Seasonal drought happens frequently in the lower slope hilly areas of China, which leads to a huge economic loss to China’s famous tea production. An accurate determination of the evapotranspiration ...(ET) value of different seasons can provide a crucial decision parameter for irrigation management. The surface renewal (SR) method is an accurate and inexpensive method compared with the eddy covariance (EC) method, which is widely used to calculate the sensible heat flux (H). The latent heat flux (LE) evapotranspiration can be estimated indirectly when combined with the energy–balance equation. This research investigated the traditional and improved calculation methods of H (SRsnyder and SRchen), based on the surface renewal theory, over a tea field for one year. The calculation accuracy was obtained from the statistical analysis between the SR and EC methods. Different months’ applicability was evaluated to determine the best calculation method for the tea field. The traditional calculation method (SRsnyder) is based on the van slope model using the second, third, and fifth structure function. The improved SR model (SRchen) introduces a third order temperature function and friction velocity for calculation. The results indicate that SRchen shows a good calculation accuracy of H in the spring seasons (February to April), summer (May to July), and autumn (August to October). The determination coefficients of regression analysis (R2) ranges were 0.66, 0.88 with most values greater than 0.8. The root mean square error (RMSE) ranges were 34.15, 69.22 W/m2. However, during this period, SRsnyder had a poor calculation accuracy of H, and the range of R2 was 0.45, 0.74 with the RMSE ranges of 32.28, 63.25 W/m2. In the winter (November to January), the calculation accuracy of both models was relatively low with R2 almost 30% lower than that of other seasons. Therefore, this study suggests the use of the SRchen method to estimate the H of a tea field ecosystem in the low slope hilly area of the Yangtze River region in the spring, summer, and autumn. While in the winter, the SRsnyder method is recommended.
Objectives
The aims of the study were first to investigate the association between self-perceptions of aging and frailty and second to determine whether self-perceptions of aging affects frailty
via
...depressive symptoms and cognitive status among older adults living in the community in China.
Methods
Among 850 older adults who participated in this cross-sectional study, 822 older adults made valid responses to Tilburg Frailty Indicator, Brief Aging Perceptions Questionnaire, UCLA loneliness scale-8, Mini-Mental State Examination, and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 between March to December 2019. The possible pathways of self-perceptions of aging affecting frailty were analyzed based on the structural equation modeling analysis.
Results
A total of 21.53% of older adults reported frailty. Correlation analyses showed that higher degrees of frailty were related to greater loneliness, more depressive symptoms, more negative self-perceptions of aging, worse locomotive function, and cognitive status (
r
= 0.267,
r
= 0.440,
r
= 0.481,
r
= 0.451,
r
= −0.337;
p
< 0.001). Multiple regression analysis showed that loneliness, depressive symptoms, self-perceptions of aging, locomotive function, and cognitive status were the five factors to be entered the regression equation, and the variance of joint explanation was 46.60%. SPA had a direct effect on frailty (
β
= 0.306 and
p
< 0.001), and SPA indirectly affects frailty by independently affecting depressive symptoms (
β
= 0.391, 95% CI 0.027, 0.061, and
p
< 0.001) or cognitive status (
β
= 0.148, 95% CI 0.009, 0.024, and
p
< 0.001) of older adults.
Conclusion
These findings help explain the potential psychological mechanisms through which SPA impacts frailty and may aid community healthcare providers in China in identifying individuals at high risk of frailty. The results suggest that health staff should help older adults improve their perspectives on aging, alleviate or prevent depressive symptoms, and improve cognitive status to delay the progress of frailty and promote healthy aging.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence and relevant factors of nocturia and its impact on sleep quality in university students in Mainland China. A large-scale survey was ...conducted on 14,000 university students from 3 universities in Henan province, China by using an anonymous questionnaire. The questionnaire collected the information from the past six months. The relationships between the prevalence of nocturia and its relevant factors were evaluated. A total of 13,874 questionnaires were collected and 13,104 qualified for statistical analysis. A total of 659 students suffered from clinically relevant nocturia (CRN) (4.56% in male and 5.34% in female). Both univariate analysis and the logistic stepwise regression model showed that the prevalence of nocturia was significantly related to female, history of enuresis, ease of waking up, urgency, frequency and RUTI (P < 0.05). The sleep quality and the university entrance score of CRN group was significantly lower than that of control group (P < 0.05). Nocturia was common in Chinese university students and showed a negative impact on sleep and academic performance. Gender of female, history of enuresis, ease of waking up, urgency, frequency and RUTI were relevant factors for CRN.
