To investigate the dietary patterns related to depressive symptoms based on reduced rank regression in people aged 55 and above in 4 provinces of China and the degree of association between this ...dietary pattern and depressive symptoms.
Stratified, multi-stage, cluster and random sampling method was used to collect personal information such as demographic characteristics, behavioral lifestyles, disease history and medicine use in Chinese aged 55 and above who participated in the baseline survey of "Community-based Cohort Study on Nervous System Diseases" project conducted in 2018 and 2019 in Hebei, Zhejiang, Shaanxi and Hunan Provinces. Food frequency questionnaire was used to obtain dietary data. Depressive symptom was assessed by geriatric depression scale with a cut-off of 11. Participants who have incomplete demographic information, dietary data or scores of geriatric depression scale, and those whose intake frequency of each food-group >99. 5% were excluded. A total of 11 497 participants, 43. 1% of whom
Sensor formats have been developed for detecting the activity of proteolytic enzymes based on fluorescent conjugated polymer superquenching. These sensors employ a reactive peptide sequence within a ...tether linking a quencher to a biotin. The peptide binds to sensors containing colocated biotin-binding protein and fluorescent polymer by means of biotin-biotin binding protein interactions, resulting in a strong quenching of polymer fluorescence. Enzyme-mediated cleavage of the peptide results in a reversal of the fluorescence quenching. These assays for protease activity are simple, sensitive, fast, and have the specificity required for screening chemical libraries for novel protease inhibitors in a high-throughput screening assay environment. These assays have been demonstrated for enterokinase, caspase-3/7, and β-secretase.
The structure of lithium (Li) metal anode, including the Li metal and the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), is critical to the investigation of cycle stability or decay mechanisms. The ...three-dimensional (3D) visualization of Li metal and SEI, however, has not been demonstrated yet, owing to the lack of 3D characterization techniques and the susceptibility of Li metal anode toward oxygen, moisture, as well as electron beam. Herein, we introduce a successful 3D presentation of deposited Li metal and SEI established via low-dose cryogenic electron microscopy tomography. The Li metal anode is imaged in low-dose mode at different tilt angles and then aligned and reconstructed into a 3D image through an expectation-maximization algorithm. The spherical Li deposits and SEI are confirmed in the 3D tomography of Li metal anode. It is also discovered that the Li metal corrodes and SEI turns concave owing to possible self-discharge after long-time rest.
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•We achieved 3D characterization of Li metal and SEI using cryo-STEM tomography•The uniformity and local thickness of the SEI can be accurately measured in 3D•The Li metal corrodes and turns concave due to self-discharge after deposition
Energy materials; Materials characterization; Materials characterization techniques; Materials chemistry; Materials science
Aim: To investigate the adverse effects of alcohol on ovarian reserve in women of childbearing age.
Material and Methods: Twenty bar hostesses between the ages of 18 and 29 with moderate alcohol ...consumption for over 3 years and 16 healthy women between the ages of 18 and 28 with alcohol consumption under a healthy standard were recruited. Their ovarian reserve was evaluated by measuring menstrual cycle day three (CD3) serum follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), estradiol (E2), prolactin (PRL) and testosterone (TST) levels, and by transvaginal B‐ultrasound examination of uterine size, ovarian size and number of antral follicles.
Results: Moderate consumption of alcohol significantly increased serum FSH level (P = 0.001), but had no effect on serum LH, E2, PRL and TST levels. Moderate alcohol consumption significantly decreased ovarian volume (P = 0.000) and number of ovarian antral follicles (P = 0.015), but had no effect on uterus size. Moderate alcohol consumption significantly increased the occurrence of menstrual flow abnormalities (P = 0.001 and P = 0.036, respectively), but had no effect on menstrual cycle. The amount of alcohol consumed positively correlated with FSH, and negatively correlated with ovarian volume and number of antral follicles in women with moderate alcohol consumption.
Conclusion: Long‐term moderate alcohol consumption may lead to diminished ovarian reserve.
Blue pearlescent pigment was obtained by coating microemulsion-synthesized CoAl
2O
4 nanoparticles onto mica titania. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) showed that the ...spherical CoAl
2O
4 spinel was around 20
nm and dispersion of the nanoparticles on the coated surface was uniform. EDS revealed that the coating rate and coating efficiency of Co was about 3.12% and 97%, respectively. The study results indicate that the optimum technology parameters were 1:1 CoO:Al
2O
3 molar ratio, and the coating ratio of CoAl
2O
4 was 3.7–4.6% by weight.
Ferroptosis and long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) expression signatures have been associated with the clinical progression and immune-contexture of different solid tumors. The study aimed to identify a ...prognostic signature of ferroptosis-related lncRNAs (falncRNAs) to forecast the immune scenery and immunotherapy response in esophageal cancer (EC).
Gene expression profiles of EC were extracted from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and ferroptosis-related genes were downloaded from the FerrDb database, which identified differentially expressed falncRNAs (DEfalncRNAs) via differential analysis. DEfalncRNA pairs associated with prognosis were identified by constructing a matrix, univariate and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) analysis. The prognostic signature was constructed by multivariate analysis. We appraised the forecasting capability of prognostic signature in survival, clinicopathological features, immune landscape, efficacy of immunotherapy, and drug sensitivity. The potential molecular mechanism of signature was investigated by gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA).
We obtained 18 DEfalncRNA pairs to define a novel prognostic signature that was determined on a discovery cohort of 158 tumor samples and 11 adjacent normal tissues from TCGA and internally validated, with the definition of high- vs low-risk groups based on 3 years overall survival. We demonstrated that the high- vs low-risk groups differed for clinical parameters and computationally predicted drug sensitivity and tumor immune contexture, with the high-risk group having worse survival, more aggressive disease (node involvement, metastasis), reduced drug sensitivity, higher tumor mutation load, and gene signatures of infiltration of pro-tumoral immune cell subsets. The GSEA results revealed that ferroptosis and immunoregulatory pathways were significantly enriched in the high-risk group.
