Increased frequency of circulating double negative T (DNT, CD4.sup.-CD8.sup.-CD3.sup.+) cells with protective immune function has been observed in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and ...tuberculosis (TB). Here the role of circulating TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells was further investigated in HIV/TB co-infection. A cross-sectional study was conducted to investigate the frequency and functional profiles of peripheral TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells including apoptosis, chemokine and cytokine expression among healthy individuals and patients with TB, HIV infection and HIV/TB co-infection by cell surface staining and intracellular cytokine staining combined with flow cytometry. Significantly increased frequency of TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells was observed in HIV/TB co-infection than that in TB (p < 0.001), HIV infection (p = 0.039) and healthy controls (p < 0.001). Compared with TB, HIV/TB co-infection had higher frequency of Fas expression (p = 0.007) and lower frequency of Annexin V expression on TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells (p = 0.049), and the frequency of Annexin V expression on Fas.sup.+TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells had no significant difference. TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells expressed less CCR5 in HIV/TB co-infection than that in TB (p = 0.014), and more CXCR4 in HIV/TB co-infection than that in HIV infection (p = 0.043). Compared with healthy controls, TB and HIV/TB co-infection had higher frequency of TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells secreting Granzyme A (p = 0.046; p = 0.005). In TB and HIV/TB co-infection, TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells secreted more granzyme A (p = 0.002; p = 0.002) and perforin (p < 0.001; p = 0.017) than CD4.sup.+ T cells but similar to CD8.sup.+ T cells. Reduced apoptosis may take part in the mechanism of increased frequency of peripheral TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells in HIV/TB co-infection. TCRalphabeta.sup.+ DNT cells may play a cytotoxic T cells-like function in HIV/TB co-infection.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The epidemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) began in China and had spread rapidly to many other countries. This study aimed to identify risk factors associated with delayed negative ...conversion of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 patients. In this retrospective single-centre study, we included 169 consecutive patients with confirmed COVID-19 in Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University from 15th January to 2nd March. The cases were divided into two groups according to the median time of SARS-CoV-2 negative conversion. The differences between groups were compared. In total, 169 patients had a median virus negative conversion time of 18 days (interquartile range: 11–25) from symptom onset. Compared with the patients with short-term negative conversion, those with long-term conversion had an older age, higher incidence of comorbidities, chief complaints of cough and chest distress/breath shortness and severer illness on admission, higher level of leucocytes, neutrophils, aspartate aminotransferase, creatine kinase and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), lower level of CD3+CD4+ lymphocytes and albumin and more likely to receive mechanical ventilation. In multivariate analysis, cough, leucocytes, neutrophils and ESR were positively correlated with delayed virus negative conversion, and CD3+CD4+ lymphocytes were negatively correlated. The integrated indicator of leucocytes, neutrophils and CD3+CD4+ lymphocytes showed a good performance in predicting the negative conversion within 2 weeks (area under ROC curve (AUC) = 0.815), 3 weeks (AUC = 0.804), 4 weeks (AUC = 0.812) and 5 weeks (AUC = 0.786). In conclusion, longer quarantine periods might be more justified for COVID-19 patients with cough, higher levels of leucocytes, neutrophils and ESR and lower levels of CD3+CD4+ lymphocytes.
Functional exhaustion of immune cells is a defining characteristic of HIV-1 chronic infections, exhibiting dysregulation of cellular immune responses and expression of co-inhibitory receptors. ...Although the molecular mechanisms controlling immune-cell exhaustion retains largely unknown, immune checkpoint blockade strategy has shown inspiring potential to reinvigorate T cell functions in chronic infections. In this study, we investigated peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) exhaustion markers from 109 chronic HIV-1-infected patients and found they correlated positively with microRNA-146a, which was inversely correlated with CD4+ T cell count. Intriguingly, ex vivo neutralization of miR-146a in PBMCs from chronic HIV-1 infection exhibited an elevated antiviral cytokines production as well as the expression of GZMB and perforin, while simultaneously, decreased the inhibitory receptors expression such as PD-1, CTLA-4, TIM-3 and LAG-3. These results highlight the importance of miR-146a to HIV-1 induced immune cell exhaustion, and uncover a novel layer of HIV/AIDS pathogenesis and provide potential targets for improved immune intervention.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Electrolytes play a vital role in myocardial electrophysiologi-cal activities in the human body. Electrolyte disturbances can affect depolarisation and repolarisation of myocardial cells and thus ...result in arrhythmia. The most common electrolyte disturbance among hospitalised patients is hyponatraemia. We report on a case of an acquired immune deficiency syndrome patient with decompensated cirrhosis, who developed sinus arrest from hyponatraemia. The electrocardiogram manifestations at different sodium concentrations were also recorded in subsequent therapeutic processes.
Since December 2019, novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)-infected pneumonia (COVID-19) occurred in Wuhan, and rapidly spread throughout China. This study aimed to clarify the characteristics of patients ...with refractory COVID-19.