Purpose
Pelvic X-ray (PXR) is widely utilized in clinical decision-making associated with the pelvis, the lower part of the trunk that supports and balances the trunk. In particular, PXR-based ...landmark detection facilitates downstream analysis and computer-assisted diagnosis and treatment of pelvic diseases. Although PXR has the advantages of low radiation and reduced cost compared to computed tomography (CT), it characterizes the 2D pelvis-tissue superposition of 3D structures, which may affect the accuracy of landmark detection in some cases. However, the superposition nature of PXR is implicitly handled by existing deep learning-based landmark detection methods, which mainly design the deep network structures for better detection performances. Explicit handling of the superposition nature of PXR is rarely done.
Methods
In this paper, we explicitly focus on the superposition of X-ray images. Specifically, we propose a pelvis extraction (PELE) module that consists of a decomposition network, a domain adaptation network, and an enhancement module, which utilizes 3D prior anatomical knowledge in CT to guide and well isolate the pelvis from PXR, thereby eliminating the influence of soft tissue for landmark detection. The extracted pelvis image, after enhancement, is then used for landmark detection.
Results
We conduct an extensive evaluation based on two public and one private dataset, totaling 850 PXRs. The experimental results show that the proposed PELE module significantly improves the accuracy of PXRs landmark detection and achieves state-of-the-art performances in several benchmark metrics.
Conclusion
The design of PELE module can improve the accuracy of different pelvic landmark detection baselines, which we believe is obviously conducive to the positioning and inspection of clinical landmarks and critical structures, thus better serving downstream tasks. Our project has been open-sourced at
https://github.com/ECNUACRush/PELEscores
.
Prolonged cold exposure causes body stress and damages health. The intestinal environment is complex and variable, and direct contact with the external environment can easily cause stress, damage and ...even lead to diseases such as diarrhea.
This study aimed to reveal the role of cold exposure on ileum damage and the role of SIRT2 in this process.
C57BL6 mice and SIRT2 knockout mice were used to construct a chronic cold exposure model (21 days, random 4 °C exposure for 3 h per day), which was tested by various methods, including intestinal permeability assays, morphological assays, ultrastructural assays, western blotting, and fluorescence staining. In vitro assays were performed on the mouse small intestinal epithelial cell line MODE-K to investigate the role of endoplasmic reticulum stress, SIRT2 knockout, and autophagy on tight junctions.
The results showed that chronic cold exposure damaged the ileal epithelial barrier, with endoplasmic reticulum stress. Knockout of SIRT2 alleviates ileal injury via enhanced autophagy under cold exposure. And autophagy can restore the expression of ZO-1 under stress.
This study can provide potential target and basic data for the treatment of IBD and other disorders of the intestinal barrier. Autophagy may be an important means of restoring damage to the intestinal barrier.
•Intestinal problems in low temperatures may be related to increased intestinal permeability.•Inhibition of SIRT2 at low temperatures can protect the intestine, but the protective effect is limited.•Autophagy may be an important pathway to relieve intestinal injury under stress.
Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) is a rapidly developing super-resolution technology. It has been widely used in various application fields of biomedicine due to its excellent two- and ...three-dimensional imaging capabilities. Furthermore, faster three-dimensional imaging methods are required to help enable more research-oriented living cell imaging. In this paper, a fast and sensitive three-dimensional structured illumination microscopy based on asymmetric three-beam interference is proposed. An innovative time-series acquisition method is employed to halve the time required to obtain each raw image. A segmented half-wave plate as a substantial linear polarization modulation method is applied to the three-dimensional SIM system for the first time. Although it needs to acquire 21 raw images instead of 15 to reconstruct one super-resolution image, the SIM setup proposed in this paper is 30% faster than the traditional spatial light modulator-SIM (SLM-SIM) in imaging each super-resolution image. The related theoretical derivation, hardware system, and verification experiment are elaborated in this paper. The stable and fast 3D super-resolution imaging method proposed in this paper is of great significance to the research of organelle interaction, intercellular communication, and other biomedical fields.
Observational studies have hinted at a correlation between the gut microbiota and spinal pain (SP). However, the impact of the gut microbiota on SP remains inconclusive.
In this study, we employed a ...two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to explore the causal relationship between the gut microbiota and SP, encompassing neck pain (NP), thoracic spine pain (TSP), low back pain (LBP), and back pain (BP). The compiled gut microbiota data originated from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) conducted by the MiBioGen consortium (
= 18,340). Summary data for NP were sourced from the UK Biobank, TSP from the FinnGen Biobank, and LBP from both the UK Biobank and FinnGen Biobank. Summary data for BP were obtained from the UK Biobank. The primary analytical approach for assessing causal relationships was the Inverse Variance Weighted (IVW) method, supplemented by various sensitivity analyses to ensure result robustness.
