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The objective of this study was to examine the mediating roles of functional and psychological factors on the relationship between vision impairment (VI) and self-rated health (SRH) in older adults in residential care institutions versus those living in the community.A cross-sectional survey study.We obtained data for this study from the public Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI) database of Yiwu, Zhejiang province, China. Our data included adults aged ≥ 60 years who had received the qualification assessment from September through December 2018. In total, 2,427 elderly individuals were included for analysis, including 747 older adults in residential care institutions and 1,680 older adults living in the community.VI and SRH were measured using participants' self-reported information. Potentially relevant functional and psychological factors were assessed using LTCI qualification assessment data, including self-care activities, mobility, incontinence, perceived usefulness, perceived fatigue, and perceived interest. The Karlson-Holm-Breen (KHB) method was used to examine whether functional and psychological factors mediated the relationship between VI and SRH and to calculate the mediated percentage among older adults.Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, all functional and psychological factors except mobility mediated the effect of severe VI on SRH in older adults living in the community. For older adults living in residential care institutions, self-care activities, mobility, and perceived usefulness mediated the effects of both moderate and severe VI on SRH, while perceived fatigue and perceived interest mediated the effect of severe VI on SRH.The findings of this study support the idea that functional and psychological factors mediate the relationship between vision impairment and self-rated health in older adults, and that different mediating pathways exist between older adults in residential care institutions and those living in the community. Our research highlights the importance of developing tailored interventions for visually impaired older adults through an integrative model to improve their overall well-being.

Background: The anti-inflammatory effect of n-3 PUFAs has been widely documented. Emerging evidence suggests that the main component of n-3 PUFAs, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), may have differential effects in ulcerative colitis (UC). It was aimed to clarify their differential effects in UC. Methods: Eight-week-old male C57BL/6J mice were randomly divided into 7 groups, namely control, UC model, salicylazosulfapyridine (SASP), low-dose DHA, high-dose DHA, low-dose EPA, and high-dose EPA. DHA, EPA and SASP treatment groups were orally treated accordingly for 9 weeks. During the 5th to 9th week the control group was given distilled water, while other groups were given distilled water with 2% dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) to induce UC. Body weight loss, diarrhea, and stool bleeding were recorded to calculate the disease activity index (DAI). The level of tight junction proteins Claudin-1 and Occludin, and cytokines including TNF-α, IL-6, and IL-1β as well as inflammatory cell markers such as MPO, F4/80, and MCP-1 in the intestinal epithelium were measured using western blotting. Activation of IL-6/STAT3 and NLRP3/IL-1β inflammatory pathways was also assessed. Levels of proliferation-related proteins of the Wnt/β-catenin pathway with c-myc, Cyclin-D1, and PCNA were detected. Results: EPA, superior to DHA, significantly attenuated DSS-induced colitis evidenced by reduced DAI scores, cytokine production and inflammatory cell infiltration. Mechanically, EPA triggered a marked up-regulation of Claudin-1 and Occludin with down-regulation of their up-stream Akt and ERK. EPA also inhibited NLRP3/IL-1β and IL-6/STAT3 inflammatory pathways and up-regulated the Wnt/β-catenin pathway. Conclusions: EPA is more suitable to be used for the treatment of UC than DHA.

This study aimed to identify multimorbidity patterns and explore the disablement process by utilizing the model raised by Verbrugge and Jette as a theoretical framework. This cross-sectional study used public Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI) claimants’ assessment data of Yiwu city in Zhejiang Province, China, for 2604 individuals aged 60 years and older, from September through December 2018. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) was conducted using 10 common chronic conditions. Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the disablement process. The latent classes of multimorbidity patterns were the “coronary atherosclerotic heart disease” class (19.0%), the “lower limb fractures” class (26.4%), and the “other diseases” class (54.6%). The structural model results show that coronary atherosclerotic heart disease had a significant influence on incontinence, but it was not statistically significant in predicting vision impairment and mobility impairment. Lower limb fractures had significant effects on vision impairment, incontinence, and mobility impairment. Vision impairment, incontinence, and mobility impairment had significant effects on physical activities of daily living (ADLs). Our findings suggest that different impairments exist from specific patterns of multimorbidity to physical ADL disability, which may provide insights for researchers and policy makers to develop tailored care and provide support for physically disabled older people.

