis and two-sample t tests, respectively, the genotypic and Barratt Impulsiveness Scale-11 (BIS-11) scores differences between groups were completed. With following genotypic stratification, the differences in BIS-11 scores between groups were analyzed through two-sample t test. Individual SNP analysis showed significant differences in alleles distribution of rs8192620 between MA and heroin subjects (p = 0.019), even after Bonferroni correction. The TT homozygotes of rs8192620 dominated in MA participants, while C-containing genotypes in heroin (p = 0.026). There was no association of genotypes of TAAR1 rs8192620 with addicts' impulsivity. Our research indicates that the TAAR1 gene polymorphism might mediate the susceptibility discrepancy between MA and heroin abuse., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany.)

Cooperative bimetallic catalysis to access novel reactivities is a powerful strategy for reaction development in transition-metal-catalyzed chemistry. Particularly, elucidation of the evolution of two transition-metal catalysts and understanding their roles in dual catalysis are among the most fundamental goals for bimetallic catalysis. Herein, a novel three-component reaction of a terminal alkyne, a diazo ester, and an allylic carbonate was successfully developed via cooperative Cu/Rh catalysis with Xantphos as the ligand, providing a highly efficient strategy to access 1,5-enynes with an all-carbon quaternary center that can be used as immediate synthetic precursors for complex cyclic molecules. Notably, a Meyer-Schuster rearrangement was involved in the reactions using propargylic alcohols, resulting in an unprecedented acylation-allylation of carbenes. Mechanistic studies suggested that in the course of the reaction Cu(I) species might aggregate to some types of Cu clusters and nanoparticles (NPs), while the Rh(II) 2 precursor can dissociate to mono-Rh species, wherein Cu NPs are proposed to be responsible for the alkynylation of carbenes and work in cooperation with Xantphos-coordinated dirhodium(II) or Rh(I)-catalyzed allylic alkylation.

Background: The prevalence of hyperuricemia (HUA) is gradually increasing worldwide. HUA is closely related to diabetes, but the relationship between HUA and pancreatic β-cells function in the population is unclear. The purpose of this article is to investigate the association between pancreatic β-cells and HUA., Methods: This cross-sectional study examined the association between pancreatic β-cells and HUA in 1999-2004 using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Subjects were divided into two groups: HUA and non-HUA. Pancreatic β-cells function levels were assessed using homeostasis model assessment version 2-%S (HOMA2-%S), homeostasis model assessment version 2-%B (HOMA2-%B) and disposition index (DI). Multivariate logistic regression models and restricted cubic spline models were fitted to assess the association of pancreatic β-cells function with HUA., Results: The final analysis included 5496 subjects with a mean age of 46.3 years (standard error (SE), 0.4). The weighted means of HOMA2-%B, HOMA2-%S and DI were 118.1 (SE, 1.0), 69.9(SE, 1.1) and 73.9 (SE, 0.7), respectively. After adjustment for major confounders, participants in the highest quartile of HOMA2-%B had a higher risk of HUA (OR = 2.55, 95% CI: 1.89-3.43) compared to participants in the lowest quartile. In contrast, participants in the lowest quartile of HOMA2-%S were significantly more likely to have HUA than that in the highest quartile (OR = 3.87, 95% CI: 2.74-5.45), and similar results were observed in DI (OR = 1.98, 95% CI: 1.32-2.97). Multivariate adjusted restricted cubic spline analysis found evidence of non-linear associations between HOMA2-%B, HOAM2-%S, DI and the prevalence of HUA., Conclusion: Our finding illustrated the indicators of inadequate β-cells compensation might be a new predictor for the presence of HUA in U.S. adults, highlighting a critical role of pancreatic β-cells function on HUA., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Despite efforts to construct super-resolution (SR) training datasets with a wide range of degradation scenarios, existing supervised methods based on these datasets still struggle to consistently offer promising results due to the diversity of real-world degradation scenarios and the inherent complexity of model learning. Our work explores a new route: integrating the sample-adaptive property learned through image intrinsic self-similarity and the universal knowledge acquired from large-scale data. We achieve this by uniting internal learning and external learning by an unrolled optimization process. With the merits of both, the tuned fully-supervised SR models can be augmented to broadly handle the real-world degradation in a plug-and-play style. Furthermore, to promote the efficiency of combining internal/external learning, we apply an attention-based weight-updating method to guide the mining of self-similarity, and various data augmentations are adopted while applying the exponential moving average strategy. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world degraded images and our approach outperforms other methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons. Our project is available at: https://github.com/ZahraFan/AdaSSR/.