The IVW analysis unveiled 37 bacterial genera with a potential causal relationship to SP. After Benjamini-Hochberg corrected test, four bacterial genera emerged with a strong causal relationship to SP. Specifically,
(OR: 1.143, 95% CI 1.061-1.232,
= 0.0004) and
(OR: 1.145, 95% CI 1.059-1.238,
= 0.0007) were identified as risk factors for LBP, while
(OR: 0.859, 95% CI 0.791-0.932,
= 0.0003) was marked as a protective factor for LBP, and
(OR: 0.893, 95% CI 0.839-0.951,
= 0.0004) was recognized as a protective factor for low back pain or/and sciatica. No significant heterogeneity or horizontal pleiotropy was observed through alternative testing methods.
This study establishes a causal relationship between the gut microbiota and SP, shedding light on the "gut-spine" axis. These findings offer novel perspectives for understanding the etiology of SP and provide a theoretical foundation for potential interventions targeting the gut microbiota to prevent and treat SP.
Ambient air temperature is a key factor affecting human health. Long-term exposure to a cold environment can cause various diseases, while the impact on the intestine, the organ which has the largest ...contact area with the external environment, cannot be ignored. In this study, we investigated the effect of chronic cold exposure on the colon and its preliminary mechanism of action. Mice were exposed to 4°C for 3 hours a day for 10 days. We found that cold exposure damaged the morphology and structure of the colon, destroyed the tight junctions of the colonic epithelial tissue, and promoted inflammation of the colon. At the same time, cold exposure also activated the unfolded protein response (UPR) in the colon and promoted apoptosis in intestinal epithelial cells. Chronic cold exposure induced oxidative stress
, but also significantly enhanced the response of the Nrf2 pathway that promotes an anti-oxidant effect. Furthermore, we demonstrated that chronic cold exposure promoted p65 acetylation to aggravate the inflammatory response by inhibiting SIRT1. Similar results were observed following SIRT1 knock-down by shRNA in Caco-2 cells treated with Thapsigargin (Tg). Knock-down of SIRT1 promoted nuclear localization of Nrf2, and increased the level of Nrf2 acetylation. Taken together, our study indicates that cold exposure may aggravate endoplasmic reticulum stress and damage epithelial tight junctions in the colon by inhibiting SIRT1, which promotes nuclear localization of Nrf2 and induces an anti-oxidant response to maintain intestinal homeostasis. These findings suggest that SIRT1 is a potential target for regulating intestinal health under cold exposure conditions.
Ice melting plays a crucial role in ocean circulation and global climate. Laboratory experiments were used to study the dynamic mechanisms of the influence of waves and currents on ice melting. The ...results showed that under near stable air temperature and water temperature conditions, the ice melting rate was significantly greater with waves than that without waves, as well as the higher the wave height, the greater the melting rate. This is related to the increase in the contact area between ice and water by waves. Further research was carried out to observe the flow field at different locations on the ice bottom, ice sides, and behind the ice by particle image velocimetry (PIV) and dyeing experiments. At different flow velocities, the changes in the side melting rate and bottom melting rate were not the same. Meltwater is attached to the bottom in the form of plume at low background flow velocity, which leads to the slowness of the heat exchange between the ice with a higher ambient temperature. Therefore, the melting of the ice bottom and the ice side were slower at low flow velocity. At high background flow velocity, there is strong shear instability and vortex at the ice bottom and behind the ice. The dissipation and mixing effects caused by vortices accelerate the melting of the ice bottom and the ice back. The thermodynamic factors, such as air temperature and water temperature, had significant impacts in the experiments. Further research needs to improve the accuracy of temperature control of experimental equipment. Computational fluid dynamics and sensitive tests of numerical simulation may also be carried out on ice melting.
Traditional in vitro anticancer drug sensitivity testing at the population level suffers from lengthy procedures and high false positive rates. To overcome these defects, we built a confocal Raman ...microscopy sensing system and proposed a single-cell approach via Raman-deuterium isotope probing (Raman-DIP) as a rapid and reliable in vitro drug efficacy evaluation method. Raman-DIP detected the incorporation of deuterium into the cell, which correlated with the metabolic activity of the cell. The human non-small cell lung cancer cell line HCC827 and human breast cancer cell line MCF-7 were tested against eight different anticancer drugs. The metabolic activity of cancer cells could be detected as early as 12 h, independent of cell growth. Incubation of cells in 30% heavy water (D2O) did not show any negative effect on cell viability. Compared with traditional methods, Raman-DIP could accurately determine the drug effect, meanwhile, it could reduce the testing period from 72–144 h to 48 h. Moreover, the heterogeneity of cells responding to anticancer drugs was observed at the single-cell level. This proof-of-concept study demonstrated the potential of Raman-DIP to be a reliable tool for cancer drug discovery and drug susceptibility testing.
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