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Objective The aim of this study was to investigate serum levels of soluble B-cell maturation antigen (sBCMA) in childhood-onset systemic lupus erythematous (cSLE) patients with renal involvement, and to elucidate their association with clinical characteristics. Methods 116 cases of cSLE patients with renal involvement (84 females and 32 males; median age 11.6 (10.1, 12.9) years) hospitalized in Department of Pediatric Nephrology and Rheumatology, the First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University and 31 healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled. Serum concentrations of sBCMA were determined using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Clinical and laboratory information of cSLE patients were retrospectively analyzed. Results Serum sBCMA levels were significantly increased in primary cSLE when compared with treated cSLE patients and HCs, whereas there was no significant difference between treated cSLE patients and HCs. Patients with high disease activity displayed higher serum sBCMA levels compared with those with no or mild to moderate disease activity. Positive correlation was observed between serum sBCMA levels and systemic lupus erythematosus disease activity index-2K (SLEDAI-2K), antinuclear antibody titers, anti-double-stranded DNA titers, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and immunoglobulin G levels, while sBCMA levels were negatively correlated with blood white blood cell count, hemoglobin, platelet count, complement C3 and C4 levels. Serum sBCMA levels decreased as disease ameliorated after treatments among 11 cases with follow-up examinations. Conclusions In cSLE patients with renal involvement, serum sBCMA levels correlated significantly with disease activity, immunological, and hematological parameters, but not with renal parameters. Our results suggest the potential and significance of serum sBCMA as a biomarker in cSLE patients.

Objectives: Acupuncture has been found to be effective at relieving many inflammatory pain conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We aimed to assess the anti-inflammatory potential of manual acupuncture (MA) treatment of RA using adjuvant-induced arthritic (AIA) rats and to explore the underlying mechanisms. Methods: The anti-inflammatory and analgesic actions of MA at ST36 ( Zusanli) in AIA rats were assessed using paw withdrawal latency and swelling, histological examination and cytokine detection by enzyme-linked immunoassay (ELISA). The cell–cell communication (CCC) network was analyzed with a multiplex immunoassay of 24 immune factors expressed in the inflamed joints, and the macrophage and Treg populations and associated cytokines regulated by MA were investigated using reverse-transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), ELISA and flow cytometry. Results: MA markedly decreased heat hyperalgesia and paw swelling in AIA rats. MA-treated rats also exhibited decreased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines (tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β) coupled with increased anti-inflammatory cytokines (IL-10, transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1) in the ankle joints at protein and mRNA levels. CCC network analysis confirmed that macrophages are of critical importance and are potential therapeutic targets in RA. Repeated treatment with MA triggered a macrophage phenotypic switch in the paws, with fewer M1 macrophages. Prominent increases in the Treg cell population and TGF-β1 in the popliteal lymph nodes demonstrated the immunomodulatory effects of MA. Furthermore, a selective TGF-β1-receptor inhibitor, SB431542, attenuated the anti-inflammatory effects of MA and MA-induced suppression of the levels of M1-released cytokines. Conclusion: These findings provide novel evidence that the anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects of MA on RA act through phenotypic modulation involving the inhibition of M1 macrophage polarization and an increase in the Treg cell population, highlighting the potential therapeutic advantages of acupuncture in controlling pain and ameliorating inflammatory conditions.

Background and Purpose: Hematoma volume (HV) is a significant diagnosis for determining the clinical stage and therapeutic approach for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). The aim of this study is to develop a robust deep learning segmentation method for the fast and accurate HV analysis using computed tomography. Methods: A novel dimension reduction UNet (DR-UNet) model was developed for computed tomography image segmentation and HV measurement. Two data sets, 512 ICH patients with 12 568 computed tomography slices in the retrospective data set and 50 ICH patients with 1257 slices in the prospective data set, were used for network training, validation, and internal and external testing. Moreover, 13 irregular hematoma cases, 11 subdural and epidural hematoma cases, and 50 different HV cases into 3 groups (60 mL) were selected to further evaluate the robustness of DR-UNet. The image segmentation performance of DR-UNet was compared with those of UNet, the fuzzy clustering method, and the active contour method. The HV measurement performance was compared using DR-UNet, UNet, and the Coniglobus formula method. Results: Using DR-UNet, the segmentation model achieved a performance similar to that of expert clinicians in 2 independent test data sets containing internal testing data (Dice of 0.861±0.139) and external testing data (Dice of 0.874±0.130). The HV measurement derived from DR-UNet was strongly correlated with that from manual segmentation (R 2 =0.9979; P Conclusions: DR-UNet can segment hematomas from the computed tomography scans of ICH patients and quantify the HV with better accuracy and greater efficiency than the main existing methods and with similar performance to expert clinicians. Due to robust performance and stable segmentation on different ICHs, DR-UNet could facilitate the development of deep learning systems for a variety of clinical applications.