While the wisdom of training an image dehazing model on synthetic hazy data can alleviate the difficulty of collecting real-world hazy/clean image pairs, it brings the well-known domain shift problem. From a different yet new perspective, this paper explores contrastive learning with an adversarial training effort to leverage unpaired real-world hazy and clean images, thus alleviating the domain shift problem and enhancing the network's generalization ability in real-world scenarios. We propose an effective unsupervised contrastive learning paradigm for image dehazing, dubbed UCL-Dehaze. Unpaired real-world clean and hazy images are easily captured, and will serve as the important positive and negative samples respectively when training our UCL-Dehaze network. To train the network more effectively, we formulate a new self-contrastive perceptual loss function, which encourages the restored images to approach the positive samples and keep away from the negative samples in the embedding space. Besides the overall network architecture of UCL-Dehaze, adversarial training is utilized to align the distributions between the positive samples and the dehazed images. Compared with recent image dehazing works, UCL-Dehaze does not require paired data during training and utilizes unpaired positive/negative data to better enhance the dehazing performance. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our UCL-Dehaze and demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-arts, even only 1,800 unpaired real-world images are used to train our network. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yz-wang/UCL-Dehaze.

Background: Brain recovery phenomenon after long-term abstinence had been reported in substance use disorders. Yet, few longitudinal studies have been conducted to observe the abnormal dynamic functional connectivity (dFNC) of large-scale brain networks and recovery after prolonged abstinence in heroin users., Objective: The current study will explore the brain network dynamic connection reconfigurations after prolonged abstinence in heroin users (HUs)., Methods: The 10-month longitudinal design was carried out for 40 HUs. The 40 healthy controls (HCs) were also enrolled. Group independent component analysis (GICA) and dFNC analysis were employed to detect the different dFNC patterns of addiction-related ICNs between HUs and HCs. The temporal properties and the graph-theoretical properties were calculated. Whether the abnormalities would be reconfigured in HUs after prolonged abstinence was then investigated., Results: Based on eight functional networks extracted from GICA, four states were identified by the dFNC analysis. Lower mean dwell time and fraction rate in state4 were found for HUs, which were increased toward HCs after prolonged abstinence. In this state, HUs at baseline showed higher dFNC of RECN-aSN, aSN- aSN and dDMN-pSN, which decreased after protracted abstinence. A similar recovery phenomenon was found for the global efficiency and path length in abstinence HUs. Mean while, the abnormal dFNC strength was correlated with craving both at baseline and after abstinence., Conclusion: Our longitudinal study observed the large-scale brain network reconfiguration from the dynamic perspective in HUs after prolonged abstinence and improved the understanding of the neurobiology of prolonged abstinence in HUs., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.)

