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Fecal calprotectin (FC) is commonly used to assess Crohn's disease (CD) activity. However, standardized cut-off values accounting for bowel resection history and disease location are lacking. In this study, we analyzed data from patients with CD who underwent magnetic resonance enterography, ileocolonoscopy, and FC measurements from January 2017 to December 2018. In 267 cases from 254 patients, the FC levels in the 'operated' patients were higher when the disease was active compared with those who were in the remission group (178 vs. 54.7 μg/g; p < 0.001), and similar findings were obtained for the 'non-operated' patients (449.5 vs. 40.95 μg/g; p < 0.001). The FC levels differed significantly according to the location of inflammation, with lower levels in the small bowel compared to those in the colon. The FC cut-off levels of 70.8 μg/g and 142.0 μg/g were considered optimal for predicting active disease for operated and non-operated patients, respectively. The corresponding FC cut-off levels of 70.8 μg/g and 65.0 μg/g were observed for patients with disease only in the small bowel. In conclusion, different FC cut-off values would be applicable to patients with CD based on their bowel resection history and disease location. Tight control with a lower FC target may benefit those with a history of bowel resection or small-bowel-only disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No design rules have yet been established for producing solid electrolytes with a lithium-ion conductivity high enough to replace liquid electrolytes and expand the performance and battery configuration limits of current lithium ion batteries. Taking advantage of the properties of high-entropy materials, we have designed a highly ion-conductive solid electrolyte by increasing the compositional complexity of a known lithium superionic conductor to eliminate ion migration barriers while maintaining the structural framework for superionic conduction. The synthesized phase with a compositional complexity showed an improved ion conductivity. We showed that the highly conductive solid electrolyte enables charge and discharge of a thick lithium-ion battery cathode at room temperature and thus has potential to change conventional battery configurations.

Understanding the fast Li ionic conductors of oxygen-substituted thiophosphates is useful for developing all-solid-state batteries because these compounds possess a high electrochemical stability and thus may be applied as solid electrolytes. In this study, we synthesized the Li 9+δ P 3+δ' S 12- k O k series of solid solution phases with the same structure as the Li 10 GeP 2 S 12 superionic conductor and characterized their crystallinity, solid solution range, and chemical stabilities. Two methods (mechanochemical and melt quenching) were used for sample synthesis. Mechanochemical synthesis was used to obtain samples within a wide range of sulfur/oxygen substitution degrees, and the solid solution range was determined to be 0 < k ≤ 3.6 based on their lattice parameter variation. Meanwhile, the melt-quenched Li 9 P 3 S 9 O 3 phase exhibited a high degree of crystallinity up to its particle surface and was thus selected for neutron crystal structure analysis, which revealed the oxygen distribution related to the solubility limit. The highly crystalline melt-quenched Li 9 P 3 S 9 O 3 showed better stability in the air atmosphere compared to the mechanochemically synthesized counterpart with a low crystallinity, implying that sample crystallinity is an important parameter in evaluating the air stability of thiophosphates. The promising electrochemical properties of the solid solution series were demonstrated by the stable charge-discharge cycling of an all-solid-state lithium metal cell using the Li 9+δ P 3+δ' S 12- k O k electrolyte with k = 0.9 and a conductivity of >1 × 10 -3 S cm -1 at 300 K.