To investigate the relationship between the correlation ratios of selenium (Se) and other elements and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) among older adults. A total of 1000 individuals participated in our research analysis. The concentrations of elements in whole blood were determined using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry to reflect their exposure levels. Participants' cognitive function was assessed using the Mini-Mental State Examination. Logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between elemental ratios and MCI. Se concentration was positively correlated with red blood cell count (r = 0.219, p 0.001), haemoglobin level (r = 0.355, p 0.001), haematocrit (r = 0.215, p 0.001), mean corpuscular haemoglobin (r = 0.294, p 0.001) and mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (r = 0.428, p 0.001) and negatively correlated with red cell volume distribution width-standard deviation (r = -0.232, p 0.001) and platelet distribution width (r = -0.382, p 0.001). Compared with the normal group, the ratios of Se/vanadium (V), Se/lead (Pb) and Se/cadmium (Cd) in the whole blood of the MCI group were significantly lower (all p 0.001), while the ratios of manganese (Mn)/Se and iron (Fe)/Se were higher (all p 0.001). The increase in the ratios of Se/V, Se/Pb and Se/Cd is related to a decreased risk of MCI among older adults; contrarily, an increase in the ratios of Mn/Se and Fe/Se may be a risk factor for MCI.

Radiotherapy is a common treatment for abdominal and pelvic malignancies with bone metastases. However, some patients develop radiation enteritis (RE) during the treatment or 2 months or more after the treatment, which seriously affects their quality of life. At present, the curative effect of western medicine is poor. Professor Renting Li believes that radiation kills tumor cells but at the same time, it damages the healthy Qi of the human body. Radiation causes heat and poison to accumulate in the intestinal tract, consumes and hurts Yin fluid, burns the vein, leads to deficiency of healthy Qi and poor detoxification, as well as cause blood stasis after a period of time. All these result in the combination of heat, blood stasis, and poison, manifesting as abdominal pain, diarrhea, mucus in stools, purulent and bloody stools, etc. Therefore, Professor Renting Li proposed the use of traditional Chinese medicine retention enema combined with oral traditional Chinese medicine to reduce symptoms, remove toxins, and improve the quality of life of patients.

Fine-grained recognition is a very challenging issue, since it is difficulty to mine discriminative and subtle feature for objects with similar visual appearance. Because massive manual annotations (e.g., bounding box for discriminative regions) are time-consuming and labor-consuming, existing methods designed single form of attention model outputted discriminative regions in a weakly supervised way. In this paper, we proposed a novel method named a Spatial-Channel Aware Attention Filters (SCAF) to address the weakly supervised fine-grained recognition problem. Compared with the previous attention models, SCAF can obtain attentions-aware features from two dimensions, i.e., the spatial location of image and the channel of feature maps. With the proposed SCAF, the model can enhance the discriminative regions on both spatial and channel dimensions simultaneously. In addition, the multi-channel network multi-level structure are designed to extract richer regional features. Moreover, focal loss is introduced to balance the samples’ distribution of fine-grained image dataset. Comprehensive and comparable experiments are conducted in publicly available datasets, and the experimental results show that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on fine-grained recognition tasks. For instance, we achieve 99.370%, 80.749% accuracy on two underwater datasets respectively, i.e., Fish4Knowlege and Wild Fish.

Conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have led to considerable improvements in the task of conditional image generation. However, there are still some problems, including the low definition of generated images, mode collapse, gradient disappearance and slow convergence, which need to be solved. In this study, the authors proposed a novel conditional GAN model, fewer iterations GAN (FI-GAN), that requires fewer iterations to generate controllable and realistic images. First, to improve the performance of feature extraction of the discriminator and data distribution fitting of the generator, two residual blocks are added into the discriminator and generator. Then, two new loss functions, including quality and category loss functions for both the discriminator and generator, are designed to enhance the details and distinguishability of the generated images. Finally, to avoid mode collapse and improve the convergence, the Wasserstein distance is used as the quality loss function. With the CIFAR-10 and large scene understanding datasets, FI-GAN can generate delicate and diverse colour samples with fewer iterations. It achieved better performance evaluated by three objective criteria, the inception score, Frechet inception distance and kernel maximum mean discrepancy, compared with four methods of conditional GAN.