Background: Individual differences have been detected in individuals with opioid use disorders (OUD) in rehabilitation following protracted abstinence. Recent studies suggested that prediction models were effective for individual-level prognosis based on neuroimage data in substance use disorders (SUD)., Aims: This prospective cohort study aimed to assess neuroimaging biomarkers for individual response to protracted abstinence in opioid users using connectome-based predictive modelling (CPM)., Methods: One hundred and eight inpatients with OUD underwent structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans at baseline. The Heroin Craving Questionnaire (HCQ) was used to assess craving levels at baseline and at the 8-month follow-up of abstinence. CPM with leave-one-out cross-validation was used to identify baseline networks that could predict follow-up HCQ scores and changes in HCQ (HCQ follow-up -HCQ baseline) . Then, the predictive ability of identified networks was tested in a separate, heterogeneous sample of methamphetamine individuals who underwent MRI scanning before abstinence for SUD., Results: CPM could predict craving changes induced by long-term abstinence, as shown by a significant correlation between predicted and actual HCQ follow-up (r=0.417, p<0.001) and changes in HCQ (negative: r=0.334, p=0.002；positive: r=0.233, p=0.038). Identified craving-related prediction networks included the somato-motor network (SMN), salience network (SALN), default mode network (DMN), medial frontal network, visual network and auditory network. In addition, decreased connectivity of frontal-parietal network (FPN)-SMN, FPN-DMN and FPN-SALN and increased connectivity of subcortical network (SCN)-DMN, SCN-SALN and SCN-SMN were positively correlated with craving levels., Conclusions: These findings highlight the potential applications of CPM to predict the craving level of individuals after protracted abstinence, as well as the generalisation ability; the identified brain networks might be the focus of innovative therapies in the future., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared.

Background: Human adipose tissue-derived stem cells (hADSCs) exert potent immunosuppressive effects in the allogeneic transplantation treatment. In mouse model of allergic rhinitis (AR), ADSCs partially ameliorated AR. However, no study has evaluated the potential therapeutic effects of hADSC-derived extracellular vesicles (hADSC-EVs) on AR., Methods: Female BALB/c mice were sensitized and challenged with ovalbumin (OVA) to induce AR. One day after the last nasal drop, each group received phosphate buffered saline (PBS) or hADSC-EVs treatment. Associated symptoms and biological changes were then assessed., Results: hADSC-EV treatment significantly alleviated nasal symptoms, and reduced inflammatory infiltration. Serum levels of OVA-specific IgE, interleukin (IL)-4 and interferon (IFN)-γ were all significantly reduced. The mRNA levels of IL-4 and IFN-γ in the spleen also changed accordingly. The T helper (Th)1/Th2 cell ratio increased. The treatment efficacy index of hADSC-EV was higher than that of all human-derived MSCs in published reports on MSC treatment of AR. ADSC-EVs exhibited a greater therapeutic index in most measures when compared to our previous treatment involving ADSCs., Conclusion: These results demonstrated that hADSC-EVs could ameliorate the symptoms of AR by modulating cytokine secretion and Th1/Th2 cell balance. hADSC-EVs could potentially be a viable therapeutic strategy for AR. Further animal studies are needed to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and to optimize potential clinical protocols., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Yang, Pan, Zhang, Wang, lai, Zhou, Zhang, Fan, Deng, Gao and Yu.)

Flexible perovskite solar cells (f-PSCs) as a promising power source have grabbed surging attention from academia and industry specialists by integrating with different wearable and portable electronics. With the development of low-temperature solution preparation technology and the application of different engineering strategies, the power conversion efficiency of f-PSCs has approached 24%. Due to the inherent properties and application scenarios of f-PSCs, the study of strain in these devices is recognized as one of the key factors in obtaining ideal devices and promoting commercialization. The strains mainly from the change of bond and lattice volume can promote phase transformation, induce decomposition of perovskite film, decrease mechanical stability, etc. However, the effect of strain on the performance of f-PSCs has not been systematically summarized yet. Herein, the sources of strain, evaluation methods, impacts on f-PSCs, and the engineering strategies to modulate strain are summarized. Furthermore, the problems and future challenges in this regard are raised, and solutions and outlooks are offered. This review is dedicated to summarizing and enhancing the research into the strain of f-PSCs to provide some new insights that can further improve the optoelectronic performance and stability of flexible devices., (© 2023 The Authors. Advanced Science published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

