Objectives
This study investigated the association between the decline of the decayed, missing, and filled teeth (DMFT) index and several family‐level and individual‐level factors among 6‐ to ...18‐year‐old Taiwanese children from 2012 to 2020.
Methods
This study used data from the 2012 and 2020 Taiwan National Oral Health Survey of Children and Adolescents. Both surveys used similar methods and were performed in the same study age group. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data on parents' sociodemographic background; the number of children in the family; oral health‐related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours; and children's dietary habits. Dental caries was recorded through standardized oral examinations. Multivariable multilevel zero‐inflated negative binomial regression models were used to determine the association between family‐level and individual‐level factors and the DMFT index from 2012 to 2020.
Results
A total of 10 217 and 10 436 schoolchildren completed the oral examinations and questionnaires in the 2012 and 2020 surveys, respectively. The adjusted mean DMFT index of 12‐year‐old Taiwanese schoolchildren in 2020 was 2.01, denoting a significant decline from 2.50 in 2012 (adjusted mean ratio = 0.20, 95% confidence interval CI = 0.17, 0.23, p < .0001). Furthermore, children who often consumed sugar‐rich drinks had a significantly higher risk (mean ratio = 1.05, 95% CI = 1.01, 1.10) of having DMFT than those who seldom consumed such drinks (p = .017).
Conclusions
In the period of 2012–2020, the DMFT index among Taiwanese children significantly declined. Children who often consumed sugar‐rich drinks had a higher DMFT index than those who seldom consumed such drinks. Our findings are valuable to paediatricians, dentists, nutritionists, and public health policymakers.
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BFBNIB, CMK, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Fluorescent carbon nanodots (C-dots; 4.3 ± 0.8 nm) from fresh tender ginger juice provide high suppression of the growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma cells (HepG2), with low toxicity to normal ...mammary epithelial cells (MCF-10A) and normal liver cells (FL83B). The inhibition is selective to HepG2 over other tested cancer cells, including human lung cancer cell line (A549), human breast cancer cell line (MDA-MB-231), and human cervical cancer cell line (HeLa). Western blot results reveal that the C-dots up-regulate the expression of p53 protein only in the HepG2 cell line. The 50% inhibiting concentration (IC
) value of the C-dots on HepG2 cells is 0.35 mg mL
. Image cytometry results show significant uptake of C-dots by HepG2 cells that induce intracellular production of reactive oxygen species (ROS, 18.2-fold increased), while other cells remain almost the same in ROS levels after treatment with C-dots (1.11 mg mL
). The C-dots trigger the pro-apoptotic factor to promote HepG2 cell apoptosis. The C-dots effectively inhibit the growth of tumors in nude mice (104 ± 14 vs. 3.7 ± 0.2 mg with and without treatment within 14 days).
Rotational needle insertion is commonly used in needle biopsy to improve cutting performance. The application of rotational motion for needle insertion has been shown to efficiently reduce the ...cutting force. However, studies have found that needle rotation can increase tissue damage due to the tissue winding effect. The bidirectional rotation of a needle during insertion can be a solution to avoid tissue winding while maintaining a low cutting force. In this study, needle insertion with bidirectional rotation was investigated by conducting mechanical and optical experiments. First, needle insertion tests were performed on gelatin-based tissue phantom samples to understand the effect of bidirectional needle rotation on the cutting force. Subsequently, the effective strain, which is an indicator of tissue damage, was observed at the cross-sections of samples in the axial and radial directions of the needle by using the digital image correlation (DIC) technology. The primary findings of this study are as follows: (1) higher needle insertion speeds result in higher cutting forces and effective strains that occur at the axial cross-section, (2) increase in the needle rotation reduces the cutting force and effective strain at the axial cross-section but increases the effective strain at the radial cross-section, (3) application of bidirectional rotation decreases the mean effective strain at the radial cross-section by 10%-25% while maintaining a low cutting force. In clinical applications, bidirectional rotation can be a useful strategy to simultaneously reduce the cutting force and tissue damage, which leads to better cutting performance and lower risks of bleeding and hematoma.
