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We aimed at exploring the value of neutrophil and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) as predictive risk markers for recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) by conducting a retrospective case-control study and a systematic review and meta-analysis. This retrospective case-control study was conducted in an academic hospital from January 2012 to June 2018 and 133 cases of women with RPL and 140 control women. In parallel, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on the value of NLR and neutrophil in RPL risk assessment. Neutrophil and NLR were higher in the women with RPL than those in the controls (median [interquartile range]: 4.32 [3.31–6.18] vs. 3.76 [2.78–4.81], p = 0.001; 2.17 [1.47–3.16] vs. 1.74 [1.40–2.34], p = 0.001). After the cut-off value of the neutrophil and NLR was determined to be 6.3 × 109/L and 3.16, the prevalence of RPL became significantly increased in the high-neutrophil and the high-NLR group compared to the low-neutrophil and the low-NLR group (76.3% vs. 44.2%, p

Background: To explore the role of insulin resistance (IR) in patients with recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) and/or recurrent implantation failure (RIF) treated with assisted reproductive technology (ART).Methods: We conducted a case-control study in a tertiary hospital from 2012 to 2018, We included 212 cases of simple RPL (only involved in RPL), 123 cases of simple RIF (only involved in RIF), 67 cases involved in both conditions (complicated group). We screened 123 women as the control cohort, who underwent ART due to male infertile, with no adverse pregnant outcomes. We examined the plasm glucose and insulin level in both fasting and postprandial condition after the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) and calculated the area under the curve of glucose (AUGG) and insulin (AUCI) as well as the homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance and β-cell function (HOMA-IR and HOMA-β).Results: Both the simple RPL group and the complicated group had significantly higher fasting insulin (FINS), HOMA-IR and HOMA-β than the control group. The simple RIF group had the lowest level of FINS, HOMA-IR and HOMA-β. The incidences of IR were significantly higher in both the simple RPL group and the complicated group than the other two groups. After adjusted for age and waist-hip ratio (WHR), the simple RIF group had the highest fasting plasma glucose (FPG) [adjusted-mean (95%CI), 5.20 (5.09-5.33) mmol/L] and lower FINS [adjusted-mean (95%CI), 10.77 (9.25-12.29) mU/L] and HOMA-β [adjusted-mean (95%CI), 127.76 (83.56-171.97)]; the simple RPL group had the highest FINS [adjusted-mean (95%CI), 12.09 (11.21-12.98) mU/L] and HOMA-β [adjusted-mean (95%CI), 189.74 (164.29-215.18)] and a lower FPG [adjusted-mean (95%CI), 5.03 (4.97-5.10) mmol/L]. The FINS tended to increase with times of implantation failure among those patients with implantation failure fewer than six times. However, patients with more than six times implantation failure had extremely low FINS when compared with those with a history of five or six times (PConclusion: In patients undergoing ART, insulin resistance may be a common etiopathogenesis of RPL and RIF and insulin secretion impairment may be related to RIF.

Background: Recent evidence suggests alterations in the gut-kidney axis may drive chronic kidney disease (CKD). Results: In the present study, we observed that administration of adenine to rats induced CKD, gut microbial dysbiosis, kidney pathology, and amino acid metabolism. In this model of CKD hyperphosphatemia, lanthanum hydroxide improved kidney function in CKD rats by restoring gut microbial homeostasis, thereby increasing urine ammonium metabolism. These findings demonstrated that lanthanum hydroxide improves kidney function in a CKD model in mice by restoring homeostasis of the gut-metabolite-kidney axis, which alleviated an amino acid imbalance. Lanthanum hydroxide thus shows therapeutic potential for patients with CKD, through reshaping the composition of gut microbiota.Conclusions: Lanthanum hydroxide plays a kidney protective role through the gut-metabolite-kidney axis in a rat model of chronic kidney disease caused by adenine.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE There are only a few cognitive screening tests for the Chinese-speaking population, and so this study aimed to validate the Chinese version of Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination III (ACE-III) for detecting mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild dementia. Its diagnostic accuracy was compared with the Chinese versions of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). METHODS The 176 included individuals were divided into 3 groups: mild dementia group, MCI group, and normal control group. MMSE, MoCA, and ACE-III were administered to all participants by researchers who were blinded to the clinical grouping. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were analyzed. RESULTS ACE-III exhibited good internal consistency and convergent validity. Age and education level significantly influenced the total ACE-III scores. When screening MCI, the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was significantly larger for ACE-III than for MMSE (0.88 vs. 0.72, p