Neuroblastoma (NB) is a kind of childhood cancer that is a prevailing and deadly solid neoplasm among pediatric malignancies. The transcriptional output of MIR938 is capable of participating in the posttranscriptional modulation of gene expression, whereby it exerts its regulatory effect by modulating both the stability and translation of target mRNAs. Previous studies showed that MIR938 was associated with many cancers. Hence, functional genetic variants in the MIR938 can be attributed to NB risk. We recruited 402 neuroblastoma patients and 473 controls from the Children's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University and genotyped one MIR938 single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) (rs2505901 T>C). There were significant associations between the rs2505901 T>C and NB risk [CC vs. TT: adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 1.90, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.02-3.55, P=0.045; CC vs. TT/TC: adjusted OR = 2.02, 95% CI = 1.09-3.75, P=0.026]. This analysis of genotypes revealed that T>C increased the risk of NB. Some borderline significant different relationships were observed in the stratified analyses: age ≤ 18 months (adjusted OR = 2.95, 95% CI = 0.92-9.51, P=0.070), male sex (adjusted OR = 2.19, 95% CI = 0.95-5.08, P=0.067), and clinical stage III+IV (adjusted OR = 2.12, 95% CI = 0.98-4.56, P=0.055). The present study revealed that the MIR938 rs2505901 T>C polymorphism may be a potential risk factor for neuroblastoma in Chinese children. In the long term, conducting large and diverse sample studies from different ethnicities will indeed be crucial in determining the role of MIR938 polymorphisms in NB risk. By including individuals from various ethnic backgrounds, researchers can account for potential genetic variations that may exist between populations., (© 2023 The Author(s).)

Objective: Unsaturated fatty acids (UFA) may be related to glycometabolism. While associations between UFA intake (especially their subtype) and prediabetes or type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) need to be further studied. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the potential relation of UFA with prediabetes and T2DM., Methods: A total of 16,290 adults aged older than 18 years from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2005 to March 2020 were included in the present analysis. Dietary intake was assessed by two day, 24-hour dietary recalls and daily intake of total monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA); four specific fatty acids of MUFA and seven specific fatty acids of PUFA were calculated. Prediabetes and T2DM were diagnosed by fasting glucose, glycohemoglobin, and self-reported medication or insulin. Rao-Scott modified chi-square tests, the Taylor series linearization method, and multivariable logistic regression analyses were applied to analyze the associations of dietary MUFA and PUFA intake with diabetes risk., Results: Of the participants, 44.34% had prediabetes and 13.16% had T2DM patients. From multivariate analysis, we found that intake of MUFA, PUFA, and some subtypes was negatively associated with the risk of prediabetes and T2DM in Americans. Compared with adults in the lowest tertile, those in the highest MUFA (PUFA) tertile had an approximately 50% (49%) and 69% (68%) lower risk of prediabetes and T2DM, respectively. Moreover, the effects of the subtypes of MUFA and PUFA on prediabetes and T2DM were different. Higher intakes of MFA 18:1, MFA 20:1, PFA 18:2, and PFA 18:3 and higher tertile intakes of MFA 16:1 and PFA 20:4 were related to a lower risk of prediabetes and T2DM. Similarly, the effects of MUFA, PUFA, and subtype on prediabetes and T2DM varied among different age groups, being weakened along with age., Conclusion: Our study suggested that total MUFA and PUFA intake might be essential in preventing prediabetes and T2DM, especially in Americans. However, this protective effect may decrease with age. Moreover, the effects of the specific UFA on prediabetes and T2DM need further consideration., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Jiang, Yang, Li, Feng, Miao, Shi and Xue.)