The effect of heteroalkyl (‐XR, X = Se, S, O) substitution on a series of molecular semiconductors having a 3,3′‐diheteroalkyl‐2,2′‐bithiophene (XBT) central core is studied. Thus, the ...selenotetradecyl (‐SeC14H29) SeBT core is investigated by end‐functionalization with two dithienothiophene (DTT), thienothiophene (TT), and thiophene (T) units to give SeBTs 1–3, respectively, for molecular π‐conjugation effect examination. Furthermore, the selenodecyl (‐SeC10H21) and selenohexyl (‐SeC6H13) SeBT cores end‐capped with DTTs to give SeBTs 1B and 1C, respectively, are synthesized for understanding ‐SeR length effects. To address systematically the impact of the chalcogen heteroatom, the newly developed selenoalkyl SeBTs are compared with the previously reported thiotetradecyl (‐SC14H29) DDTT‐SBT (4) and the new tetradecyloxy (‐OC14H29) DDTT‐OBT (5). When fabricating organic field effect transistors by the solution‐shearing method, the devices based on the tetradecylated DDTT‐SeBT (1) exhibit the highest mobility up to 4.01 cm2 V−1 s−1, which is larger than those of the other SeBT compounds and both DDTT‐SBT (4) (1.70 cm2 V−1 s−1) and DDTT‐OBT (5) (9.32 × 10−4 cm2 V−1 s−1). These results are rationalized by a combination of crystallographic, morphological, and microstructural analysis.
The effect of heteroalkyl (‐XR, X = O, S, Se) substitution on a series of small molecule semiconductors having a 3,3′‐diheteroalkyl‐2,2′‐bithiophene central cores are studied. Solution‐processed DDTT‐SeBT (1) organic field effect transistors exhibit high hole mobility of 4.01 cm2 V−1 s−1, far surpassing those of the corresponding SBT and OBT compounds.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying leptin‐mediated brain protection against cerebral ischemia were investigated at the blood–brain barrier (BBB) and neutrophil level. Through the ...ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) animal model, we found that leptin expression level was significantly decreased in ischemic hemisphere. Brain injection with leptin (15 μg/kg, intracisternally) could block the I/R‐increased BBB permeability, activation of matrix metallopeptidase 9 (MMP‐9) and brain infiltration of blood–borne neutrophils to reduce the infarct volume of ischemic brain. The brain expression level of tight junction protein ZO‐1 as well as number and motility of neutrophils in blood was all increased by the same injection, indicating BBB stability (rather than reduction in neutrophils) played a major role in the leptin‐inhibited brain infiltration of neutrophils. Leptin‐mediated protection of BBB was further confirmed in vitro, through a BBB cellular model under the in vitro ischemic condition (G/R: glucose–oxygen–serum deprivation followed by GOS restoration). The results showed that leptin again could block the G/R‐increased neutrophil adherence to EC layer as well as BBB permeability, likely by stimulating the endothelial expression of ZO‐1 and VE‐Cadherin. The study has demonstrated that leptin could protect ischemic brain via multiple ways (other than neuronal protection), by inhibiting the BBB permeability, brain infiltration of the blood‐borne neutrophils and neutrophil adherence to vascular ECs. The role of leptin in vascular biology of stroke could further support its therapeutic potential in other neurodegenerative diseases, associated with BBB disorder.
Leptin reveals a central protective role in ischemic brain. Leptin blocks the infiltration of blood‐borne neutrophils to ischemic brain. Leptin blocks the neutrophil adherence to vascular ECs. Leptin blocks the ischemia/reperfusion‐induced BBB leakage in ischemic brain.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
As advance of economy and industry, the impact of air pollution has gradually gained attention. In order to predict air quality, there were many studies that exploited various machine learning ...techniques to build predictive model for pollutant concentration or air quality prediction. However, enhancing the prediction performance always is the common problem of existing studies. Traditional templates based on machine learning and deep learning methods, such as GBTR (gradient boosted tree regression), SVR (support vector machine-based regression), and LSTM (long short-term memory), are most promising approaches to address these problems. Some previous researches showed that ensemble learning technology can improve predictive performance of other domains. In order to improve the accuracy of forecasting, in this paper, we propose a hybrid model and framework to improve the forecasting accuracy of air pollution. We not only exploit stacking-based ensemble learning scheme with Pearson correlation coefficient to calculate the correlation between different machine learning models to integrate various forecasting models together, but also construct a framework based on Spark+Hadoop machine learning and TensorFlow deep learning framework to physically integrate these models to demonstrate the next 1 to 8 h’ air pollution forecasting. We also conduct experiments and compare the result with GBTR, SVR, LSTM, and LSTM2 (version 2) models to demonstrate the proposed hybrid model’s predictive performance. The experimental results show that the hybrid model is superior to the existing models used for predicting air pollution.