To assess the effect and safety of bloodletting puncture at hand twelve Jing-Well points (HTWPs) in acute stroke patients with conscious disturbance. In this multi-center and randomized controlled trial, 360 patients suffered from ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke with conscious disturbance within 48 h from the onset of symptom were divided into bloodletting (180 cases) and control (180 cases) groups using a block randomization. Patients in both groups received routine Western medicine, and patients in the bloodletting group received additional bloodletting puncture at HTWPs on admission immediately before conventional treatment. The primary outcome measure was Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score and the secondary outcomes included blood pressure, respiratory rate and pulse rate. All variables were evaluated at baseline (before bloodletting), 0 (after bloodletting immediately), 15, 30, 50 and 80 min post bloodletting. At 80 min post bloodletting, the proportion of patients with improved consciousness in the bloodletting group was greater than the control group (P 0.05). The bloodletting puncture at HTWPs was safe and could improve conscious levels of ischemic stroke patients, highlighting a first-aid intervention for acute stroke. (Registration No. ChiCTR-INR-16009530)

It was conjectured by Hoffmann–Ostenhof that the edge set of every connected cubic graph can be decomposed into a spanning tree, a matching and a family of disjoint cycles. In this paper, we show that the conjecture is true for connected claw-free cubic graphs, and, furthermore, any edge not contained any triangle appears only on the tree or on the matching. Then we show that the edge set of every connected cubic graph (except for K 4 and K 3 , 3 ) can be decomposed into a spanning tree and a family of disjoint paths of length at most 2.

While China has achieved rapid economic growth in the past several decades, such growth has also caused serious environmental problems. Local governments' tolerance and indulgence pollution is one of the key factors. Therefore, the state has established a generally centralized environmental governance system. This empirical study proposes an Objective-Conduct-Performance model to explain environmental regulation differences between developed countries and China, and attempts to analyze local governments' environment deregulation in the context of environmental centralization using data from Chinese provinces from 1997 to 2015. Our results indicate the following findings. First, newly transferred officials exert influence that is characterized by a fall-rise pattern in CO2 emissions during the few first years of the officials' new terms. Second, the centralized environmental governance and strict legal rules may provide strong restrictions on local governments' environment deregulation. Third, market forces are a driver of local governments' environment deregulation rather than a constraint. Last but not least, top officials transferred from adjacent provinces are more likely to ease environmental regulations than those from non-adjacent provinces. Thus, we can conclude that local government officials in China have a powerful motive to ease environmental regulations, leading to a failed effort to restrain local government officials’ further measures in spite of the severity of laws, regulations, and the unfamiliarity of administrative circumstances. This is perhaps due to a lack of political and economic power structures that match environmental centralization. Asymmetric incentives make local government officials tend to prioritize the goal of economic growth over environmental quality.

This study analyses domestic market integration’s (DMI’s) dynamic influence on regional economic growth in China. The authors construct a matrix of annual DMI indices for 29 provinces for 1997–2015. They calculate the reciprocal matrix and combine it with the β-convergence model and spatial econometrics to analyse the relationships between DMI and regional economic growth. Their findings indicate that the relation between these two variables is not straightforward, and 2004 was a tipping-point year. Before 2004, the statistical relationship between DMI and regional economic growth was downward sloping, which suggests a trend of divergence and negative spillover effects across the 29 provinces. After 2004, the relationship between DMI and regional economic growth becomes positive: increased DMI now is strengthening (regional) economic growth. The authors provide the possible explanations for the unstable relationship combined with China’s reality as well.

Acupuncture is used in the treatment of a variety of inflammatory conditions and diseases. However, the mechanisms of its anti-inflammatory action are complex and have not been systematically investigated. Macrophages are key components of the innate immune system, thus, balancing the M1/M2 macrophage ratio and modulating cytokine levels in the inflammatory environment may be desirable therapeutic goals. Evidence has shown that acupuncture has anti-inflammatory actions that affect multiple body systems, including the immune, locomotory, endocrine, nervous, digestive, and respiratory systems, by downregulating pro-inflammatory M1 and upregulating anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages, as well as by modulating associated cytokine secretion. Macrophage polarization is controlled by the interlocking pathways of extrinsic factors, the local tissue microenvironment, and the neural-endocrine-immune systems. It has been suggested that polarization of T lymphocytes and cytokine secretions resulting in modulation of the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, may be upstream mechanisms of acupuncture-induced macrophage polarization. We further propose that macrophage polarization could be the principal pathway involved in acupuncture immune regulation and provide the scientific basis for the clinical application of acupuncture in inflammatory conditions.