Cerebral ischemia reperfusion (I/R) injury is associated with a high incidence of neurological morbidity and mortality worldwide. Higenamine has anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidative and anti-apoptotic capacities and has been successfully used in myocardial and intestinal ischemia reperfusion. We hypothesized that higenamine might serve the same effects in cerebral I/R. In a rat model of cerebral I/R, higenamine improved functional state of nerves, significantly inhibited the I/R-induced increase in the serum level of tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-alpha) and interleukins (ILs) such as IL-1, IL-6 and IL-18, and CD14+ cells, while decreasing the axonal nerve degeneration. Together, the data demonstrate that higenamine has therapeutic effect in cerebral I/R injury.

BERT, as a pre-trained model, can not only greatly improve the performance of the task models in the field of language processing, but also greatly save computational resources and costs. At present, most of sentiment classification tasks focus on the model structures. But it is very important to explore the changes of hyper-parameters based on the task models so as to obtain a general parameters setting method for improving the accuracy of models' predictions. In this paper, we conduct two parameter fine-tuning methods: static parameter fine-tune is used to improve the performance of the task models, and then use the layer frozen strategy to further fine-tune the task models. We propose that when the static learning rate is 2e-5 and the batch size is 32, the prediction performance of the sentiment analysis model is improved. Then, under such parameter settings, we further fine-tune the sentiment analysis model by adopting the dynamic layer frozen strategy. After fine-tuning, the prediction accuracy is more accurate than that under the static optimal parameters.

The task of event factuality identification is to recognize the degree of event factuality, such as certain, possible, impossible, uncertain, or underspecified. Previous studies mostly focused on sentence-level event factuality identification and used various kinds of annotated sentence-level information. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end approach to Chinese document-level event factuality identification. Specially, we proposed a multi-task framework to join the event detection task and the event factuality identification task, which can interact the two tasks and then provide more accurate event and factuality information. The experimental results on the Chinese DLEF corpus show that our proposed model outperforms several baselines significantly.

Background There are specific physiologic features regarding the immunity and coagulation among pregnant women, which may play important roles in the illness development of COVID-19. Objective To determine the key factors associated with the deterioration of patients with COVID-19 and the differentiating clinical characteristics of pregnant women with COVID-19, to interfere with the progression of COVID-19. Study Design A retrospective study of 539 Chinese Han adult patients with COVID-19 was conducted, of which 36 cases were pregnant women. 36 pregnant women without COVID-19 were recruited as the control. The characteristics of severe and critical illness which were differentiated from mild and moderate illness in patients with COVID-19 were analyzed using a machine learning algorithm. Additionally, major differences between pregnant women with COVID-19 and age-matched non-pregnant women with severe/critical COVID-19, paired with pregnant women without COVID-19, were explored to identify specific physiological features of pregnant women with COVID-19. Results For the total patient population, the lymphocyte, CD3+, CD4+, CD8+, CD19+ and CD16+56+ cell counts were significantly lower, and white blood cell (WBC), neutrophil and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) were higher in those with severe/critical illness than those with mild/moderate illness (P

Background Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) and acupuncture are known to mitigate tissue damage. This study aimed to investigate the therapeutic effects of combined electroacupuncture (EA) stimulation and BMSC injection in a rat model of anal sphincter injury-induced faecal incontinence (FI). Methods 60 Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into five groups: sham-operated control, FI, FI+EA, FI+BMSC, and FI+BMSC+EA. The anorectal tissues were collected on days 1, 3, 7 and 14. Repair of the injured anal sphincter was compared using haematoxylin and eosin (HE) and immunocytochemiscal analyses with sarcomeric α actinin. The expression of stromal cell derived factor-1 (SDF-1) and monocyte chemoattractant protein-3 (MCP-3) was detected by quantitative reverse transcription PCR to evaluate the effects of EA on the homing of BMSCs. Results The therapeutic effect of combined EA+BMSCs on damaged tissue was the strongest among all the groups as indicated by HE and immunohistochemical staining. The expression of SDF-1 and MCP-3 was significantly increased by combined EA and BMSC treatment when compared with the other groups (P=0.01 to PConclusion The combination of EA and BMSC transplantation effectively repaired the impaired anal sphincters. The underlying mechanism might be associated with apparent promotive effects of EA on the homing of BMSCs. Our study provides a theoretical basis for the development of a non-surgical treatment method for FI secondary to muscle impairment.

