Search

Background Previous meta-analyses have investigated the efficacy of lipid-lowering therapies for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease; however, few have focused on patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). This meta-analysis aimed to compare the benefits of intensive lipid-lowering therapy with those of background statin therapy in patients with ACS.Methods Searches were performed on PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and ClinicalTrials.gov databases for articles published until April 13, 2023. Randomized controlled trials that compared intensive lipid-lowering therapies and background statin therapies in patients with prior ACS and recorded the outcome of three-point major cardiovascular events (MACE) were included. The risk ratio (RR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was used as a measure of primary and secondary outcomes.Results Nine trials involving 38,640 patients with ACS were identified. Pooled results suggested that intensive lipid-lowering therapies are associated with a reduction in the risk of three-point MACE (RR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.83–0.94; p

Farmers’ perceptions, beliefs, adaptive strategies, and barriers regarding climate change are critical to promoting sustainable ecosystems and societal stability. This paper is based on an extensive survey of 1 500 farmers and their households in Henan Province in China during 2013–2014. Henan is the largest agricultural province in China with over 51 million farmers. The survey results showed that approximately 57% of the respondents perceived the direct impact of climate change during the past 10 years, with 70.3% believing that climate change posed a risk to their livelihood. Not surprisingly, most farmers reported that they have adopted new measures to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change. The main barriers hindering farmers’ adopting adaptation measures were lack of funds and timely information. A multinomial logit model revealed that land ownership, knowledge of crop variety and the causes of climate change, as well as the belief of climate change, were all positively related to the likelihood of employing adaptive strategies. Moreover, the percentage of households engaging in agriculture activity, and years of engaging in farming were both negatively correlated with famer's likelihood of adopting adaptation strategies. More importantly, farmers with high incomes were less likely to adopt adaptive strategies and more willing to engage in other business activities. In conclusion, it is important to communicate climate change related information and government policies in rural areas, promote farmer associations and other educational outreach efforts to assist Chinese farmers to deal with climate change.

Over the past decades, urban growth boundaries (UGBs) have been regarded as effective tools applied by planners and local governments to curb urban sprawl and guide urban smart growth. The UGBs help limit urban development to suitable areas and protect surrounding agricultural and ecological landscapes. At present, China's Town and Country Planning Act officially requires the delimitation of UGBs in a city master planning outline and in central urban area planning. However, China's practices in UGBs are usually determined by urban planners and local authorities, and lack a sound analytical basis. Consequently, Chinese UGBs are often proven to be inefficient for controlling urban expansion. In this paper, take the fast-growing Xinzhuang town of Changshu city, eastern China as an example, a new method towards establishing UGBs is proposed based on land-use change model (the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects at Small regional extent, CLUE-S). The results of our study show that the land-use change and urban growth simulation accuracy of CLUE-S model is high. The expansion of construction land and the decrease of paddy field would be the main changing trends of local land use, and a good deal of cultivated land and ecological land would be transformed into construction land in 2009-2027. There is remarkable discordance in the spatial distribution between the simulated UGBs based on the CLUE-S model and the planned UGBs based on the conventional method, where the simulated results may more closely reflect the reality of urban growth laws. Therefore, we believe that our method could be a useful planning tool for the delimitation of UGBs in Chinese cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid urbanization, land scarcity, and accompanying ecological deterioration in China have received growing attention. In this paper, two fast-growing metropolitan regions, Greater Shanghai and Greater Hangzhou, were selected as case studies to quantify the impact of land use/land cover (LULC) change on regional ecosystem services value (ESV) at the landscape scale since the late 1970s. The results show that in both regions, dramatic LULC change, especially recent land development at the urban fringes, led to a steady decline in the available area of productive agricultural land, natural land and semi-natural land. This consequently caused remarkable landscape fragmentation along the urban-rural gradient as measured by five class-level landscape metrics. It was estimated that in Greater Shanghai, regulating, supporting, provisioning, and cultural ESVs decreased by 32.05%, 17.89%, 53.72%, and 17.06%, respectively. In Greater Hangzhou, these values decreased by 27.82%, 23.86%, 28.62%, and 22.85%, respectively. In addition, the relationship is quantified between zonal buffer-based ESV and class-level landscape metrics. Further analysis shows that spatiotemporal patterns of zonal ESVs along the urban-rural gradient in these two regions exhibited unbalanced patterns of ecological services delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]