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Abstract Background Deep venous thrombosis (DVT) after spinal surgery has recently attracted increasing attention. Patients with spinal metastases who undergo decompression with fixation are at a high risk of developing DVT. D-dimer levels indicate the risk of DVT, and the purpose of our study was to investigate D-dimer levels as a predictor of DVT perioperatively. Methods We prospectively evaluated 100 patients with spinal metastases. D-dimer tests were performed twice: once before surgery and one day postoperatively. DVT was diagnosed by duplex ultrasonographic assessment of both lower extremities. Pulmonary embolisms (PEs) were diagnosed using multidetector computed tomography and pulmonary angiography. Perioperative serum D-dimer levels were compared between the DVT (+) and DVT (-) groups. The cutoff value of the D-dimer level was calculated using receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results Preoperative and postoperative DVT prevalences were 8.0% (8/100) and 6.6% (6/91), respectively, and none of the patients developed PE. Before surgery, there was no significant differences in D-dimer levels between the pre-DVT (+) and pre-DVT (-) groups. After surgery, the D-dimer level one-day postoperatively for the post-DVT (+) group (17.6 ± 11.8 mg/L) was significantly higher than that of the post-DVT (-) group (5.0 ± 4.7 mg/L). The cutoff value of the postoperative D-dimer level was 9.51(mg/L), and the sensitivity and specificity for the optimum threshold were 83.3% and 89.4%, respectively. Conclusions Our findings suggest that preoperative D-dimer level may not be a predictor of DVT. Preoperative ultrasound examinations should be routinely performed in patients with spinal metastases. Postoperative D-dimer levels greater than 9.51(mg/L) are a predictive factor for the early diagnosis of DVT after spine surgery. Trial registration Our study was registered on Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (No.ChiCTR2000029737). Registered 11 February 2020 - Retrospectively registered, https://www.chictr.org.cn/index.aspx.

ABSTRACT Human intestinal enteroids (HIEs) are gaining recognition as physiologically relevant models of the intestinal epithelium. While HIEs from adults are used extensively in biomedical research, few studies have used HIEs from infants. Considering the dramatic developmental changes that occur during infancy, it is important to establish models that represent infant intestinal characteristics and physiological responses. We established jejunal HIEs from infant surgical samples and performed comparisons to jejunal HIEs from adults using RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) and morphologic analyses. We then validated differences in key pathways through functional studies and determined whether these cultures recapitulate known features of the infant intestinal epithelium. RNA-Seq analysis showed significant differences in the transcriptome of infant and adult HIEs, including differences in genes and pathways associated with cell differentiation and proliferation, tissue development, lipid metabolism, innate immunity, and biological adhesion. Validating these results, we observed a higher abundance of cells expressing specific enterocyte, goblet cell, and enteroendocrine cell markers in differentiated infant HIE monolayers, and greater numbers of proliferative cells in undifferentiated 3D cultures. Compared to adult HIEs, infant HIEs portray characteristics of an immature gastrointestinal epithelium including significantly shorter cell height, lower epithelial barrier integrity, and lower innate immune responses to infection with an oral poliovirus vaccine. HIEs established from infant intestinal tissues reflect characteristics of the infant gut and are distinct from adult cultures. Our data support the use of infant HIEs as an ex vivo model to advance studies of infant-specific diseases and drug discovery for this population.IMPORTANCETissue or biopsy stem cell-derived human intestinal enteroids are increasingly recognized as physiologically relevant models of the human gastrointestinal epithelium. While enteroids from adults and fetal tissues have been extensively used for studying many infectious and non-infectious diseases, there are few reports on enteroids from infants. We show that infant enteroids exhibit both transcriptomic and morphological differences compared to adult cultures. They also differ in functional responses to barrier disruption and innate immune responses to infection, suggesting that infant and adult enteroids are distinct model systems. Considering the dramatic changes in body composition and physiology that begin during infancy, tools that appropriately reflect intestinal development and diseases are critical. Infant enteroids exhibit key features of the infant gastrointestinal epithelium. This study is significant in establishing infant enteroids as age-appropriate models for infant intestinal physiology, infant-specific diseases, and responses to pathogens.