In this retrospective single-center study, we included 155 consecutive patients with confirmed COVID-19 in Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University from January 1st to February 5th. The cases were divided into general and refractory COVID-19 groups according to the clinical efficacy after hospitalization, and the difference between groups were compared.
Compared with general COVID-19 patients (45.2%), refractory patients had an older age, male sex, more underlying comorbidities, lower incidence of fever, higher levels of maximum temperature among fever cases, higher incidence of breath shortness and anorexia, severer disease assessment on admission, high levels of neutrophil, aspartate aminotransferase (AST), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and C-reactive protein, lower levels of platelets and albumin, and higher incidence of bilateral pneumonia and pleural effusion (P<0.05). Refractory COVID-19 patients were more likely to receive oxygen, mechanical ventilation, expectorant, and adjunctive treatment including corticosteroid, antiviral drugs and immune enhancer (P<0.05). After adjustment, those with refractory COVID-19 were also more likely to have a male sex and manifestations of anorexia and fever on admission, and receive oxygen, expectorant and adjunctive agents (P<0.05) when considering the factors of disease severity on admission, mechanical ventilation, and ICU transfer.
Nearly 50% COVID-19 patients could not reach obvious clinical and radiological remission within 10 days after hospitalization. The patients with male sex, anorexia and no fever on admission predicted poor efficacy.
Visual object tracking is an important problem in computer vision and has many applications including traffic monitoring, augmented reality and human computer interface. Although it has been ...investigated in the past decades, designing a robust tracker to cope with different objects under various situations is still a great challenging task. Focusing on the single-target tracking problem, this paper proposes an object tracking system architecture based on the simplified Haar feature and the improved cost-sensitive Adaboost with online learning strategy, and has implemented three different object tracking algorithms under this architecture. In this thesis, three main tasks have been done for the architecture to achieve the accuracy and speed required by object tracking. First, the Haar feature is simplified, for the original one's computational cost is still a burden for real-time tracking. Second, the architecture uses the cost-sensitive Adaboost instead of the original Adaboost as the object detector, because the quantity of positive samples and negative samples may be unbalanced, and the classifier will perform only as a detector without training after a certain number of the beginning frames, which will compromise the issues of real time and accuracy. Third, a new parameter is added in the sample weight updating formula of the cost-sensitive Adaboost to give more weights on the misclassified samples. In the tracking experiments, the proposed algorithm has shown strong anti-interference ability and better performance in some test video sequences, compared with other tracking algorithms. Meanwhile, the improvement of the cost-sensitive Adaboost can help the algorithm achieve better tracking results in some sequences, compared with the original one. Through experiments it can be found that the proposed tracking system architecture performs well in terms of accuracy and speed.
Visual tracking in a video is a challenging problem in computer vision. The core component of object tracker based on tracking-by-detection framework is a discriminative classifier, tasked with ...distinguishing between the target and the surrounding environment. Fast compressive tracking algorithm is utilized to cope with real time tracking which trained a classifier to distinguish foreground and background, however, it does not take into account the influence of previous positive samples, when target occluded, it is easy lead to tracking fail or drifting problem. This paper proposed a new samples extracted method which take the previous positive samples into classifier training, two sub-classifier are trained and combined to a strong classifier which is used to distinguish target. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.
BackgroundThe reasons for gastrointestinal bleeding among patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) were complex. Here we present an unusual case of life-threatening gastrointestinal ...bleeding caused by a cytomegalovirus-induced duodenal ulcer in an AIDS patient.Case presentationA 31-year-old male with AIDS was admitted on July 18, 2023, complaining of abdominal pain for 38 days and intermittent hematochezia for 12 days. During his hospitalization, gastrointestinal endoscopy attributed gastrointestinal bleeding to a giant duodenal ulcer. Furthermore, cytomegalovirus(CMV) infection was confirmed as the reason for the ulcer through metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGs), hematoxylin-eosin(HE) staining, and immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining for the biopsy tissue. The patient's gastrointestinal bleeding was stopped by interventional embolization. Following a 4-week course of anti-CMV treatment, the giant duodenal ulcer was cured.ConclusionsFor AIDS patients with gastrointestinal bleeding, the CMV-induced gastrointestinal ulcer should be considered. Comprehensive mothods (mNGs, HE staining and IHC staining for biopsy tissue) were benefit for confirmed diagnosis. Beside anti-CMV treatment, the interventional embolization is a choice for hemostasis.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Oral ulcers are often neglected in patients with AIDS. However, giant oral ulcers are uncommon and are usually suspected to be malignant lesions. Our study presents a case of giant ulcers in an AIDS ...patient that were initially suspected to be oral cancer. To assist with diagnosis, conventional microbiological tests, metagenomic next-generation sequencing, and a pathological examination were conducted on oral lesion biopsy specimens. The case was finally confirmed via hematoxylin-eosin staining and immunohistochemical staining to be a cytomegalovirus infection.
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