Objective: This study aims to explore the association between coffee consumption and the prevalence of hearing loss in American adults based on a national population-based survey., Design: Cross-sectional analysis of reported audiometric status and coffee intake from the 2003-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Multivariate logistic regression, forest plots and restricted cubic spline (RCS) analyses were used to explore the associations and dose-response relationships between coffee consumption frequency and hearing loss., Setting: The USA., Participant: This study included 1894 individuals aged ≥ 20 from the 2003-2006 NHANES., Results: In this study, the prevalence of speech-frequency hearing loss (SFHL) and high-frequency hearing loss (HFHL) among the participants was 35·90 % and 51·54 %, respectively. Compared with those who no consumed coffee, non-Hispanic White who consumed ≥ 4 cups/d had higher prevalence of SFHL (OR: 1·87; 95 % CI: 1·003. 3·47). And a positive trend of coffee consumption frequency with the prevalence of HFHL was found ( P trend = 0·001). This association of HFHL was similar for participants aged 20-64 ( P trend = 0·001), non-Hispanic White ( P trend = 0·002), non-noise exposure participants ( P trend = 0·03) and noise-exposed participants ( P trend = 0·003). The forest plots analysis found that the association between 1 cup-increment of daily coffee consumption and the prevalence of HFHL was statistically significant in males. RCS model supported a positive linear association of coffee consumption with SFHL ( P for overall association = 0·02, P for nonlinearity = 0·48) and a positive non-linear association of coffee consumption with HFHL ( P for overall association = 0·001, P for nonlinearity = 0·001)., Conclusion: Our findings suggested that coffee consumption was associated with higher prevalence of hearing loss. Further cohort studies in larger population are needed to investigate these findings.

Metal halide hybrid perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have received considerable attention over the past decade owing to their potential for low-cost, solution-processable, earth-abundant, and high-performance superiority, increasing power conversion efficiencies of up to 25.7%. Solar energy conversion into electricity is highly efficient and sustainable, but direct utilization, storage, and poor energy diversity are difficult to achieve, resulting in a potential waste of resources. Considering its convenience and feasibility, converting solar energy into chemical fuels is regarded as a promising pathway for boosting energy diversity and expanding its utilization. In addition, the energy conversion-storage integrated system can efficiently sequentially capture, convert, and store energy in electrochemical energy storage devices. However, a comprehensive overview focusing on PSC-self-driven integrated devices with a discussion of their development and limitations remains lacking. Here, focus is on the development of representative configurations of emerging PSC-based photo-electrochemical devices including self-charging power packs, unassisted solar water splitting/CO 2 reduction. The advanced progresses in this field, including configuration design, key parameters, working principles, integration strategies, electrode materials, and their performance evaluations are also summarized. Finally, scientific challenges and future perspectives for ongoing research in this field are presented., (© 2023 Wiley-VCH GmbH.)

Developmental disabilities prevalence seem to be high in countries around the world. It's worth understanding the most recent prevalence and trends of developmental disabilities. The objective of this study is to examine the prevalence and trends of developmental disabilities of US children and adolescents. A total of 26,422 individuals aged 3-17 years were included. Annual data were examined from the National Health Interview Survey (2018-2021). Weighted prevalence for each of the selected developmental disabilities were calculated. The prevalence of any developmental disabilities in individuals was 16.65% (95% CI 16.03-17.26%), prevalence of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disability (LD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), intellectual disability (ID), and other developmental delay were 9.57% (95% CI 9.09-10.06%), 7.45% (95% CI 7.00-7.89%), 2.94% (95% CI 2.67-3.21%), 1.72% (95% CI 1.51-1.93%), and 5.24% (95% CI 4.89-5.59%), respectively. Significant increases were observed for other developmental delay (4.02-6.05%) and co-occurring LD & ID (1.03-1.82%). Findings form this study highlight a high prevalence of any developmental disabilities, although no significant increase was observed. The prevalence of other developmental delay and co-occurring LD & ID were significantly increased. Further investigation is warranted to assess potentially modifiable risk factors and causes of developmental disabilities., (© 2023. Springer Nature Limited.)