Hyperglycemia is generally considered to be an important cause of diabetic retinopathy (DR). The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of miR-5195-3p in high glucose (HG)-induced human retinal pigment epithelial ARPE-19 cell injury. Here, we first found that the expression level of miR-5195-3p was significantly downregulated in HG-stimulated ARPE-19 cells using reverse transcription quantitative PCR. Overexpression of miR-5195-3p attenuated the impaired cell viability, increased apoptosis and pro-inflammatory cytokines secretion in ARPE-19 cells under HG condition using CCK-8 assay, flow cytometry and ELISA assay, respectively. Luciferase reporter assay showed that miR-5195-3p could specifically bind to the 3’UTR of glia maturation factor-β (GMFB). GMFB overexpression reversed, while knockdown enhanced the protective effects of miR-5195-3p overexpression against HG-induced ARPE-19 cell injury. In summary, miR-5195-3p targeting GMFB might be a potential therapeutic target for DR.

Background. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic systemic chronic autoimmune disease characterized by the aggregation of immune cells and secretion of cytokines in the joint synovium, causing hyperblastosis and even bone destruction. Acupuncture has been proven effective in RA treatment. This study aimed to investigate the anti-inflammatory action of acupuncture, specifically, in relation to immune cell interactions and key mediators. Methods. Rats with adjuvant-induced arthritics (AIA) were treated with manual acupuncture (MA) at Zusanli (ST36). Joint edema and paw withdrawal latency were monitored to observe the effects on inflammation. The levels of 24 cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors in ankle joints during the treatment (on days 1, 7, 15, and 21) were detected by multiplex immunoassay. A bioinformatics analysis based on a directed weighted mathematical model was used to construct cell communication network diagrams and identify the key cells through calculation. The monocyte/macrophage polarization in inflamed joints was investigated by detecting M1- and M2-phenotypic populations and their related cytokines. Results. ST36 MA alleviated paw edema and upregulated the nociceptive threshold of AIA rats. Several innate and adaptive immune cytokines were dynamically regulated by MA, and MA-treated rats showed a significant improvement in symptoms compared with AIA rats by day 21. The immune cell-cell communication networks were intensified with the development of RA but were significantly reduced after treatment with MA. MA was found to specifically regulate monocytes/macrophages in inflamed ankle joints ST36 MA also inhibited M1-phenotype macrophages accompanied by decreased levels of IL-1β. Conclusions. ST36 MA showed anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects as well as inhibition of immune cell communication networks in inflamed joints of AIA rats. Inhibiting the polarization of macrophages to the M1-phenotype in inflamed joints may be one of the key mechanisms of MA anti-inflammatory action. This research highlighted a systematic research paradigm for investigating mechanisms of acupuncture action.

Since the 1978 economic reform, China has undergone a historical process of rapid urbanization. Although this process has been recognized as a key factor in the development of sustainable growth in China, low quality rural labor continues to limit the effectiveness of the country&rsquo, s urbanization. Our study uses a spatial analysis framework to explore how the education level of rural laborers moderates the effect of urbanization on economic growth with provincial data collected from 1996 to 2015. Our results reveal that the influence of population urbanization on sustainable growth is mediated by the improvement of consumption capacity of urban dwellers and the industrial structural changes. The education level of rural laborers adjusts the urbanization&rsquo, s influence on the consumption capacity of residents, which further affects economic growth. Empirical evidence indicates that the educationally limited rural population negatively moderates the impact of urbanization on sustainable economic growth by restraining the consumption capacity of migrating rural labor. It is also found that in some provinces with less-qualified rural labor, such as Gansu, Yunnan and Qinghai, population urbanization has not contributed to a corresponding economic growth, indicating that these provinces may have undergone urbanization without growth. These findings suggest that basic education is critical to the growth of income and consumption capacities of rural labor when laborers are migrating to urban areas. To achieve a valid urbanization process and sustainable growth, state and local governments must improve the basic education scheme, especially the nine-year compulsory education in Chinese rural areas through public financial investment and policy support.

