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Introduction Previous studies have suggested that adolescents may smoke cigarettes to control weight, but relevant research is scarce in Chinese youth. This study was conducted to examine the associations of weight control related behaviors with cigarette smoking in Chinese students. Methods This was a secondary analysis of data for 24835 middle and high school students drawn from the 2022 Zhejiang Youth Risk Behavior Survey of China which collected self-reported information of cigarette smoking, weight control strategies and other health-related behaviors. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to estimate the adjusted odds ratios (AORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the study associations. Results Overall, there were 998 (4.02%) current cigarette smokers in this wave of the Zhejiang YRBS (2022). Neither trying to control weight nor healthy weight control behavior of exercising was associated with current cigarette smoking (AOR=1.15; 95% CI: 0.97–1.37 and AOR=1.01; 95% CI: 0.85–1.20, respectively). Meanwhile, unhealthy weight control behaviors of taking laxatives (AOR=1.52; 95% CI: 1.03–2.26), taking diet pills (AOR=1.82; 95% CI: 1.26–2.62), dieting (AOR=1.24; 95% CI: 1.04–1.49), and fasting (AOR=1.81; 95% CI: 1.40–2.34) were significantly associated with increased odds of current cigarette smoking. Conclusions Screening and developing interventions for unhealthy weight control behaviors should be considered as part of smoking prevention programs among adolescents.

Abstract To assess the relationship of sodium, potassium and the ratio of sodium to potassium (Na/K) with albuminuria, a cross-sectional study was carried out in China in 2017. Sodium, potassium and albumin excretions were examined in a 24-h (h) urine sample collected from 1486 participants. Microalbuminuria was defined as 24-h urinary albumin excretion between 30 and 300 mg/24 h. The participants had an average age of 46.2 ± 14.1 years old, and 48.9% were men. The proportion of patients with microalbuminuria was 9.0%. As illustrated by the adjusted generalized linear mixed model, sodium concentration increased significantly with the increase in 24-h urinary albumin (β = 1.16, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.38–1.93; P = 0.003). Multivariable-adjusted logistic regression analyses demonstrated that the odds ratio (OR) of microalbuminuria increased with the quartiles of sodium [OR = 2.20, 95% CI 1.26–3.84 (the maximum quartile vs. the minimum quartile), P for trend = 0.006]. Potassium and the Na/K ratio did not have any association with outcome indicators. A high amount of sodium intake was potentially correlated with early renal function impairment.

Abstract To understand the association between sodium and potassium consumption levels, hypertension and knowledge, attitudes and behaviors (KAB) toward salt and the commitment to effective sodium reduction and potassium supplementation to achieve the purpose of suppressing hypertension. A stratified multistage random sampling method was used to obtain a representative provincial sample of 7512 residents aged 18–69 years through a cross-sectional survey by the Salt Reduction and Hypertension Prevention Project (SRHPP) in Zhejiang Province of China in 2017–2018. A screening including demographic, anthropometric, salt-related KAB and physical measurements was implemented, and 24-h urine of approximately 1/5 of the participants was collected and tested. The mean age was 44.8 years, 50.1% were women, 44.0% lived in urban areas, and hypertension or prehypertension accounted for approximately 35.0%. The mean 24-h urinary sodium and potassium excretion were 3848.5 (1661.1) mg/d and 1491.1 (710.9) mg/d, respectively. KAB in urban areas was generally more favorable than in rural areas, women were better than men, and the optimal blood pressure group was better than the other two groups (P

In recent years, significant progress has been made in image super-resolution (SR) methods based on convolutional neural networks. However, most of them do not fully utilize multi-scale feature correspondence in the image SR process, resulting in blurred and artifact detail restoration, especially for SR tasks with larger scaling factors (i.e. $\times 4$ and $\times 8$ ). A multi-scale feature-enhanced SR network (MFENet) is proposed to solve the problems mentioned above. Specifically, the super-resolution method is enhanced by utilizing multi-scale feature correspondence in two ways. On the one hand, we propose an effective multi-scale non-local attention module and it can fully exploit a large number of low-level features at different scales of a single low-resolution (LR) feature map by exhaustively evaluating the correlations in local feature, in-scale non-local feature, and cross-scale non-local feature. On the other hand, the mapping from high-resolution (HR) to LR images is explored by a feedback branch we introduced, that provides an additional constraint for images reconstruction. It can penalize incorrect SR predictions to achieve better SR performance. Experimental results on 5 benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both subjective visual quality and objective quantitative metrics.