A forest wildlife detection algorithm based on an improved YOLOv5s network model is proposed to advance forest wildlife monitoring and improve detection accuracy in complex forest environments. This research utilizes a data set from the Hunan Hupingshan National Nature Reserve in China, to which data augmentation and expansion methods are applied to extensively train the proposed model. To enhance the feature extraction ability of the proposed model, a weighted channel stitching method based on channel attention is introduced. The Swin Transformer module is combined with a CNN network to add a Self-Attention mechanism, thus improving the perceptual field for feature extraction. Furthermore, a new loss function ( DIOU&#95;Loss ) and an adaptive class suppression loss ( L&#95;BCE ) are adopted to accelerate the model's convergence speed, reduce false detections in confusing categories, and increase its accuracy. When comparing our improved algorithm with the original YOLOv5s network model under the same experimental conditions and data set, significant improvements are observed, in particular, the mean average precision ( mAP ) is increased from 72.6% to 89.4%, comprising an accuracy improvement of 16.8%. Our improved algorithm also outperforms popular target detection algorithms, including YOLOv5s, YOLOv3, RetinaNet, and Faster-RCNN. Our proposed improvement measures can well address the challenges posed by the low contrast between background and targets, as well as occlusion and overlap, in forest wildlife images captured by trap cameras. These measures provide practical solutions for enhanced forest wildlife protection and facilitate efficient data acquisition., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Thyroid cancer is the most common malignant tumor of the endocrine system, and its incidence is increasing worldwide each year. This study aimed to explore the association between XRCC1, GSTM1, and GSTT1 polymorphisms in the model of thyroid cancer. The experiment was conducted by searching PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science, with the last search performed in March 2022. A total of 12 studies were included in this meta-analysis, with sample sizes ranging from 211 to 1124. The proportion of XRCC1 polymorphisms (rs25489, GG) in thyroid cancer was slightly lower than that of the normal control group, but the difference was not statistically significant (Mean difference=1.13, 95% CI: 0.99-1.28, p=0.08). The proportion of XRCC1 polymorphisms (rs25489, GA) in thyroid cancer was significantly lower than that of the normal control group (Mean difference=1.32, 95% CI: 1.16-1.52, p<0.00001). The proportion of XRCC1 polymorphisms (rs25489, AA) in thyroid cancer was slightly lower than that of the normal control group, but again, the difference was not statistically significant (Mean difference=0.78, 95% CI: 0.61-1.01, p=0.06). Similarly, the proportion of XRCC1 polymorphisms (rs25487, GG) and (rs25487, GA) in thyroid cancer was lower than that of the normal control group, but the differences were not statistically significant (p=0.22 and p=0.49, respectively). In conclusion, this study found that the proportion of XRCC1 polymorphisms (rs25489, AA) in thyroid cancer was lower than that of the normal control group., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (Thieme. All rights reserved.)

Accumulating evidence has indicated that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play critical roles in the development and progression of cancers, including esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). However, the mechanisms of lncRNAs in ESCC are still incompletely understood and therapeutic attempts for in vivo targeting cancer-associated lncRNA remain a challenge. By RNA-sequencing analysis, we identified that LLNLR-299G3.1 was a novel ESCC-associated lncRNA. LLNLR-299G3.1 was up-regulated in ESCC tissues and cells and promoted ESCC cell proliferation and invasion. Silencing of LLNLR-299G3.1 with ASO (antisense oligonucleotide) resulted in opposite effects. Mechanistically, LLNLR-299G3.1 bound to cancer-associated RNA binding proteins and regulated the expression of cancer-related genes, including OSM, TNFRSF4, HRH3, and SSTR3. ChIRP-seq (chromatin isolation by RNA purification and sequencing) revealed that these genes contained enriched chromatin binding sites for LLNLR-299G3.1 . Rescue experiments confirmed that the effects of LLNLR-299G3.1 on ESCC cell proliferation were dependent on interaction with HRH3 and TNFRSF4. Therapeutically, intravenous delivery of placental chondroitin sulfate A binding peptide-coated nanoparticles containing antisense oligonucleotide (pICSA-BP-ANPs) strongly inhibited ESCC tumor growth and significantly improved animal survival in vivo . Overall, our results suggest that LLNLR-299G3.1 promotes ESCC malignancy through regulating gene-chromatin interactions and targeting ESCC by pICSA-BP-ANPs may be an effective strategy for the treatment of lncRNA-associated ESCC., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to report regarding the present study., (© 2023 Tian et al.)