Quasi-neutral limit and the boundary layer problem of the two/three dimensional incompressible Planck-Nernst-Poisson-Navier-Stokes equations for electro hydrodynamics with the general mobilities of two kinds of charges and in the bounded domain is studied. For the generally smooth doping profile and the physical case that the mobilities of two kinds of charges is different, quasi-neutral limit with a subtle boundary layer structure is rigorously proved by constructing one new λ-weighted entropy functional coupled with multi-scaling approximating expansion techniques.

An overdose of acetaminophen (APAP), the main cause of acute liver failure (ALF), induces oxidative stress that ultimately causes mitochondrial impairment and hepatotoxicity. The nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) was widely recognized as an anti-oxidative stress mechanism. The present study was aimed at investigating whether sarmentosin, extract from traditional Chinese medicine, protects the liver against APAP-induced injury via activating Nrf2 and subsequently decreasing oxidative stress.Male ICR mice were treated with sarmentosin oral administration for 1 week and injected APAP (300 mg/kg. i.p.) for acute liver injury model. The liver and serum of mice for histological and biochemistry analysis. AML12 and LO2 cells were used in vitro assays.We found that sarmentosin moderately increased accumulation of Nrf2 via upregulating USP17-mediated ubiquitin inhibition at the early stage of hepatocytes damage. The Nrf2 separating from bonding protein Keap1 translocated into nucleus and activated downstream gene of antioxidants. Mitophagy, a unique autophagy can remove Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) damaged mitochondria, was elevated in this progress to maintain mitochondria function and ROS homeostasis.In summary, our research revealed that sarmentosin could alleviate APAP-induced liver acute injury through USP17-mediated Nrf2 overexpression and PINK1-dependent mitophagy.

Zhitao Jiang,1,* Qianyu Cao,2,* Guoliang Dai,3 Jianchun Wang,1 Chundi Liu,1 Lingyan Lv,1 Jinhuo Pan4 1Department of Pharmacy Office, Zhangjiagang Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine Affiliated to Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Zhangjiagang, China; 2The First Clinical College, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China; 3Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China; 4College of Pharmacy, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China *These authors contributed equally to this work Background: There are few clinical challenges associated with the treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC). Studies have shown that TGF-β plays a crucial role in CRC. Importantly, celastrol, a major components of the root extract of the traditional Chinese herb Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F, has been shown to inhibit the growth, adhesion, and metastasis of human CRC cells through the inhibition of TGF-β1/Smad signaling.Materials and methods: Real-time PCR and Western blot tests were proceeded to present TGF-β1, TGF-β receptor type I (TGFβRI), TGF-β receptor type II (TGFβRII), Smad2/3, p-Smad2/3, Smad4, and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase expression in human colon cancer cell samples.Results: Our results indicated that celastrol can reduce the expression levels of TGF-β1, TGFβRI, and TGFβRII in HCT116 and SW620 cells. Furthermore, celastrol could also prevent the increase in Smad4 and p-Smad2/3 in HCT116 and SW620 cells.Conclusion: Celastrol could inhibit tumor growth through TGF-β1/Smad signaling and might be a promising therapeutic component against CRC. Keywords: celastrol, colorectal cancer, TGF-β1, Smad&nbsp

Quasineutral limit for a model of three-dimensional Euler–Poisson system in half space with a boundary layer is studied. Based on the matched asymptotic expansion method of singular perturbation problem and the elaborate energy method, we prove that the quasineutral regime is the incompressible Euler equation.