The goal of this study was to assess the antitumor efficacy and safety of lobaplatin-based regimens as the second line of treatment in patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) resistant to anthracyclines and taxanes, compared with that of cisplatin-based regimens. During August 2012 to April 2015, 87 patients who received lobaplatin-based regimens or cisplatin-based regimens were included. Medical records of the patients noted that lobaplatin (30 mg/m2) or cisplatin (25 mg/m2), combined with another chemotherapeutic agent such as Gemcitabine (1000 mg/m2) or Vinorelbine (25 mg/m2), was intravenously given to the patients on a basis of twenty-one days as one treatment cycle. All the patients were followed until August 2017. The endpoint of this study was progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and estimated objective response rate (RR). Safety and drug tolerability data were also obtained. Lobaplatin-based regimens prolonged PFS compared to cisplatin-based regimens (median 13.2 vs 4.7 months, hazard ratio = 0.37, 95% confidence intervals: 0.21–0.67, P = .0007), while OS was not significantly different between the two groups (hazard ratio = 0.72, 95% confidence intervals: 0.40–1.30, P = .2767), as was objective RR (37.8% vs 33.4%, x2 = 0.19, P = .6653). Nausea/vomiting and renal injury were more frequent with cisplatin-based regimens. Our results show that lobaplatin-based regimens are superior to cisplatin in terms of efficacy and are better tolerated. Keywords: Lobaplatin, Metastatic, Breast cancer, Resistant, Cisplatin

There are limited cognitive screening tests for the Chinese-speaking population. This study aimed to validate the Chinese version of the Mini-Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (M-ACE) for detecting mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild dementia. Its diagnostic accuracy was compared with that of Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). The study also evaluated the influential factors of M-ACE scores and its convergent validity against Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR) and MMSE.One hundred sixty-nine participants were classified into 3 groups: mild dementia, MCI, and healthy control. Mini-Mental State Examination and M-ACE were administered by researchers who were blinded to the clinical grouping. Receiver operating characteristic curves were graphed to test the diagnostic accuracy.Mini-Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination scores had good convergent validity against CDR and MMSE. Years of education ( r = 0.4, P.001) yielded significant impacts on M-ACE scores. The optimal cutoff score of M-ACE to detect MCI was 25/26 (sensitivity = 0.88; specificity = 0.72) with an area under curve (AUC) significantly higher than MMSE (0.86 vs 0.72). The optimal cutoff score of M-ACE to screen mild dementia (21/22) yielded satisfactory sensitivity (0.96) and specificity (0.87) with a comparable AUC to MMSE (0.96 vs 0.94).Mini-Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination was a brief and reliable tool to detect MCI and mild dementia in the Chinese-speaking population significantly superior to MMSE when detecting MCI.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is an extremely serious type of physical trauma observed in clinics. Neuropathic pain resulting from SCI has a lasting and significant impact on most aspects of daily life. Thus, a better understanding of the molecular pathways responsible for the cause of neuropathic pain observed in SCI is important to develop effective therapeutic agents and treatment strategies. Mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) is a serine/threonine protein kinase that is well known for its critical roles in regulating protein synthesis and growth. Furthermore, compelling evidence supports the notion that widespread dysregulation of mTOR and its downstream pathways are involved in neuropathic pain. Thus, in this study we specifically examined the underlying mechanisms by which mTOR and its signaling pathways are involved in SCI-evoked neuropathic pain in a rat model. Overall, we demonstrated that SCI increased the protein expression of p-mTOR, and mTORmediated- phosphorylation of 4E–binding protein 4 (4E-BP1) and p70 ribosomal S6 protein kinase 1 (S6K1) in the superficial dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Also, we showed that blocking spinal mTOR by intrathecal injection of rapamycin significantly inhibited pain responses induced by mechanical and thermal stimulation. In addition, blocking spinal phosphatidylinositide 3-kinase (p-PI3K) pathway significantly attenuated activities of p-mTOR pathways as well as mechanical and thermal hyperalgesia in SCI rats. Moreover, blocking mTOR and PI3K decreased the enhanced levels of substance P and calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) in the dorsal horn of SCI rats. We revealed specific signaling pathways leading to SCI-evoked neuropathic pain, including the activation of PI3K, mTOR and its downstream signaling pathways. Targeting one or more of these signaling molecules may present new opportunities for treatment and management of neuropathic pain often observed in patients with SCI.

