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Recurrent oral ulcer is one of the most prevalent inflammatory ulcerative disorders of the oral mucosa. Due to the indeterminant cause and unpredictable course of the disease, clinical treatment of patients with recurrent oral ulcer is focused on relieving the pain, shortening the course of the disease, and prolonging the intermission period. Numerous chemical and biologic agents have been characterized as beneficial in the treatment of patients with recurrent oral ulcer, but there is currently no definitive therapy available. This study aimed to investigate the clinical effects and tolerability of combined mecobalamin tablets and vitamin E capsules in the treatment of recurrent oral ulcer.A total of 58 patients with recurrent oral ulcer admitted to our hospital were allocated to receive mecobalamin tablets + vitamin E soft capsules (test group) or Fe complex enzyme gargle only (control group) (n = 29 per group). Changes in parameters such as pain level, as measured on a 10-point visual analog scale (VAS); ulcer status and number of ulcers; proinflammatory cytokine levels; and quality of life, as measured using SF-36, from before to after treatment were measured. Mean intermission time and mean ulcer healing time were calculated. Total effectiveness rate was also calculated. The occurrences of adverse reactions in the two groups were quantified.The total intermission time interval was significantly longer, the mean ulcer healing time was considerably shorter, the total number of ulcers was appreciably less, and the total effectiveness rate was significantly greater in the test group compared to the control group (all, P0.05). The VAS scores were significantly greater after treatment than before treatment in both the test and control groups (mecobalamin + vitamin E, 2.16 [1.09] vs 7.87 [0.51]; control, 3.72 [1.15] vs 7.94 [0.56]; both, P0.05). Interleukin (IL)-8, tumor necrosis factor α, and C-reactive protein levels were appreciably down-regulated in both groups when compared to before treatment. In addition, IL-2 concentration and SF-36 scores were much greater after treatment in the test group with respect to the control group. Levels of IL-8, TNF-α, and CRP were significantly lesser in the test group than in the control group (all, P0.05).The combination of mecobalamin tablets and vitamin E soft capsules was effective in the treatment of recurrent oral ulcer. This combination can be used as an adjunctive therapy, offering effective pain control and improving quality of life in patients with oral ulcers.

The value of CT imaging in evaluating the efficacy of percutaneous transforaminal endoscopic discectomy (PTED) in the treatment of lumbar disc herniation (LDH) is explored. A total of 105 patients with LDH admitted to our hospital from March 2018 to September 2019 are selected for treatment with PTED, and all patients undergo CT examination before and after surgery. The CT imaging parameters (CT value of spinal canal soft tissue shadow, maximum back shift distance, longitudinal axis length, and intervertebral space height) before and 1 week after operation, the Japanese Orthopaedic Association (JOA) scores before and 6 months after the operation are compared, and the excellent and good rate of the operation effect is calculated. The correlation between JOA score and CT imaging parameters are analyzed by Pearson correlation method. The experimental results prove that PTED is effective in treating LDH. CT imaging can quantitatively measure the data of herniated intervertebral discs to clarify the recovery of the compressed dural sac and nerve roots, and the results are highly consistent with JOA score, which can be used as PTED objective evaluation method for the treatment of LDH.

External and internal stimuli are often involved in the pathogenesis of tumors, and the deterioration of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) function within cells is also an important etiological factor of tumorigenesis resulting in the impairment of the endoplasmic reticulum, which is termed ER stress. The ER is an organelle that serves a crucial role in the process of protein synthesis and maturation, and also acts as a reservoir of calcium to maintain intracellular Ca2+ homeostasis. ER stress has been revealed to serve a critical role in tumorigenesis. In the present review, the association between ER stress‑related pathways and tumor cell apoptosis is examined. Primarily, the role of ER stress in tumor cell apoptosis is discussed, and it is stipulated that ER stress, induced by drugs both directly and indirectly, promotes tumor cell apoptosis.