Background: Hypertension is a worldwide public health problem. We sought to explore the interaction of oral health and smoking on hypertension, and periodontal disease and smoking on hypertension., Methods: We included 21,800 participants aged ≧ 30 years from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2009-2018. Information of oral health and periodontal disease were self-reported. Blood pressure was taken by trained personnel and/or physicians at mobile testing center. Multiple logistic regression was used to estimate the association between oral health, periodontal disease and the prevalence of hypertension. The effects of oral health and periodontal disease on hypertension under smoking status and age were analyzed by stratified and interaction analysis., Results: A total of 21,800 participants were investigated, including 11,017 (50.54%) in hypertensive group and 10,783 (49.46%) in non-hypertensive group. Compared with the excellent/very good of oral health, the multivariable-adjusted OR of good, fair, and poor were 1.13 (95% CI, 1.02-1.27), 1.30 (95% CI, 1.15-1.47), and 1.48 (95% CI, 1.22-1.79) (p for trend < 0.001) for hypertension, respectively. Compared without periodontal disease group, the multivariable-adjusted OR of periodontal disease for hypertension was 1.21 (95% CI ,1.09-1.35) (p for trend < 0.001). Furthermore, we found the interactions between periodontal disease and smoking, oral health and smoking, periodontal disease and age, oral health and age were p < 0.001., Conclusions: An association between oral health and periodontal disease with the prevalence of hypertension was identified. There exists interactive effect of periodontal disease and smoking, oral health and smoking, periodontal disease and age, oral health and age on hypertension in American population over 30 years of age and older., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