Abstract Spot urine (SU) collection is a convenient method commonly used for sodium estimation, but its validity in predicting 24-h urinary sodium (24-hUNa) excretion has not been thoroughly evaluated among the general population. The aim of this study was to comprehensively assess the validity of eight existing methods in predicting 24-hUNa excretion by using SU samples among Chinese adults. We analyzed 1424 representative individuals aged 18 to 69 years. We compared the measured and estimated measurements of 24-hUNa at the population level by examining bias, the correlation, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and Bland–Altman plots and analyzed the relative and absolute differences and misclassification at the individual level. The bias for all methods was significant (all p 40% for the eight methods were all over one-third, the proportions of absolute differences > 51.3 mmol/24 h (3 g/day NaCl) were all over 40%, and the misclassification rates (7, 10, and 13 g/day NaCl as cutoff points) were all over 65%. Caution remains due to poor validity between estimated and actual measurements when using the eight formulas to obtain a plausible estimation for surveillance of the Chinese population sodium excretion, and the results do not support the application of SU to estimate sodium intake at the individual level due to its poor performance with respect to classification.

Abstract The direction and magnitude of the association between sodium and potassium excretion and blood pressure (BP) may differ depending on the characteristics of the study participant or the intake assessment method. Our objective was to assess the relationship between BP, hypertension and 24-h urinary sodium and potassium excretion among Chinese adults. A total of 1424 provincially representative Chinese residents aged 18 to 69 years participated in a cross-sectional survey in 2017 that included demographic data, physical measurements and 24-h urine collection. In this study, the average 24-h urinary sodium and potassium excretion and sodium-to-potassium ratio were 3811.4 mg/day, 1449.3 mg/day, and 4.9, respectively. After multivariable adjustment, each 1000 mg difference in 24-h urinary sodium excretion was significantly associated with systolic BP (0.64 mm Hg; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.05–1.24) and diastolic BP (0.45 mm Hg; 95% CI 0.08–0.81), and each 1000 mg difference in 24-h urinary potassium excretion was inversely associated with systolic BP (− 3.07 mm Hg; 95% CI − 4.57 to − 1.57) and diastolic BP (− 0.94 mm Hg; 95% CI − 1.87 to − 0.02). The sodium-to-potassium ratio was significantly associated with systolic BP (0.78 mm Hg; 95% CI 0.42–1.13) and diastolic BP (0.31 mm Hg; 95% CI 0.10–0.53) per 1-unit increase. These associations were mainly driven by the hypertensive group. Those with a sodium intake above about 4900 mg/24 h or with a potassium intake below about 1000 mg/24 h had a higher risk of hypertension. At higher but not lower levels of 24-h urinary sodium excretion, potassium can better blunt the sodium-BP relationship. The adjusted odds ratios (ORs) of hypertension in the highest quartile compared with the lowest quartile of excretion were 0.54 (95% CI 0.35–0.84) for potassium and 1.71 (95% CI 1.16–2.51) for the sodium-to-potassium ratio, while the corresponding OR for sodium was not significant (OR, 1.28; 95% CI 0.83–1.98). Our results showed that the sodium intake was significantly associated with BP among hypertensive patients and the inverse association between potassium intake and BP was stronger and involved a larger fraction of the population, especially those with a potassium intake below 1000 mg/24 h should probably increase their potassium intake.

Background: Few epidemiological studies have investigated associations of exposure to multiple metals with thyroid hormone homeostasis, especially for the pregnant women. Methods: Among all the 1644 participants enrolled in Hangzhou Birth Cohort Study (HBCS) at baseline, a total of 915 pregnant women with complete data of interest were analyzed. Eleven metals were measured in blood samples collected around 25 weeks gestation. Serum levels of thyroid hormones including free triiodothyronine (FT3), total triiodothyronine (TT3), free thyroxine (FT4), total thyroxine (TT4) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) were abstracted from the medical records. Relationships between tertiles of metal levels (setting the lowest tertile as the reference) and percent changes in thyroid hormones were estimated by multivariable adjusted linear regression models. Results: Five metals [arsenic (As), selenium (Se), manganese (Mn), nickel (Ni), antimony (Sb)] were significantly linked to decreased levels of one or more thyroid hormones based on trend tests in the single-metal models. Percent changes [95% confidence intervals (CIs)] in thyroid hormones for the third tertiles of metals remained significant between FT3 and As [−3.53% (−5.48%, −1.54%)]; and between TT3 and As [−4.19% (−7.00%, −1.31%)]; and between FT4 and Mn [−2.05% (−3.49%, −0.58%)], Sb [−1.99% (−3.44%, −0.52%)] in the multiple-metal models. Conclusions: Thyroid hormone concentrations were reversely related to the levels of blood metals of As, Mn and Sb among Chinese pregnant women. Additional prospective studies are warranted to confirm the causality.Paper capsule: Exposure to multiple metals was reversely associated with one or more thyroid hormones in the Chinese pregnant women. Keywords: Metals, Thyroid hormones, Pregnant women, Cross-sectional study