Background: Atypical chemokine receptors (ACKRs), including DARC, D6 and CCX-CKR, hold very critical roles in cancer invasion and metastasis. The objective of the present study was to determine preliminarily the predictive value of ACKRs in colorectal cancer (CRC). Methods: From 2012 to 2019 in the First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, 44 CRC patients were followed up. We performed immunohistochemical analysis, Western blot and RT-PCR analysis on CRC and adjacent normal tissues for investigating the expression of ACKRs and their relationships to clinicopathologic features and survival rate. Results: The expression of three ACKRs, CCX-CKR, DARC and D6, in normal colon tissues is higher than that in colorectal cancer tissues. Meanwhile, the expression of corresponding ligands CCL21, CCL2 and CCL22 shows the opposite. Low expression of ACKRs in colon cancer tissues was closely related to the potential of lymph node metastasis (P= 0.001). When compared with triple-negative ACKR expression, co-expression of the ACKRs predicted better outcomes of colorectal cancer patients with statistical significance (P=0.011). Conclusions: The loss of ACKRs may play important roles in lymph node metastasis of CRC. ACKR expression may be considered as prognostic markers in CRC patients.

Background: ZNRD1-AS1 plays an important role in liver cancer, endometrial cancer and other diseases. However, the relationship between ZNRD1-AS1 and retinoblastoma has not been studied in detail. This study aimed to determine the role of ZNRD1-AS1 in retinoblastoma. Methods: Differentially expressed genes in retinoblastoma downloaded from GEO database were identified by Limma package, and the expression and cell location of ZNRD1-AS1 were detected by real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR). The relationships between miR-128-3p and two genes (ZNRD1-AS1 and BMI1) were analyzed by bioinformatics and dual-luciferase assay. After manipulating the expressions of ZNRD1-AS1, miR-128-3p and BMI1, cell viability, tube length, migration, invasion and the protein expressions (PCNA, E-Cadherin, N-Cadherin) of retinoblastoma cells were determined by cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8), tube formation, transwell and Western blot assays, respectively. Subcutaneous transplantation tumor assay, immunohistochemistry, and RT-qPCR were applied to verify the functions of the target gene in vivo. Results: ZNRD1-AS1 was up-regulated in the cytoplasm of retinoblastoma and regulated BMI1 via sponging miR-128-3p. ZNRD1-AS1 knockdown alleviated the malignant phenotype (viability, tube length, migration and invasion) of retinoblastoma cells, reduced tumor volume and weight, and inhibited BMI1 and CD34 expressions. Different from miR-128-3p mimic, miR-128-3p inhibitor promoted malignant phenotype of retinoblastoma cells, and partially reversed the inhibitory effect of siZNRD1-AS1. MiR-128-3p mimic down-regulated BMI1, PNCA, N-Cadherin expressions, and up-regulated p16 and E-Cadherin expressions. The regulatory effect of miR-128-3p was partially reversed by BMI1. Conclusion: ZNRD1-AS1, acting as a “sponge” of miR-128-3p, up-regulates BMI1, thereby promoting the progression of retinoblastoma.

Radiation pneumonitis is a clinical problem with a high incidence. Once the onset of radiation pneumonitis has occurred, the administration of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents is the most commonly used method of clinical treatment. Quercetin (Que) is a common flavonoid, with potent anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant activities. In the present study, the therapeutic effect of inhaled Que on radiation-induced radiation pneumonitis in rats was investigated. Treatment with Que via inhalation was shown to increase the number of leukocytes and erythrocytes in the blood, and reduce the number of inflammatory cells in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid. Histological examination of lung tissue indicated that inhaled Que reduced hemorrhaging and the infiltration of inflammatory cells, and suppressed the expression of the proinflammatory cytokines transforming growth factor-β1 and interleukin-6. These results indicated that treatment with Que via inhalation ameliorates radiation pneumonitis by reducing the number of inflammatory cells, and attenuating the inflammatory response and pathological changes. This suggests that administration of Que via inhalation has the potential to become a novel treatment for radiation pneumonitis.

