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Although concomitant nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is common in chronic hepatitis B (CHB), the impact of viral factors on NASH and the outcome of CHB patients concomitant with NASH remain unclear. We aimed to investigate the outcomes of NASH in CHB patients receiving antiviral treatment.In the post-hoc analysis of a multicenter trial, naïve CHB patients receiving 72-week entecavir treatment were enrolled. We evaluated the biochemical, viral and histopathological responses of these patients. The histopathological features of NASH were also evaluated, using paired liver biopsies at baseline and week 72.A total of 1000 CHB patients were finally enrolled for analysis, with 18.2% of whom fulfilling the criteria of NASH. A total of 727 patients completed entecavir antiviral treatment and received the second biopsy. Serum HBeAg loss, HBeAg seroconversion and HBV-DNA undetectable rates were similar between patients with or without NASH (P0.05). Among patients with NASH, the hepatic steatosis, ballooning, lobular inflammation scores and fibrosis stages all improved during follow-up (all P0.001), 46% (63/136) achieved NASH resolution. Patients with baseline body mass index (BMI) ≥ 23 kg/mLower BMI and weight reduction but not virologic factors determine NASH resolution in CHB. The value of weight management in CHB patients during antiviral treatment deserves further evaluation.

Background Suan-Zao-Ren Decoction (SZRD) has been widely used to treat neurological illnesses, including dementia, insomnia and depression. However, the mechanisms underlying SZRD’s improvement in cognitive function remain unclear. In this study, we examined SZRD’s effect on APP/PS1 transgenic mice and mechanisms associated with SZRD’s action in alleviating neuroinflammation and improving synaptic plasticity. Methods The APP/PS1 mice were treated with different dosages of SZRD (12.96 and 25.92 g/kg/day, in L-SZRD and H-SZRD groups, respectively) for 4 weeks. Morris water maze was conducted to determine changes in behaviors of the mice after the treatment. Meanwhile, in the samples of the hippocampus, Nissl staining and Golgi-Cox staining were used to detect synaptic plasticity. ELISA was applied to assess the expression levels of Aβ1−40 and Aβ1−42 in the hippocampus of mice. Western blot (WB) was employed to test the protein expression level of Aβ1−42, APP, ADAM10, BACE1, PS1, IDE, IBA1, GFAP, PSD95 and SYN, as well as the expressions of JAK2, STAT3 and their phosphorylation patterns to detect the involvement of JAK2/STAT3 pathway. Besides, we examined the serum and hippocampal contents of IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α through ELISA. Results Compared to the APP/PS1 mice without any treatment, SZRD, especially the L-SZRD, significantly ameliorated cognitive impairment of the APP/PS1 mice with decreases in the loss of neurons and Aβ plaque deposition as well as improvement of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus (P P Conclusions The SZRD, especially the L-SZRD, may improve the cognitive impairment and ameliorate the neural degeneration in APP/PS1 transgenic mice through inhibiting Aβ accumulation and neuroinflammation via the JAK2/STAT3 pathway.

Background: Heart sound segmentation is a long-standing problem in heart analysis, and it is mainly caused by noise interference and diversification of heart sounds. Faced with the challenging of heart sound segmentation, a more applicable segmentation model was studied. Methods: In this process, the optimal modified Log-spectral amplitude and wavelet were used to suppress the noise in the heart sound, and used the duration-dependent hidden Markov model based on personalized Gaussian mixture model (PGMM-DHMM) to segment the fundamental heart sound (FHS) and the non-fundamental heart sound (non-FHS). Then used the optimized Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) to realize the classification of S1 and S2 heart sound frames through the Convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier, which can avoid the errors caused by the ambiguity of the time domain features. Results: PGMM-DHMM can segment FHS more effectively, and the accuracy is 94.3%. The CNN classifier obtained the best results in the S1 and S2 classifications, the accuracy is 90.92%, the precision of S1 is 90.76%, the recall is 91.05%, the F-measure is 90.9%, and the precision of S2 is 91.07%, the recall is 90.79%, the F-measure is 90.93%. The final segmentation accuracy is 92.92%. In addition, the experimental results further indicate that CNN has more robust performance when classifying abnormal S1 and abnormal S2. Conclusions: The PGMM-DHMM model can better segment FHS and Non-FHS. The optimization of MFCC improves the classification effect of S1 and S2, and the improvement effect by the CNN classifier is significant, especially for abnormal heart sounds. The proposed algorithm is better than other algorithms at this stage.