Drug–target interactions (DTIs) are considered a crucial component of drug design and drug discovery. To date, many computational methods were developed for drug–target interactions, but they are ...insufficiently informative for accurately predicting DTIs due to the lack of experimentally verified negative datasets, inaccurate molecular feature representation, and ineffective DTI classifiers. Therefore, we address the limitations of randomly selecting negative DTI data from unknown drug–target pairs by establishing two experimentally validated datasets and propose a capsule network-based framework called CapBM-DTI to capture hierarchical relationships of drugs and targets, which adopts pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) for contextual sequence feature extraction from target proteins through transfer learning and the message-passing neural network (MPNN) for the 2-D graph feature extraction of compounds to accurately and robustly identify drug–target interactions. We compared the performance of CapBM-DTI with state-of-the-art methods using four experimentally validated DTI datasets of different sizes, including human (Homo sapiens) and worm (Caenorhabditis elegans) species datasets, as well as three subsets (new compounds, new proteins, and new pairs). Our results demonstrate that the proposed model achieved robust performance and powerful generalization ability in all experiments. The case study on treating COVID-19 demonstrates the applicability of the model in virtual screening.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Asymmetrical cell division (ACD) maintains the proper number of stem cells to ensure self-renewal. In cancer cells, the deregulation of ACD disrupts the homeostasis of the stem cell pool and promotes ...tumour growth. However, this mechanism is unclear. Here, we show a reduction of ACD in spheroid-derived colorectal cancer stem cells (CRCSCs) compared with differentiated cancer cells. The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) inducer Snail is responsible for the ACD-to-symmetrical cell division (SCD) switch in CRCSCs. Mechanistically, Snail induces the expression of microRNA-146a (miR-146a) through the β-catenin-TCF4 complex. miR-146a targets Numb to stabilize β-catenin, which forms a feedback circuit to maintain Wnt activity and directs SCD. Interference with the Snail-miR-146a–β-catenin loop by inhibiting the MEK or Wnt activity reduces the symmetrical division of CRCSCs and attenuates tumorigenicity. In colorectal cancer patients, the Snail(High)Numb(Low) profile is correlated with cetuximab resistance and a poorer prognosis. This study elucidates a unique mechanism of EMT-induced CRCSC expansion.
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DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Open-air burning of rice straw (RS) on sites after harvesting produces tremendous amounts of air pollutants in Southeast Asia. Additionally, cooking oil smoke (COS) from high-temperature frying is ...classified as “Probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. To mitigate the air pollution from COS, RS was recycled to prepare activated carbon (AC), which was used as a bed filter (BF) packing material for COS removal, and to our best knowledge, this study is the first one. Besides, a negative air ionizer (NAI) was firstly utilized to enhance the removal efficiency (η) of COS particles. Other biomass waste, including tea leaves (TL), wood dust (WD), rice hulls (RH), and coffee grounds (CG), were also used as packing materials for comparison. Specific surface area and pore volume of the packing materials were determined by nitrogen adsorption/desorption isothermal. Laser airborne particle counters and volatile organic compound (VOC) monitors (photoionization detector) were utilized for real-time recording of the particle and VOC concentration of COS. Economic assessments for the control of COS was also conducted. For submicron particles, the removal efficiency of the BFs ranged from 0 to 98% and the AC filter had the highest quality factor. The NAI remarkably enhanced the
η
value and filter quality factor. For the removal of particles larger than 2.5 μm, all BFs had
η
> 96%. The removal efficiency of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) (η
VOC
) of the test BFs ranged from 18.22 to 90.8%. The AC filter had the largest pore volume (0.432 cm
3
/g) and surface area (877 m
2
/g) among all packing materials, causing this filter to have the highest η
VOC
and adsorption capacity (over 28.3 mg-VOCs/g-AC). The annual operating costs of the TL, WD, RH, CG, and AC filters were 319.4, 23.3, 29.1, 189.4, and 62.9 US$, respectively. Therefore, using RS to prepare an AC bed filter for the removal of COS is a practical and sustainable strategy for COS control.
Chronic exposure to ambient polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is associated with asthma, but its regulatory mechanisms remain incompletely defined. We report herein that elevated levels of ...urinary 1-hydroxypyrene, a biomarker of PAH exposure, were found in asthmatic subjects (n = 39) as compared to those in healthy subjects (n = 43) living in an industrial city of Taiwan, where indeno1,2,3-cdpyrene (IP) was found to be a prominent PAH associated with ambient PM
. In a mouse model, intranasal exposure of mice with varying doses of IP significantly enhanced antigen-induced allergic inflammation, including increased airway eosinophilia, Th2 cytokines, including IL-4 and IL-5, as well as antigen-specific IgE level, which was absent in dendritic cell (DC)-specific aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR)-null mice. Mechanistically, IP treatment significantly altered DC's function, including increased level of pro-inflammatory IL-6 and decreased generation of anti-inflammatory IL-10. The IP's effect was lost in DCs from mice carrying an AhR-mutant allele. Taken together, these results suggest that chronic exposure to environmental PAHs may pose a significant risk for asthma, in which IP, a prominent ambient PAH in Taiwan, was shown to enhance the severity of allergic lung inflammation in mice through, at least in part, its ability in modulating DC's function in an AhR-dependent manner.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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