“Lipotoxicity” induced by excessive accumulation of free fatty acids (FFAs) in the liver, especially saturated FAs and their toxic metabolites, is closely related to metabolic diseases such as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a novel gaseous signaling molecule, has been reported to have lipid-lowering effects, but its effect on FAs metabolism remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect and mechanisms of anethole dithiolethione (ADT, a sustained-release H2S donor) on hepatic FAs metabolism. ADT was administered daily for 4 weeks in male Syrian golden hamsters fed a high fat diet (HFD), and FAs profiles of liver tissues were analyzed using GC-MS. The results showed that in HFD-fed hamsters, ADT treatment significantly reduced the accumulation of saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids (C16:0, C18:0, C16:1, and C18:1n9), while increased the content of n-6 and n-3 series polyunsaturated fatty acids (C20:3n6, C20:4n6, and C22:6n3). Mechanistically, ADT obviously inhibited the overexpression of ACC1, FAS and SCD1, and up-regulated the levels of FATPs, L-FABP, CPT1α, FADS1 and FADS2. Notably, ADT evidently induced Mitofusin1 to facilitate mitochondrial fusion and optimize β-oxidation. These findings suggest that ADT plays a beneficial role by regulating the synthesis, desaturation, β-oxidation, uptake, binding/isolation, and transport of FAs. In conclusion, ADT is effective in improving liver FAs metabolic disorders and liver injuries caused by HFD.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic autoimmune inflammatory and debilitating disease that involves the systemic imbalance of the immune network. Previous studies have shown that acupuncture can help treat RA. However, its specific mechanisms are not fully understood. Thus, the present study was designed to clarify the mechanisms of acupuncture acted on RA via immune network modulation using complete Freund’s adjuvant (CFA)-induced arthritic rats. Results revealed that manual acupuncture (MA) could alleviate the inflammation and pain of infected joints. Moreover, MA could effectively stimulate the innate immune cytokines (IL-1[Formula: see text], IL-1[Formula: see text], IL-6, IL-7, IL-18, TNF-[Formula: see text]) and adaptive immunity cytokines (IL-2, IL-12, IFN-[Formula: see text], IL-4, IL-5, IL-10, IL-13, IL-17) as the main part of the immune response and repaired damage of RA. These complex immunomodulatory processes were analyzed quantitatively by cell–cell communication (CCC) networks. The CCC networks demonstrated that the immune networks were enhanced with the development of RA, while MA enhanced the immune networks in the early stage to act on RA and promoted the immune-network to a normal level at the late stage. Moreover, we found that monocyte/macrophage and endothelial cells were the key cells of innate immunity and body cells; TH1, TH2 and B cells were the key cells of adaptive immunity, which were also the main target cells for MA regulation.

This article interrogates the role of local Chinese governors in government-driven urbanisation. This process often involves local governments converting rural land to urban land rather than local governments incentivising rural-to-urban migration. This study proposes a method to find a proxy variable of government-driven urbanisation and performs an exploratory study of its impact on economic growth. Its empirical analysis is based on provincial data from 1996 to 2015, a period of intense urbanisation in China. The results show that urbanisation has had various effects on growth across different provinces, and that some provinces exhibit a phenomenon called ‘urbanisation without growth’. This may be because local governors push urbanisation too heavy that it can hardly generate positive effects, such as external consumption, technology diffusion, and a larger pool of urban labour. This is similar to the phenomenon of over-urbanisation experienced in some developing countries. As a main driver of over-urbanisation, government-driven urbanisation has typical Chinese characteristics, but this paper's findings still have significant implications for other emerging economies.

Histidine, an amino acid that is essential to humans, exerts favorable cytoprotective effects against oxidative stress in vivo and in vitro, but the effect of histidine on human lens epithelial cells (HLECs) and its regulatory mechanism have not previously been reported. The oxidative stress induced by H2 O2 plays an important role in the pathology of cataract. We know that HLECs are important for maintaining the transparency and integrity of the lens. In the present study, we investigated the possible molecular mechanisms underlying the cytoprotective effects of histidine against H2 O2 -induced oxidative stress in HLECs. The results showed that histidine reduced H2 O2 -induced cell apoptosis and reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation, protected HLECs from H2 O2 -induced oxidative damage, increased the expression levels of dismutase (SOD) and glutathione (GSH), and decreased the expression level of malondialdehyde (MDA), and the protective effect of histidine depended on the NF-кB pathway. Together, these data suggest that histidine could be helpful in inhibiting oxidative stress in the lens and thus attenuating cataract formation.