Background: Suan-Zao-Ren Decoction (SZRD) has been widely used to treat neurological illnesses, like dementia, insomnia, and depression. However, mechanisms underlying SZRD’s improvement in cognitive function remains unclear. In this study, we examined SZRD’s effect on APP/PS1 transgenic mice as well as mechanisms associated with SZRD’s action in alleviating neuroinflammation and improving the synaptic plasticity. Methods: The APP/PS1 mice were treated with different dosages of SZRD (12.96 and 25.92 g/kg/d, in L-SZRD and H-SZRD groups, respectively) for four weeks. Morris water maze was conducted to determine changes in behaviors of the mice after the treatment. Meanwhile, in the samples of the hippocampus, Nissl staining and Golgi-Cox staining were used to detect the synaptic plasticity, Western blot (WB) was employed to test expressions of Aβ1-42, APP, ADAM10, BACE1, PS1, IDE, IBA1, GFAP, PSD95 and SYN, as well as the expressions of JAK2, STAT3 and their phosphorylation patterns to detect involvement of JAK2/STAT3 pathway. Besides, we examined the serum contents of IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α using ELISA.Results: Compared to the APP/PS1 mice without any treatment, SZRD, especially the L-SZRD, significantly ameliorated cognitive impairment of the APP/PS1 mice with decreases in the loss of neurons and Aβ plaque deposition as well as improvement of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus (all PPConclusion: The SZRD, especially the L-SZRD, may improve the cognitive impairment and ameliorate the neural degeneration in APP/PS1 transgenic mice through decreasing Aβ accumulation and inhibiting neuroinflammation via JAK2/STAT3 pathway.

Background: HBeAg-positive chronic infection is a unique phase of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. Current guidelines advise against starting antiviral treatment for HBeAg-positive chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection patients, some data suggest treating such patients may reduce the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma. We aimed to explore whether these patients can have evident histological liver injury (EHLI), and develop a non-invasive model for identifying EHLI in such patients. Method: We assessed whether HBeAg-positive chronic HBV infection patients can have EHLI defined by Ishak fibrosis stage ≥3 and/or histologic activity index ≥ 9 in a prospective multicenter study. Logistic and Lasso regression was used to select the optimal predictors. We used Akaike information criterion, discrimination improvement, net reclassification improvement to develop and validate models predicting EHLI risk in training cohort and two external validation cohorts. Findings: Of these 336 patients met the inclusion criteria, 181(54%) were HBeAg-positive chronic HBV infection, of whom 60 patients (33%) had EHLI, the proportion of significant fibrosis was higher than that of significant inflammation (33% vs. 8%, P

Introduction. To examine the protective effects of Liu Wei Di Huang Wan formula (LWDH) on liver and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) injuries in monosodium glutamate (MSG) and partial hepatectomy (PH) rat model. Methods. Neonatal Wistar rats were given MSG or saline on postnatal days 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. The rats were caged into five groups and treated accordingly at six weeks old as follows: Saline group, Saline+PH group, MSG group, MSG+PH group, and LWDH group (MSG+PH+LWDH). The PH was performed during week 8 by excision of the left and median hepatic lobes (occupying about 68% of whole liver).On day 8 after the PH, the rats were subjected to an inner OFT before being sacrificed. The liver and OFC were stained using H&E, ORO, or Nissl staining. The expression of neurotrophic factors (β-NGF, BDNF) was examined in the OFC lysates by ELISA. Serum levels of cytokines (IL-1β, VEGF) were examined using the Bio-Plex suspension array. Results. LWDH increased the total distance traveled by the animals (p p p p pp>0.05) and decreased hepatic steatosis (pβ (p>0.05), while it increased VEGF (p>0.05) expression. LWDH administration increased the expression of BDNF (p>0.05) and β-NGF (p>0.05) in the OFC, all as compared to the MSG+PH group. Conclusion. LWDH partly protected the animals from depressive-like behaviors in the MSG+PH-induced liver regeneration neonatal rat model. LWDH alleviated hepatic injury and steatosis and, furthermore, protected the Nissl body integrity and the growth of neurites.

Deformation behaviors of bicrystalline and nano-polycrystalline structures of various tilt angles and inclination angles in two dimensions are investigated in detail using a two-mode phase field crystal model. The interaction between grain boundary (GB) and dislocation is also examined in bicrystals and nano-polycrystals that both contain asymmetric and symmetric tilt GBs, with energy analysis being carried out to analyze these processes. During deformation simulations, we assume the volume of each simulation cell at every time step is coincident with that of the initial state just before deformation. Our simulation results show that the behaviors of symmetric and asymmetric GBs in bicrystals and nano-polycrystals differ from each other depending on tilt angle and inclination angle. A new dislocation emission mechanism of interest is observed in bicrystals which contain low angle symmetric tilt GBs. Low angle GB has a higher mobility relative to high angle GB in both bicrystalline and nano-polycrystalline structures, as does asymmetric GB to symmetric GB. The generation, motion, pileup and annihilation of dislocations, grain rotation and grain coalescence are observed, which is consistent with the simulation results obtained by molecular dynamics. These simulation results can provide strong guidelines for experimentation.

Using the phase field crystal approach, the crystallization process within the liquid–solid coexistence region is investigated for a square lattice on an atomic scale. Two competing growth modes, i.e., the diffusion-controlled growth through long-range atomic migration in liquid and the diffusionless growth through local atom rearrangement, which give rise to two completely different crystallization behaviors, are compared. In the diffusion-controlled regime, the interface migrates in a layerwise manner, leading to a gradual change of crystal morphology from truncated square to four-fold symmetric dendrite with the increase of driving force. For the diffusionless growth mode, a single crystal with no significant density change occupies the whole system at a faster rate while exhibiting a small growth anisotropy. The competition between these two modes is also discussed from the key input of the phase field crystal model: the correlation function.