Why are men less likely to use electronic coupons than women? Previous studies have explained the gender difference in coupon usage by exploring roles within the household and personality traits of the sexes. However, this research offers a novel explanation for this phenomenon, that men’s reluctance to use e-coupons may derive from the prevalent stereotype that e-coupon users are feminine. Because of the feminine stereotype associated with e-coupon usage, acquiring and using e-coupons are inconsistent with men’s gender identity. Five studies combining real data analysis, an online survey and experiments are used to support the previous notion. Using e-coupon acquisition data from a platform, study 1 tests whether females are more likely to acquire and use e-coupons than males in the real world. Study 2 experimentally tests the coupon–feminine stereotype. Study 3 explores the mediation effect of gender identity threat. Study 4 and study 5 consider two boundary conditions under which male consumers may be motivated to use e-coupons: when male consumers’ masculine identity is affirmed, and when the association between e-coupons and femininity is weakened. The results explain the gender difference in e-coupon usage from the novel lens of the coupon–feminine stereotype, offering a new and important perspective to explore the effect of gender identity on coupon use. Practical implications such as breaking the coupon–feminine stereotype, adopting a masculine design and communicating an affirmation of gender identity are further discussed.

Abstract Objectives Perioperative cisplatin‐based chemotherapy decreases the risk of death over surgery alone and is a standard of care. Here, we examined perioperative chemotherapy indications for stage IB‐III non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients according to lobe‐specific analysis. Methods Resectable NSCLC patients with stage IB–III who received perioperative chemotherapy with and without radiotherapy after lung resection were identified from the SEER database. Propensity score matching (PSM) analysis was performed to reduce the inherent bias of retrospective studies. The Kaplan–Meier method and log‐rank tests were used to assess the differences in overall survival (OS). Results The study enrolled 23,844 patients before PSM. The perioperative chemotherapy group had better OS than the nonperioperative chemotherapy group in stage IB–III NSCLC patients before and after PSM. However, subgroup analysis according to stage demonstrated that perioperative chemotherapy did not markedly benefit patients with stage IB. Furthermore, lobar subgroup analysis did not show survival advantages in primary tumors located in either the right middle lobe in stages II and III NSCLC or the right lower lobe in stage III NSCLC. Conclusions Lobe‐specific perioperative chemotherapy is recommended in NSCLC patients. For stage IB NSCLC, right middle lobe NSCLC from stage IB‐III and right lower lobe NSCLC from stage III, perioperative chemotherapy might not confer survival benefits.

Named entity recognition of wheat diseases and pests is a key step to building a knowledge graph. Aiming at the problems of lack of training data, complex entity structure, diverse entity types and uneven entity distribution in wheat diseases and pests field, under the promise of fully mining the implicit knowledge, two data augmentation methods are used to expand sentence semantic information, and to construct the corpus WpdCNER (wheat pests and diseases Chinese named entity recognition) and the field lexicon WpdDict (wheat pests and diseases dictionary). And 16 categories of entities are defined with the field experts’ guidance. Meanwhile, Chinese named entity recognition model based on rules amendment WPD-RA (wheat pests and disease-rules amendment model) is proposed. This model is carried out entity recognition based on ALBERT+BiLSTM+CRF (a lite bi-directional encoder representation from transformer + bi-directional long short-term memory + conditional random field), and specific rules are defined to amend entity boundaries after recognition. The WPD-RA model achieves the best results with 94.72% precision, 95.23% recall, and 94.97% F1. Its precision is increased by 1.71 percentage points, recall is increased by 0.34 percentage points, and F1 is increased by 1.03 percentage points, compared with the model without rules. Experimental results show that the model can effectively recognize named entities in wheat diseases and pests field, and its performance is better than other models. The proposed model provides a reference idea for named entity recognition task in other fields such as food safety and biology.

