With dramatic changes in lifestyles over the last 20 years, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has become the most prevalent liver disorder in China but has not received sufficient attention. ...NAFLD‐related advanced liver disease and its mortality along with its overall disease burden are expected to increase substantially. There is thus an imperative need to clarify the epidemiological features of NAFLD to guide a holistic approach to management. We summarize eight epidemiological features of NAFLD in China over the past two decades using systematic review and meta‐analysis methodology. Our data reveal a rapid growth in the NAFLD population, especially among younger individuals. Importantly, there is a strong ethnic difference in body mass index (BMI) and genetic risk of NAFLD compared with the US population. The etiology of advanced liver disease and its complications (e.g., hepatocellular carcinoma) has been altered because of a Westernized lifestyle and the implementation of effective vaccination strategies against viral hepatitis. Regional epidemiological patterns of NAFLD indicate that economics, environment, and lifestyle are critical factors in disease progression. The analysis also indicates that a large number of patients remain undiagnosed and untreated because of the inadequacy of diagnostic tools and the absence of effective pharmacologic therapies. Given the burden of NAFLD, future policy and research efforts need to address knowledge gaps to mitigate the risk burden.
With rapid lifestyle transitions, the increasing burden of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in China has emerged as a major public health issue. To obtain a comprehensive overview of the ...status of NAFLD over the past decade, we evaluated the epidemiology, risk factors, complications, and management of NAFLD in China through a systematic review and meta‐analysis. Five English literature databases and three Chinese databases were searched for relevant topics from 2008 to 2018. A total of 392 studies with a population of 2,054,554 were included. National prevalence of NAFLD was 29.2%, with a heavier disease burden among the middle‐aged, males, those in northwest China and Taiwan, regions with a gross domestic product per capita greater than 100,000 yuan, and Uygur and Hui ethnic groups. Currently, original studies on natural history and complications of NAFLD in China are scarce. Several studies revealed that NAFLD is positively correlated with the incidence of extrahepatic tumors, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome. The Chinese population may have a higher hereditary risk of NAFLD due to more frequent nonsynonymous mutations in genes regulating lipid metabolism. Ultrasonography is the primary imaging tool in the detection of NAFLD in China. Serum tests and risk stratification algorithms for staging NAFLD remain under investigation. Specific pharmaceutical treatments for NAFLD are still undergoing clinical trials. It is noteworthy that the Chinese are underrepresented compared with their proportion of the NAFLD population in such trials. Conclusion: China experienced an unexpected rapid increase in the burden of NAFLD over a short period. Rising awareness and urgent actions need to be taken in order to control the NAFLD pandemic in China.
Drawn on the upper echelons theory, this study investigates how chief executive officer (CEO) hometown identity drives firm green innovation. We propose that CEO hometown identity has a positive ...impact on a firm's green innovation performance. Furthermore, we explore the moderating role of managerial discretion determined by organizational and environmental factors (i.e., institutional ownership and market complexity). We propose that institutional ownership negatively moderates the positive relationship between CEO hometown identity and green innovation, but market complexity plays a positive moderating role. Using Chinese publicly listed firms from 2002 to 2016 in heavily polluting industries, our findings support these hypotheses. Our research contributes to the upper echelons theory and corporate social responsibility literature and has substantial practical implications.
Drawing on the institutional view of legitimacy theory, we examine whether and under which conditions a policy tool, mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, enforced by ...constituents positively triggers firms to make substantive environmental responses. Using China's 2008 CSR reporting policy as a quasi‐natural experiment and the difference‐in‐differences estimation approach, the results reveal that after implementation of this policy, mandatory CSR reporting firms show substantially higher green innovation performance than non‐CSR reporting firms. We further find that this effect is stronger for firms located in areas with high environmental enforcement intensity, for state‐owned enterprises and for those with higher levels of media coverage. Moreover, we make a nuanced investigation on whether the media coverage is laden with a negative or positive tone, and find that both negative and positive coverage strengthen the relationship between mandatory CSR disclosure and green innovation.