As the number of civil aerial vehicles increase explosively, spectrum scarcity and security become an increasingly challenge in both the airspace and terrestrial space. To address this difficulty, this paper presents an unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted (UAV-assisted) spectrum mapping system and a spectrum data reconstruction algorithm driven by spectrum data and channel model are proposed. The reconstruction algorithm, which includes a model-driven spectrum data inference method and a spectrum data completion method with uniformity decision mechanism, can reconstruct limited and incomplete spectrum data to a three-dimensional (3D) spectrum map. As a result, spectrum scarcity and security can be achieved. Spectrum mapping is a symmetry-based digital twin technology. By employing an uniformity decision mechanism, the proposed completion method can effectively interpolate spatial data even when the collected data are unevenly distributed. The effectiveness of the proposed mapping scheme is evaluated by comparing its results with the ray-tracing simulated data of the campus scenario. Simulation results show that the proposed reconstruction algorithm outperforms the classical inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation method and the tensor completion method by about 12.5% and 92.3%, respectively, in terms of reconstruction accuracy when the collected spectrum data are regularly missing, unevenly distributed and limited.

In the LIC algorithm process, symmetrical streamline tracing is used to symmetrically convolve the original values of all the primitive values that pass by to obtain the resulting texture. In this process, streamline tracking and convolution consume a lot of computing resources. To generate more expressive textures for vector fields with less time consumption, a novel method named random increment streamline (RIS) is put forward, which can generate streamline textures without convolution calculations. First, the mesh unit filling preprocessing (MUFP) method is presented to transform an undressed irregular grid into a special kind of regular grid named a “texture pixel”, and the point location and interpolation processes of all sampling points in the texture pixels are calculated before streamline tracking. Second, the random increment streamline method is used to generate line integral convolution style textures without any convolution calculations, thus greatly reducing the algorithm’s time consumption. Third, the vector directions at each point in the static vector field are clearly expressed using the periodic cyclic animation method. Finally, several simplifications of the RIS algorithm are discussed, which help to achieve a better visual effect with faster speed. The programming results show that the method is faster and more applicable than the traditional LIC method and provides clearer expression of the vector field.

BackgroundIn recent decades, hypertension has become a popular public health problem in China. In 2017, a cross-sectional survey about hypertension and sodium intake measured by 24-hour (24-h) urine was launched in Zhejiang Province, to provide the basis of the Chinese population to develop a salt reduction intervention and prevention of hypertension strategy.MethodsCross-sectional data were obtained from 7512 participants aged 18 to 69 years in Zhejiang Province of China by complex, multistage sampling methods. The survey included face-to-face questionnaires and physical examination among all participants. Blood pressures and the use of anti-hypertension medications were used to determine hypertension. One thousand five hundred participants of them were asked to collect 24-h urine to measure sodium and potassium levels to assess intake. All rates and means were weighted by sampling weight and population structure of the province.ResultsThe weighted means of systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were 127.78 mm Hg (95% confidence interval [CI], 127.21-128.36) and 79.40 mm Hg (95%CI, 79.04-79.76). The weighted hypertension prevalence was 30.41% (95%CI, 28.91-31.91). Among those classified as having hypertension, 43.55% (95%CI, 40.77-46.34) were aware of the fact that they were suffering from hypertension, 32.05% (95%CI, 29.49-34.61) of them reported taking anti-hypertension medications, only 14.48% (95%CI, 12.54-16.42) had their blood pressure controlled. The weighted means of 24-h urinary sodium was 165.52 mmol (standard deviation [SD], 2.92), representing that the mean intake of sodium chloride was 9.68g (SD, 0.17) through conversion.ConclusionThese cross-sectional survey results show that hypertension and excessive sodium intake in adults are prevalent in Zhejiang Province, China. Salt reduction and prevention of hypertension is still an urgent public health work.