Cronkhite-Canada Syndrome (CCS) is a rare, noninherited polyposis syndrome affecting 1 in every million individuals. Despite over 50 years of CCS cases, the etiopathogenesis and optimal treatment for CCS remains unknown due to the rarity of the disease and lack of model systems. To better understand the etiology of CCS, we generated human intestinal organoids (HIOs) from intestinal stem cells isolated from 2 patients. We discovered that CCS HIOs are highly proliferative and have increased numbers of enteroendocrine cells producing serotonin (also known as 5-hydroxytryptamine or 5HT). These features were also confirmed in patient tissue biopsies. Recombinant 5HT increased proliferation of non-CCS donor HIOs and inhibition of 5HT production in the CCS HIOs resulted in decreased proliferation, suggesting a link between local epithelial 5HT production and control of epithelial stem cell proliferation. This link was confirmed in genetically engineered HIOs with an increased number of enteroendocrine cells. This work provides a new mechanism to explain the pathogenesis of CCS and illustrates the important contribution of HIO cultures to understanding disease etiology and in the identification of novel therapies. Our work demonstrates the principle of using organoids for personalized medicine and sheds light on how intestinal hormones can play a role in intestinal epithelial proliferation.

Abstract Background Poor prognosis is linked to peripheral blood levels of preoperative platelet‐lymphocyte ratio (PLR) and neutrophil‐lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in many advanced cancers. Nevertheless, whether the correlation exists in resected early‐stage cases with non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) stays controversial. Consequently, we performed a meta‐analysis to explore the preoperative NLR and PLR's prognostic significance in early‐stage patients with NSCLC undergoing curative surgery. Methods Relevant studies that validated the link between preoperative NLR or PLR and survival results were found via the proceeding databases: PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science. The merged 95% confidence interval (CI) and hazard ratio (HR) was employed to validate the link between the NLR or PLR's index and overall survival (OS) and disease‐free survival (DFS) in resected NSCLC cases. We used sensitivity and subgroup analyses to assess the studies' heterogeneity. Results An overall of 21 studies were attributed to the meta‐analysis. The findings indicated that great preoperative NLR was considerably correlated with poor DFS (HR = 1.58, 95% CI: 1.37–1.82, p

Platinum group metal(PGM) elements such as ruthenium(Ru), rhodium(Rh) and palladium(Pd) in the high-level radioactive waste solution will aggregate and deposit at the bottom of the furnace during the process of vitrification. The deposition of PGM will lead to the change of glass density, conductivity and viscosity of melt in the furnace, which will easily cause the short circuit of the heating electrodes and the blockage of the discharge hole in the Joule heated ceramic furnace, and affect the performance of the glass. In this paper, based on the research progress of the deposition mechanism and properties of PGM during the process of vitrification at home and abroad, the crystallization mechanism of PGM in glass melt was reviewed, and the growth, agglomeration and distribution of PGM were analyzed and observed. The mechanism of the influence of PGM on the conductivity and viscosity of glass melt was studied, and the factors affecting the conductivity and viscosity were summarized. The effect of PGM deposition on the leaching rate of glass was discussed. Finally, the solutions about deposition of platinum group metals in the process of vitrification were put forward and summarized.

Cronkhite-Canada Syndrome (CCS) is a rare, noninherited polyposis syndrome affecting 1 in every million individuals. Despite over 50 years of CCS cases, the etiopathogenesis and optimal treatment for CCS remains unknown due to the rarity of the disease and lack of model systems. To better understand the etiology of CCS, we generated human intestinal organoids (HIOs) from intestinal stem cells isolated from 2 patients. We discovered that CCS HIOs are highly proliferative and have increased numbers of enteroendocrine cells producing serotonin (also known as 5-hydroxytryptamine or 5HT). These features were also confirmed in patient tissue biopsies. Recombinant 5HT increased proliferation of non-CCS donor HIOs and inhibition of 5HT production in the CCS HIOs resulted in decreased proliferation, suggesting a link between local epithelial 5HT production and control of epithelial stem cell proliferation. This link was confirmed in genetically engineered HIOs with an increased number of enteroendocrine cells. This work provides a new mechanism to explain the pathogenesis of CCS and illustrates the important contribution of HIO cultures to understanding disease etiology and in the identification of novel therapies. Our work demonstrates the principle of using organoids for personalized medicine and sheds light on how intestinal hormones can play a role in intestinal epithelial proliferation., Introduction In 1955, Leonard Cronkhite and Wilma Canada documented a rare, nonhereditary disease associated with nonadenomatous cystic polyps in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, ectodermal abnormalities of alopecia, nail dystrophy, and [...]