The prognostic signature based on falncRNAs has the potential to forecast the survival, immune scenery, efficacy of immunotherapy, and drug sensitivity of EC, which is helpful for clinical prediction and individualized treatment.
An assay technology for high-throughput screening of kinase and phosphatase activities is introduced. The format is based upon superquenching of fluorescent-conjugated polymers by dyelabeled ...kinase/phosphatase peptide substrates. The sensor platform is composed of highly fluorescent-conjugated polyelectrolytes colocated with the phosphate coordinating metal ion gallium on microspheres. Phosphorylated peptide substrates containing a quencher bind specifically to the metal ions by means of phosphate groups, resulting in quench of polymer fluorescence. The modulation of fluorescence signal is proportional to kinase or phosphatase activity and is monitored as a turn-off or turn-on signal, respectively. The assay is homogeneous and simple and can be run either as an endpoint measurement or in a kinetic mode. The assay meets the sensitivity required for high-throughput screening of kinase or phosphatase inhibitors and is a valuable tool for drug discovery. A modified version of the assay allows for the detection of protein phosphorylation.
Objective:
To investigate the prevalence and the related characteristics of oligomenorrhea among women within childbearing age in China.
Study design:
A large-scale community-based investigation was ...conducted from 2013 to 2015. A total of 12,964 women aged 18–49 years from 9 provinces/municipalities in China were recruited for healthcare screening in local community health centers. Outcome measures include clinical history, ultrasonographic exam, and hormonal and metabolic parameters.
Results:
Among women within childbearing age in China, the prevalence of oligomenorrhea was 12.2% (1,579/12,964). Both sociodemographic factors and medical history were significantly associated with oligomenorrhea (P < 0.05). In such women, the prevalence of obesity, acne, seborrhea, acanthosis, larger ovarian size, and polycystic ovarian morphology was higher when compared with normal women; the prevalence of anti-Mullerian hormone, total testosterone, and androstenedione (P < 0.05) was higher as well. The infertility rates of all women were higher in the oligomenorrhea group (17.2%, 272⁄1,579) than in the non-oligomenorrhea group (9.0%, 1,024⁄11,385), and among women without contraception, for the oligomenorrhea group, the infertility rate was 32.5% (128⁄394), and for the non-oligomenorrhea group, 17.9% (400⁄2,240). In the oligomenorrhea group, 57.4% (156/272) of the women underwent treatments for infertility, which was higher than the non-oligomenorrhea group 36.1% (370/1,024).
Conclusions:
Obesity, acne, seborrhea, acanthosis, larger ovarian size, and polycystic ovarian morphology were significantly associated with oligomenorrhea. The increase of anti-Mullerian hormone, total testosterone, and androstenedione level was also demonstrated in the oligomenorrhea group. Higher prevalence of infertility and medical treatment rate was observed in women with oligomenorrhea.
At present, computed tomography (CT) is widely used to assist disease diagnosis. Especially, computer aided diagnosis (CAD) based on artificial intelligence (AI) recently exhibits its importance in ...intelligent healthcare. However, it is a great challenge to establish an adequate labeled dataset for CT analysis assistance, due to the privacy and security issues. Therefore, this paper proposes a convolutional autoencoder deep learning framework to support unsupervised image features learning for lung nodule through unlabeled data, which only needs a small amount of labeled data for efficient feature learning. Through comprehensive experiments, it shows that the proposed scheme is superior to other approaches, which effectively solves the intrinsic labor-intensive problem during artificial image labeling. Moreover, it verifies that the proposed convolutional autoencoder approach can be extended for similarity measurement of lung nodules images. Especially, the features extracted through unsupervised learning are also applicable in other related scenarios.
In our paper, a highly effective S,N-co-doped NaTaO3 catalysts were prepared through a facile polymerized complex technique followed by a post-nitridation route in ammonia for the first time. The ...degradation of Rhodamine B indicated significantly higher activity of co-doped samples (as high as 95% for 1h) compared with pure NaTaO3 or mono ion doped catalysts under visible light. This result is not reported previously. The synergistic effect of porous structure and narrowed band gap as well as may be responsible for an excellent photocatalytic activity.
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•Highly effective S,N-co-doped NaTaO3 catalysts were fabricated via a PC method.•S and N atoms incorporated into the lattice structure of the NaTaO3 resulting in narrowed band gap.•The degradation of RhB dye is as high as 95% under visible light irradiation.•The synergistic effect was responsible for the excellent photocatalytic activity.•Schematic model of a proposed reaction process of S,N-co-doped NaTaO3 was provided.
Highly effective S,N-co-doped NaTaO3 catalysts were successfully prepared through a facile polymerized complex technique. The catalysts were analyzed by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), Energy Dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX), and ultraviolet-visible absorbtion spectroscopy. Based on the XRD results, the structure of as-prepared co-doped NaTaO3 is monoclinical. EDS and XPS results showed that both sulfur and nitrogen were incorporated into the NaTaO3 martrix and occupied O2– sites. The co-doped S and N could create an additional energy level, resulting in narrowed band gap, increased visible light absorption capacity and the upward-shifted valence band edge. The photocatalytic activity evaluation through the visible light degradation of Rhodamine B indicated significantly higher activity of co-doped samples (95% degradation in water after 1 h). The synergistic effect of the monoclinic, porous structure and narrowed band gap may be responsible for an excellent photocatalytic activity.
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