The aim of this paper was to investigate the effect of carboxymethyl chitosan anti-adhesion solution on prevention of postsurgical adhesion. Forty adult male Wistar rats were randomly divided into three groups: 0.9 % normal saline solution (group A), hyaluronic acid gels (group B) and carboxymethyl chitosan anti-adhesion solution (group C). The animals were treated with normal saline, hyaluronic acid gels or carboxymethyl chitosan anti-adhesion solution at the time of surgery. After 2 or 3 weeks, the degree of adhesions and histological effects were determined. The adhesions in groups B and C were significantly decreased, and the levels of TGF-β1 and hydroxyproline in group C were significantly lower than that in group A (P

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small endogenously RNA with an approximate length of 22nt which are known to be ubiquitous in eukaryotes. More importantly, miRNAs are key regulators of gene expression in eukaryotic cells through the degradation of target mRNA. The investigation on miRNAs in tomato that is an important model plant has made a great progress in recent years. Herein, by collecting the reported literature and miRBase, we found that 34 miRNAs in tomato are closely associated with pathogenicity. Subsequently, we predicted their target genes through bioinformatics approaches and built a disease-related regulatory network of miRNA and its target genes using Cytoscope program. This has led us to identify 13 miRNAs that are closely associated with pathogenicity in tomato from which we selected miR169, miR482, miR5300, miR6024, miR6026 and miR6027 for further analysis based on the association between miRNAs and the number of target genes. Lastly, we performed the analysis of target gene, promoter and real time quantitative PCR verification for these 6 miRNAs. Our study may pave the way for future in-depth analysis of biological action of miRNAs.

Being one kind of approximately 22nt long small RNA, miRNA has shown its roles in host-pathogen interaction, providing one possible way for pathogen infection. Though Phytophthora infestans is a major pathogen that causes devastating late blight of potato, tomato and so on, so far there have not been any systematic researches on miRNAs and even pathogenic miRNAs in P. infestans. Here, for the first time we comprehensively predicted and identified pathogenic miRNAs that may exist in P. infestans. First, a total of 128 putative miRNAs belonging to 66 miRNA family were identified by bioinformatic approaches. Then, 33 vital pathogenic miRNAs were screened by constructing miRNA-miRNA relationship networks. Finally, four potential pathogenic miRNAs were chosen for detection, two of which are chosen for validation. The expression quantity of pi-miR466 and pi-miR1918 changed dramatically during incubation of tomato leaves, implying that they are potential pathogenic miRNAs.

A recently proposed sparse representation based classifier, called collaborative representation based classification with regularized least square (CRC_RLS), has attracted notable attention. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the CRC_RLS technique has less complexity than traditional sparse representation based classifier (SRC) but results in better classification performance. However, the existing SRC-like approaches fail to consider the manifold structure of the data space. It has been shown that the manifold information of the data is important for discrimination. The paper presents a more effective classification scheme, termed kernelized laplacian collaborative representation based classifier (KLCRC) for face recognition. KLCRC explicitly take into account the nonlinear distribution and local manifold structure of the data. The extensive experimental results over several standard face databases have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Nonlinear dimensionality reduction and face classifier selection are two key issues of face recognition. In this paper, an efficient face recognition algorithm named Robust Marginal Fisher Analysis (RMFA) is proposed, which uses the recent advances on rank minimization. Marginal Fisher Analysis (MFA) is a supervised manifold learning method who perseveres the local manifold information. However, one major shortcoming of MFA is its brittleness with respect to grossly corrupted or outlying observations. So the main idea of RMFA is as follows. First, the high-dimensional face images are mapped into lower-dimensional discriminating feature space by low-rank matrix recovery (LR), which determines a low-rank data matrix from corrupted input data. Then try to obtain a set of projection axes that maximize the ratio of between-class scatter S b against within-class scatter S w by using MFA. Several experiments are used to illustrate the benefit and robustness of RMFA.

Traditional linear discriminant analysis is very sensitive to largely corrupted data. To address this problem, based on the recent success of low-rank matrix recovery, the paper proposes a novel low-rank constrained linear discriminant analysis (LRLDA) algorithm for head pose estimation and face recognition. By adding the low-rank constraint in our method, LRLDA can obtain more robustness and discriminating power compared with traditional LDA algorithms. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LRLDA.

This paper introduces basis structure of Unified Power Quality Conditioner. According to the different compensation methods of series and parallel connection, introduces several topology structures. Through the comparison among several topological structure performances, selects a suitable proposal for three-phase four-line control system, and carries the experiments of the typical harmonic source in power grids and the simulation analysis of Three-phase rectifier bridge, gives the experimental waveform. The results prove that the selected topological structure is flexible and effective.