As an important process in cancer immunotherapy, T cell-mediated tumor killing (TTK) enhances the immune response of patients. However, the role of TTK in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC) patients still needs further exploration. Therefore, we comprehensively analyzed the gene expression information and clinical characteristics of 1063 HNSCC in five cohorts. Univariate regression, differential expression analysis, and gene mutation profiling were combined to identify the important genes regulating the sensitivity of tumor cells to T cell-mediated killing (GSTTK) in HNSCC. A total of 20 GSTTK were identified as important genes of HNSCC. Patients were divided into C1 and C2 subgroups (TTK patterns) and displayed significant prognostic differences. Patients with C2 subtype had dismal prognosis characteristic compared to C1 subtype in all validation cohorts. Patients with C1 subgroup exhibited robust immune profile and C1 subgroup patients were significantly enriched in metabolically relevant functions. Notably, the multi-omics analysis found that C1 subgroup have higher mutation burden and C2 subgroup patients had significantly higher copy number variation. Drug sensitivity analysis found that multiple first-line chemotherapeutic drugs were more sensitive in patients with subgroup C1. In conclusion, the establishment of GSTTK provides guidance and assistance to clinicians in the personalized management and treatment of HNSCC patients., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Meng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Background: Chemotherapeutic drugs, particularly alkylating cytotoxics such as cyclophosphamide (CTX), play an important role to induce premature ovarian failure (POF). Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is a widely used treatment to improve hormone secretion. However, the long-term HRT increases the risk of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease are attracting concerns. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a safe and effective treatment for POF., Method: Adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) were isolated and identified from human adipose tissue. For POF modeling, CTX were intraperitoneal injected into CTX-acute group, CTX-chronic group, CTX-acute + ADSCs group and CTX-chronic + ADSCs group rats; For transplantation, ADSCs were transplanted into POF rats through tail-vein. The control group rats were injected with PBS. The effects of POF modeling and transplantation were determined by estrous cycle analysis, histopathological analysis, immunohistochemical staining and apoptosis-related marker. To evaluate the effects of ADSC on granulosa cells in vitro, CTX-induced senescent KGN cells were co-cultured with ADSCs, and senescent-related marker expression was investigated by immunofluorescent staining., Results: In vivo studies revealed that ADSCs transplantation reduced the apoptosis of ovarian granulosa cells and secretion of follicle-stimulating hormone. The number of total follicles, primordial follicles, primary follicles, and mature follicles and secretion of anti-Müllerian hormone and estradiol (E2) were also increased by ADSCs. The estrous cycle was also improved by ADSC transplantation. Histopathological analysis showed that CTX-damaged ovarian microenvironment was improved by ADSCs. Furthermore, TUNEL staining indicated that apoptosis of granulosa cells was decreased by ADSCs. In vitro assay also demonstrated that ADSC markedly attenuated CTX-induced senescence and apoptosis of granulosa cell. Mechanistically, both in vivo and in vitro experiments proved that ADSC transplantation suppressed activation of the PI3K/Akt/mTOR axis., Conclusion: Our experiment demonstrated that a single injection of high-dose CTX was a less damaging chemotherapeutic strategy than continuous injection of low-dose CTX, and tail-vein injection of ADSCs was a potential approach to promote the restoration of CTX-induced POF., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Background: Progress have been made in brain function recovery after long-term abstinence in person with heroin addiction (PHA). However, less is known about whether the nucleus accumbens (NAc) white matter pathways can recover in PHA by prolonged abstinence., Methods: Forty-two PHA and Thirty-nine age- and gender- matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited. Two MRI scans were obtained at baseline (PHA1) and 8-month follow-up (PHA2). We employed tractography atlas-based analysis (TABS) method to investigate fractional anisotropy (FA) changes in NAc fiber tracts (i.e., Insula-NAc, ventral tegmental area (VTA)-NAc, medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC)-NAc) in PHA. A partial least square regression (PLSR) analysis was carried to explore whether FA of NAc fiber tracts can predict longitudinal craving changes., Results: Relative to HCs, lower FA was found in the right Insula-NAc and VTA-NAc fiber tracts in PHA1, and PHA2 showed increased FA values in these tracts compared with PHA1. Furthermore, changes of FA of NAc fiber tracts can predict longitudinal craving changes (r = 0.51). Additionally, craving changes can also be predicted from FA changes in the left Insula-NAc (r = 0.601) and VTA-NAc (r = 0.384) fiber alone., Conclusions: Results indicated that the right Insula-NAc and VTA-NAc fiber tracts are potential biomarkers for brain recovery. Prediction of craving changes highlighted the utility of structural markers to inform clinical decision-making of treatment for PHA., Competing Interests: Conflict of Interest All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Drug abuse is a serious problem worldwide. Owing to intermittent intake of certain substances and the early inconspicuous clinical symptoms, this brings huge challenges for timely diagnosing addiction status and preventing substance use disorders (SUDs). As a non-invasive technique, neuroimaging can capture neurobiological signatures of abnormality in multiple brain regions caused by drug consumption in each clinical stage, like parenchymal morphology alteration as well as aberrant functional activity and connectivity of cerebral areas, making it realizable to diagnosis, prediction and even preemptive therapy of addiction. Machine learning (ML) algorithms primarily used for classification have been extensively applied in analysing medical imaging datasets. Significant neurobiological characteristics employed and revealed by classifiers were used to diagnose addictive states and predict initiation and vulnerability to drug usage, treatment abstinence, relapse and resilience of addicts and the risk of SUD. In this review, we summarize application of ML methods in neuroimaging focusing on addicts' diagnosis of clinical status and risk prediction and elucidate the discriminative neurobiological features from brain electrophysiological, morphological and functional perspectives that contribute most to the classifier, finally highlighting the auxiliary role of ML in addiction treatment., (© 2023 Society for the Study of Addiction.)