Background Cerebral edema, erupting simultaneously with severe ischemic stroke, might lead to increased intracranial pressure, cerebral herniation, and ultimately death. Studies conducted previously by our team have demonstrated the fact that bloodletting puncture at hand twelve Jing-well points (HTWP) could alleviate cerebral edema, which mainly results from the disruption of blood-brain barrier (BBB). The study, therefore, was first designed to demonstrate whether BBB-protection serves an important role in the edema-relief effect of HTWP bloodletting, based on which to research the molecular mechanism underlying. Methods The rats were made into model suffering from permanent middle cerebral artery occlusion (pMCAO) and then bloodletting puncture were treated at HTWP once a day. Wet and dry weight method was adopted to evaluate the degree of brain edema, evans blue extravasation and electron microscopy were used to evaluate the integrity of the BBB, and RT-qPCR was carried out to analyze the expression level of occludin, claudin-5, ICAM-1, and VEGF. Results Results revealed that bloodletting puncture treatment could reduce water content of brain and the permeability of BBB caused by ischemic stroke. In bloodletting puncture group, ameliorated tight junctions could be observed under electron microscopy. It was demonstrated in further study that, in bloodletting group, compared with pMCAO one, the expression levels of occludin and claudin-5 were up-regulated, while ICAM-1 and VEGF were down-regulated. Conclusions In conclusion, bloodletting puncture at HTWP might play a significant role in protecting the tight junctions of BBB, thus alleviating cerebral edema induced by ischemic stroke. Therefore, the therapy of bloodletting puncture at HTWP may be a promising strategy for acute ischemic stroke in the future.

Urea, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and N-ethylmaleimide (NEM) were employed to monitor the contributions of hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic interactions and disulfide bonds in heat-induced surimi gel. Surimi gels were prepared with the bond disrupting agents followed by texture profile, gel strength, rheological and Raman analysis. The rheological analysis demonstrated that remarkable changes of storage moduli (G′) were presented below the critical temperature, especially for SDS treatments. Gel strength significantly decreased as the concentration of urea and NEM increased, while it was slightly improved by 1% SDS. With the involvement of bond disrupting agents, hardness and gumminess of surimi gel presented a dramatical decrease. The Raman results indicated that protein secondary structure tended to transform to random coil, with content of α-helix and β-sheet decreasing. Textural properties were in correlation with protein conformation. Less of random coil led to improvement of gel strength, and springiness was mainly contributed by β-sheet and β-turn. The results suggested that different bond disrupting agents induced various changes in surimi gel properties and protein secondary structure.

Acupuncture, with its unique set of theories and its evident results in clinical practice is an important part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and gaining recognition worldwide for the past few years. Although acupuncture treatment is generally accepted by the public, a few western researchers believe that sufficient evidence of its efficiency is still currently lacking, therefore creating a challenge of its acceptance on a wider scale. This article suggests the concepts of acupuncture behind clinical researches by reviewing the clinical researches done, analyzing the existing problems, and integrating real life acupuncture into the research process. By increasing the credibility of acupuncture, its reach can be extended globally and to more countries and regions.

Low shear stress (LSS) is a well‑established risk factor resulting in endothelial apoptosis and atherosclerosis. Autophagy has been reported to be involved in the development of atherosclerosis. However, whether autophagy participates in LSS‑induced atherosclerosis remains unclear. The effect of autophagy and its association with apoptosis, in the development of atherosclerosis, remains controversial. Therefore, in the present study, the level and role of autophagy in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) exposed to LSS was examined. The results revealed that LSS increased the formation of autophagosomes and MAP1 light chain 3‑like protein (LC3) puncta (as demonstrated by transmission electron microscopy and immunofluorescence), and the protein levels of Beclin‑1 and LC3II decreased the expression of p62 [as revealed by western blot analysis (WB)]. Furthermore, the level of p62 decreased when autophagy was induced by rapamycin, and increased when autophagy was inhibited by chloroquine (CQ), which indicated that LSS may serve an important role in inducing autophagy flux. In addition, it was observed that HUVECs treated with LSS underwent apoptotic death, by monitoring the rate of apoptosis and the expression of apoptosis regulator BAX (Bax) and apoptosis regulator Bcl‑2 (Bcl‑2) (by flow cytometry and WB) and the LSS‑induced apoptosis in HUVECs, that was significantly alleviated by pretreatment with rapamycin, partially via a decrease in the level of Bax and an increase in the level of Bcl‑2. Pretreatment of HUVECs with CQ markedly increased LSS‑induced apoptosis, which was associated with an increased expression of Bax and a decreased expression of Bcl‑2. In conclusion, the results of the present study indicate that LSS increases the level of autophagy, which may be through a Bcl‑2/Beclin‑1‑dependent mechanism, which serves a protective role against LSS‑induced apoptosis.