With rising CO2 emissions caused by the massive consumption of fossil fuels, it is highly desirable to develop strategies that adopt renewable energy to convert CO2 into value‐added chemical ...feedstocks. Over the past decades, photocatalytic reduction of CO2 using light energy has attracted considerable attention. However, the advanced photocatalysis techniques cannot exert their action where light is unavailable. Here, a method for CO2 reduction on basis of vibration‐driven piezoelectricity to yield a piezo‐electrocatalysis effect which requires mechanical vibration rather than light, is proposed. Under mild vibration and sacrificial agent‐free conditions, the piezoelectric BaTiO3 catalyst provides a suitable piezo‐potential to overcome the redox potential of CO2 and convert it into CO with a maximum yield of 63.3 µmol g−1, achieving a reactivity comparable to those of photocatalysts. The piezo‐electrocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction adds a new avenue in addition to the existing photocatalytic techniques by expanding the scope of energy utilization to promote carbon neutrality.
Exploring strategies to expand the sources of natural energy utilization is imperative to cope with ever‐increasing CO2 emissions. A photon‐free piezo‐electrocatalysis system based on the coupling of piezoelectricity and electrochemistry enables the harvesting of dispersed and extensive mechanical energy and converts CO2 into value‐added chemical fuels. The piezo‐electrocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction adds a new avenue to promote carbon neutrality.
The gut microbiota has been linked to cardiovascular diseases. However, the composition and functional capacity of the gut microbiome in relation to cardiovascular diseases have not been ...systematically examined. Here, we perform a metagenome-wide association study on stools from 218 individuals with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ACVD) and 187 healthy controls. The ACVD gut microbiome deviates from the healthy status by increased abundance of Enterobacteriaceae and Streptococcus spp. and, functionally, in the potential for metabolism or transport of several molecules important for cardiovascular health. Although drug treatment represents a confounding factor, ACVD status, and not current drug use, is the major distinguishing feature in this cohort. We identify common themes by comparison with gut microbiome data associated with other cardiometabolic diseases (obesity and type 2 diabetes), with liver cirrhosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. Our data represent a comprehensive resource for further investigations on the role of the gut microbiome in promoting or preventing ACVD as well as other related diseases.The gut microbiota may play a role in cardiovascular diseases. Here, the authors perform a metagenome-wide association study on stools from individuals with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and healthy controls, identifying microbial strains and functions associated with the disease.
The remaining useful life (RUL) prediction plays a pivotal role in the predictive maintenance of industrial manufacturing systems. However, one major problem with the existing RUL estimation ...algorithms is the assumption of a single health degradation trend for different machine health stages. To improve the RUL prediction accuracy with various degradation trends, this article proposes an algorithm dubbed degradation-aware long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoder (AE) (DELTA). First, the Hilbert transform is adopted to evaluate the degradation stage and factor with the real-time sensory signal. Second, we adopt LSTM AE to predict RUL based on multisensor time-series data and the degradation factor. Distinct from the existing studies, the proposed framework is able to dynamically model the degradation factor and explore latent variables to improve RUL prediction accuracy. The performance of DELTA is evaluated with the open-source FEMTO bearing data set. Compared with the existing algorithms, DELTA achieves appreciable improvements in the RUL prediction accuracy.