Background: Currently, the studies on the relationship between type 2 diabetes and platelets indicators were carried out on a selective small sample population generally. Large sample studies in this area are rare, especially in Chinese population. In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between type 2 diabetes and the mean platelet volume (MPV), platelet count (PLT) and platelet distribution width (PDW). Methods: This is a cross-sectional analysis of the routine health examination data from 20128 participants with complete baseline data in Yinzhou District 2013. The detection of indicators in this study was completed by automatic hematology analyzer. Results: The PDW and PLT were not significantly different between diabetic group and non-diabetic group, (16.00% vs. 16.00%, P=0.88, and 194*109/L vs. 196*109/L, P=0.05 respectively). The MPV was significantly higher in diabetic group (9.3fl vs. 9.2fl, P

Objective: This study describes the association between taste preference for salt and actual salt intake, thus guiding and refining personal and public health campaigns designed to lower salt intake in China. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of 1489 residents aged 18 to 69 years was conducted in 2017 in China. A multistage random sampling strategy was used, and a combination of questionnaires and physical and laboratory measurements were conducted to collect baseline characteristics and knowledge, attitudes, and behavior (KAB) related to salt. A 24 h urine collection was obtained for sodium and potassium excretion analysis. Participants were divided into two groups, light taste preference and salty taste preference, according to their answer to the question “Compared to others, how do you think your taste preference is for salt?”. Results: The mean age of the 1489 participants was 46.26 years, 48.9% were males, over 1/3 (35.7%) were identified as hypertensive, and 317 (21.3%) self-reported a salty taste preference. The mean of 24 h urinary sodium excretion was 167.32 mmol/24 h, corresponding to 9.79 g salt/d intake, and the sodium-to-potassium ratio (Na/K) was 4.90. The 24 h urinary sodium excretion of salty taste preference (177.06 mmol/24 h) was significantly higher than that of light taste preference (164.69 mmol/24 h). The multiple logistic regression analysis showed that the salty taste preference group had significantly higher 24 h urinary sodium (ORa(95%CI) = 1.004(1.002–1.006)), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), proportion of greasy food preference, and drinking levels, but lower potassium excretion, response levels to most KAB questions, and regular physical activity compared to the light taste preference group. Conclusion: Self-reported taste preference for salt predicted actual salt intake, which was verified by 24 h urinary sodium monitoring. Taste preference for salt could be used as a proxy for intake in terms of targeted salt intake, nutrition, and health education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study Question: Is prenatal vanadium exposure associated with adverse birth outcomes?Summary Answer: The odds of low birthweight (LBW) are increased 2.23-fold in mothers with a urinary vanadium of ≥2.91 μg/g creatinine compared with that in mothers with a urinary vanadium of ≤1.42 μg/g creatinine.What Is Known Already: Human exposure to vanadium occurs through intake of food, water and polluted air. Vanadium has been suggested to have fetotoxicity and developmental toxicity in animal studies, and epidemiological studies have reported an association between a decrease in birthweight and vanadium exposure estimated from particulate matter.Study Design, Size, Duration: A nested case-control study involving 816 study participants (204 LBW cases and 612 matched controls) was conducted with data from the prospective Healthy Baby Cohort between 2012 and 2014 in the province of Hubei, China.Participants/materials, Setting, Methods: Vanadium concentrations in 816 maternal urine samples collected before delivery [the median gestational age was 39 weeks (range 27-42 weeks)] were measured by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Information on the infants' birth outcomes was obtained from medical records. Conditional logistic regression was used to calculate the odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).Main Results and the Role Of Chance: The median urinary vanadium concentration of the cases was much higher than that of the controls (3.04 μg/g creatinine versus 1.93 μg/g creatinine). The results revealed a significant positive trend between the odds of LBW and level of maternal urinary vanadium [relative to the lowest tertile; adjusted OR = 1.69 (95% CI: 0.92, 3.10) for the medium tertile; adjusted OR = 2.23 (95% CI: 1.23, 4.05) for the highest tertile; P-trend = 0.02]. Additionally, the association was not modified by maternal age (P for heterogeneity = 0.70) or infant gender (P for heterogeneity = 0.21).Limitations, Reasons For Caution: The maternal urine sample was collected before labor, and the maternal urinary vanadium levels measured at one point in time may not accurately reflect the vanadium burden during the entire pregnancy.Wider Implications Of the Findings: The results of this study can enrich the biological monitoring data on urinary vanadium in pregnant women; and may be evidence that vanadium may affect fetal development.Study Funding/competing Interests: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21437002, 81372959 and 81402649), the R&D Special Fund for Public Welfare Industry (Environment) (201309048) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, HUST (2016YXZD043). The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]