Solar steam generation technology can utilize abundant and renewable solar energy for many applications. In this work, we proposed a low-cost high-efficiency solar steam generator by using wick materials with wrapped graphene nanoparticles, and the energy efficiency can reaches up to 80%. Instead of traditional smearing method, the chemical wrapping method was used for better coating the graphene nanoparticles on the wick materials. Through the SEM morphological results, the graphene nanoparticles are shown to be evenly wrapped across the fibres of the wick material, which have better dispersity and stability. The evaporation rate, instantaneous energy efficiency and the solar absorptivity of three wick materials with/without nanoparticles under different conditions were compared and analyzed. Among the three different wick materials, the fine fluffy cloth can provide more three-dimensional contact area for wrapping graphene nanoparticles and thus contribute to better evaporation. Additionally, the influence of two different reduction methods and different concentrations of graphene oxide solution on the energy efficiency was also analyzed. Our work offers a simple and effective way of using nanotechnology in practical application for better solar-to-heat conversion.

Ethnopharmacological relevance Salvianolic acid (SAL) and tanshinone (TAN) are major hydrophilic and lipophilic compounds, respectively, from one herbal medicine, Danshen, which has been widely and successfully used for treating cardiovascular diseases in Asian countries. Because few studies have reported different molecular mechanisms between the different compounds in same herb, we investigate if separate molecular pathways are involved in cardioprotective effect by different active components of Danshen. Materials and methods We used an acute myocardial infarction (MI) model to compare the cardioprotective effects of SAL and TAN in rats. Both infarct size and echocardiographic response were evaluated at 3, 7, 14 and 28 days after surgery. Genes involved in ischemic injury and in responses to SAL or TAN treatment in ischemic hearts were identified by microarray analysis and verified by quantitative real-time RT-PCR. Results Results showed that both SAL and TAN delay the development of ischemia by decreasing infarct size and improving systolic function post MI. Gene ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis indicated different kinetics and gene expression profiles by SAL and TAN. SAL acts in a later period after ischemia, and its effect is probably mediated by downregulation of genes involved in oxidative stress, certain G-protein coupled receptor activities and apoptosis. On the other hand, TAN acts relatively early after ischemic injury and its effect is at least in part mediated by inhibition of intracellular calcium, cell adhesion and alternative complement pathway. Strikingly, we found that TAN, a recently identified member of selective estrogen receptor modifier (SERM), indeed regulates genes known to be involved in estrogen metabolism post MI. Conclusions Although both SAL and TAN contribute to the cardioprotective effect of Danshen, there are significant mechanistic and temporal differences between the two: TAN acts at an early stage after ischemic injury mainly by inhibition of intracellular calcium and cell adhesion pathways whereas SAL acts mainly by down-regulating apoptosis.

In the condition of certain electromagnetic levitation coi l and spherical sample, according to the expressions of levitation force and absorbed power in magnetic field, the re lationship between levitation force, absorbed power and high frequency power supply frequency is established in this paper. In addition, the effect of the power supply frequency on the levitation force of the coil and the absorbed power of the sample is analyzed, and the general rules of frequency parameter selection are confirmed. Finally, a guiding role in the frequ ency selection of high frequency power supply in electromagnetic levitation melting is played.

In this paper, we propose a personnel positioning method based on self-organizing network and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The RFID configuration collects message to establish the relationship between tourists’ information and corresponding tag. The reader deployed as monitoring nodes along the tour road in the Mt. Everest scenic detect active tag ID message of the tourists automatically while one passes within radius 100 m, and transfer ID message to data server via data radio and 3G networks. Once emergency occurs, the rescuers will trace the position of the trapped people according to detected information. The result shows that the method provides an effective way in the tourist management and emergency rescue in the high altitude region.

A new scheme for recognition of working condition is proposed based on fuzzy reasoning and soft sensor in the foundation of analyzing the rotary kiln hood characteristics. In this scheme, the key parameters which can not be measured on-line are identified current conditions by a double RBF neural network based on soft-sensor identification. Fuzzy recognition is used to recognize the change tendency and real-time state of pivotal craft parameters. The system outputs the species of current working condition after fuzzy reasoning, practice in factory shows the correctness and practicability of the scheme.