The purpose of this paper is to study the boundary layer problem and zero viscosity-diffusion limit of the initial boundary value problem for the incompressible viscous and diffusive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) system with (no-slip characteristic) Dirichlet boundary conditions and to prove that the corresponding Prandtl's type boundary layer are stable with respect to small viscosity-diffusion coefficients. The main difficulty here comes from Dirichlet boundary conditions for the velocity and magnetic field. Firstly, we identify a non-trivial class of initial data for which we can establish the uniform stability of the Prandtl's type boundary layers and prove rigorously the solution of incompressible viscous-diffusion MHD system converges strongly to the sum of the solution to the ideal MHD system and the approximating solution to Prandtl's type boundary layer equation by using the elaborate energy methods and the special structure of the solution to ideal MHD system with the initial data we identify here, which yields that there exists the cancellation between the boundary layer of the velocity and that of the magnetic field. Secondly, for general initial data, we obtain zero viscosity-diffusion limit of the incompressible viscous and diffusive MHD system with the different horizontal and vertical viscosities and magnetic diffusions, when they go to zero with the different speeds, and, we prove rigorously the convergence of the incompressible viscous and diffusion MHD system to the ideal MHD system or the anisotropic MHD system by constructing the exact boundary layers and using the elaborate energy methods. We also mention that these results obtained here should be the first rigorous ones on the stability of Prandtl's type boundary layer for the incompressible viscous and diffusion MHD system with no-slip characteristic boundary condition.

In the past three decades, a lot of progress has been made in higher education internationalization in Mainland China. By December 2016, 2411 organizations and projects of Chinese-foreign cooperati...

We propose a novel graph-based approach for image retrieval. Given a nearest neighbor graph produced by the global descriptor model, we traverse it by alternating between exploit and explore steps. The exploit step maximally utilizes the immediate neighborhood of each vertex, while the explore step traverses vertices that are farther away in the descriptor space. By combining these two steps we can better capture the underlying image manifold, and successfully retrieve relevant images that are visually dissimilar to the query. Our traversal algorithm is conceptually simple, has few tunable parameters and can be implemented with basic data structures. This enables fast real-time inference for previously unseen queries with minimal memory overhead. Despite relative simplicity, we show highly competitive results on multiple public benchmarks, including the largest image retrieval dataset that is currently publicly available. Full code for this work is available here: https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/egt.

We study the boundary layer problem and the quasineutral limit of the compressible Euler-Poisson system arising from plasma physics in a domain with boundary. The quasineutral regime is the incompressible Euler equations. Compared to the quasineutral limit of compressible Euler-Poisson equations in whole space or periodic domain, the key difficulty here is to deal with the singularity caused by the boundary layer. The proof of the result is based on a λ-weighted energy method and the matched asymptotic expansion method.

Sedum sarmentosum Bunge (SSB) is a traditional Chinese herbal medicine containing multiple components that has been extensively used clinically to treat chronic viral hepatitis and some inflammatory diseases. Total flavonoids are major pharmacologically active components of SSB. To gain a deeper understanding of SSB resources, we analyzed eight chemical constituents in 33 batches of SSB from 11 regions in China. An accurate, precise and sensitive ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple quadrupole electrospray tandem mass spectrometry method was developed for the determination of eight flavonoids in SSB. Under the optimized chromatographic conditions, good separation for the eight target components was obtained on an Agilent Zobax SB C18 (50 × 2.1 mm, 5 μm) column within 4 min. The established methods were validated with good linearity (r ≥ 0.9988), precision (RSD ≤ 2.68%), stability (1.43-3.28%) and repeatability (1.14-2.89%). Moreover, the average recoveries were 95.91-100.68%, and the RSDs were 1.50-3.80%. In addition, the analytical conditions of UPLC-ESI-MS/MS provided better sensitivity with a shorter analysis time when compared with the HPLC-DAD method. Hierarchical clustering analysis and principal component analysis were performed to estimate and classify these samples based on the contents of the eight chemical constituents. This study provided the theoretical basis and scientific evidence for the development and utilization of SSB resources.

With more and more foreign countries dump in Chinese market, it’s necessary for China to take the anti-dumping measures. However, the effect of China anti-dumping is very complex and most of domestic studies on China anti-dumping have been based on the active effect of China anti-dumping. Then, with foreign countries’ crazy dumping in Chinese market, shall we take the anti-dumping measures blindly? Whether the effect of China anti-dumping is surely positive and active? This article studies the trade diversion effect of China anti-dumping by means of the dynamic game model. It’s helpful for us to understand anti-dumping correctly and take the appropriate anti-dumping measures timely.