Sleep deprivation (SD) is increasingly common in modern society, which can lead to the dysregulation of inflammatory responses and cognitive impairment, but the mechanisms remain unclear. Emerging ...evidence suggests that gut microbiota plays a critical role in the pathogenesis and development of inflammatory and psychiatric diseases, possibly via gut microbiota-brain interactions and neuroinflammation. The present study investigated the impact of SD on gut microbiota composition and explored whether alterations of the gut microbiota play a causal role in chronic inflammatory states and cognitive impairment that are induced by SD. We found that SD-induced gut dysbiosis, inflammatory responses, and cognitive impairment in humans. Moreover, the absence of the gut microbiota suppressed inflammatory response and cognitive impairment induced by SD in germ-free (GF) mice. Transplantation of the "SD microbiota" into GF mice activated the Toll-like receptor 4/nuclear factor-κB signaling pathway and impaired cognitive function in the recipient mice. Mice that harbored "SD microbiota" also exhibited increases in neuroinflammation and microglial activity in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex. These findings indicate that gut dysbiosis contributes to both peripheral and central inflammatory processes and cognitive deficits that are induced by SD, which may open avenues for potential interventions that can relieve the detrimental consequences of sleep loss.
Statins are lipid-lowering therapeutics with favorable anti-inflammatory profiles and have been proposed as an adjunct therapy for COVID-19. However, statins may increase the risk of SARS-CoV-2 viral ...entry by inducing ACE2 expression. Here, we performed a retrospective study on 13,981 patients with COVID-19 in Hubei Province, China, among which 1,219 received statins. Based on a mixed-effect Cox model after propensity score-matching, we found that the risk for 28-day all-cause mortality was 5.2% and 9.4% in the matched statin and non-statin groups, respectively, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 0.58. The statin use-associated lower risk of mortality was also observed in the Cox time-varying model and marginal structural model analysis. These results give support for the completion of ongoing prospective studies and randomized controlled trials involving statin treatment for COVID-19, which are needed to further validate the utility of this class of drugs to combat the mortality of this pandemic.
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•Statin treatment among 13,981 patients with COVID-19 was retrospectively studied•Statin use in this cohort was associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality•Adding an ACE inhibitor or an ARB did not affect statin-associated outcome in the cohort•The benefit of statins among this cohort may be due to immunomodulatory benefits
Statins have anti-inflammatory benefits and were suggested as an adjunct therapy for COVID-19. But statins may increase the expression of ACE2, the receptor for SARS-CoV-2. Here, Zhang et al. retrospectively analyzed 13,981 COVID-19 cases and found that in-hospital statin use is associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality.
Piezo‐electrocatalysis as an emerging mechano‐to‐chemistry energy conversion technique opens multiple innovative opportunities and draws great interest over the past decade. However, the two ...potential mechanisms in piezo‐electrocatalysis, i.e., screening charge effect and energy band theory, generally coexist in the most piezoelectrics, making the essential mechanism remain controversial. Here, for the first time, the two mechanisms in piezo‐electrocatalytic CO2 reduction reaction (PECRR) is distinguished through a narrow‐bandgap piezo‐electrocatalyst strategy using MoS2 nanoflakes as demo. With conduction band of −0.12 eV, the MoS2 nanoflakes are unsatisfied for CO2‐to‐CO redox potential of −0.53 eV, yet they achieve an ultrahigh CO yield of ≈543.1 µmol g−1 h−1 in PECRR. Potential band position shifts under vibration are still unsatisfied with CO2‐to‐CO potential verified by theoretical investigation and piezo‐photocatalytic experiment, further indicating that the mechanism of piezo‐electrocatalysis is independent of band position. Besides, MoS2 nanoflakes exhibit unexpected intense “breathing” effect under vibration and enable the naked‐eye‐visible inhalation of CO2 gas, independently achieving the complete carbon cycle chain from CO2 capture to conversion. The CO2 inhalation and conversion processes in PECRR are revealed by a self‐designed in situ reaction cell. This work brings new insights into the essential mechanism and surface reaction evolution of piezo‐electrocatalysis.
Piezo‐electrocatalysis as an emerging mechano‐to‐chemistry energy conversion technique opens multiple innovative opportunities, drawing great interest but also suffering from the controversial mechanisms. A narrow‐bandgap piezo‐electrocatalyst strategy is proposed by choosing CO2 reduction as a probe reaction to distinguish the two potential mechanisms, i.e., screening charge effect and energy band theory, and reveal that piezo‐electrocatalysis is independent of band positions.
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