Tea is widely consumed all over the world. Generally, tea is divided into six categories: White, green, yellow, oolong, black, and dark teas, based on the fermentation degree. Tea contains abundant ...phytochemicals, such as polyphenols, pigments, polysaccharides, alkaloids, free amino acids, and saponins. However, the bioavailability of tea phytochemicals is relatively low. Thus, some novel technologies like nanotechnology have been developed to improve the bioavailability of tea bioactive components and consequently enhance the bioactivity. So far, many studies have demonstrated that tea shows various health functions, such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immuno-regulatory, anticancer, cardiovascular-protective, anti-diabetic, anti-obesity, and hepato-protective effects. Moreover, it is also considered that drinking tea is safe to humans, since reports about the severe adverse effects of tea consumption are rare. In order to provide a better understanding of tea and its health potential, this review summarizes and discusses recent literature on the bioactive components, bioavailability, health functions, and safety issues of tea, with special attention paid to the related molecular mechanisms of tea health functions.
Background
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) infection has been widely spread. We aim to investigate the clinical ...characteristic and allergy status of patients infected with SARS‐CoV‐2.
Methods
Electronic medical records including demographics, clinical manifestation, comorbidities, laboratory data, and radiological materials of 140 hospitalized COVID‐19 patients, with confirmed result of SARS‐CoV‐2 viral infection, were extracted and analyzed.
Results
An approximately 1:1 ratio of male (50.7%) and female COVID‐19 patients was found, with an overall median age of 57.0 years. All patients were community‐acquired cases. Fever (91.7%), cough (75.0%), fatigue (75.0%), and gastrointestinal symptoms (39.6%) were the most common clinical manifestations, whereas hypertension (30.0%) and diabetes mellitus (12.1%) were the most common comorbidities. Drug hypersensitivity (11.4%) and urticaria (1.4%) were self‐reported by several patients. Asthma or other allergic diseases were not reported by any of the patients. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD, 1.4%) patients and current smokers (1.4%) were rare. Bilateral ground‐glass or patchy opacity (89.6%) was the most common sign of radiological finding. Lymphopenia (75.4%) and eosinopenia (52.9%) were observed in most patients. Blood eosinophil counts correlate positively with lymphocyte counts in severe (r = .486, P < .001) and nonsevere (r = .469, P < .001) patients after hospital admission. Significantly higher levels of D‐dimer, C‐reactive protein, and procalcitonin were associated with severe patients compared to nonsevere patients (all P < .001).
Conclusion
Detailed clinical investigation of 140 hospitalized COVID‐19 cases suggests eosinopenia together with lymphopenia may be a potential indicator for diagnosis. Allergic diseases, asthma, and COPD are not risk factors for SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. Older age, high number of comorbidities, and more prominent laboratory abnormalities were associated with severe patients.
Decreased eosinophil count, which was positively correlated with lymphocyte counts, may be a potential biological indicator for diagnosing
COVID‐19 patients. Low prevalence of allergic diseases, COPD and patients with smoking history indicated they may not be the predisposing
factors of COVID‐19. Elder age, high number of comorbidities and more prominent laboratory abnormalities were associated with severe
patientsz.
This study explores the impacts of country risks on the relationship between energy consumption and financial development for 79 countries. By using the panel smooth transition regression model, this ...study finds non-linear relationships between variables - that is, the relationships differ in higher and lower risk environments. We show that banking sector development has larger impacts on energy consumption than does stock market development. The results of the full sample show under the stable country risk environments that financial development could help to reduce energy consumptions. Lastly, the results offer that different types of financial development and country risk environments have varying impacts on energy consumption in OECD and non-OECD countries.
•Explore the impacts of country risks on the energy-finance nexus.•Use the panel smooth transition regression model.•The relationships between variables differ in higher and lower risk environments.•Banking sector development has larger impacts on energy consumption than does stock market development.•Under the stable country risk environments financial development could help to reduce energy consumptions.
Fecal microbiota transplantation is an emerging therapy for a variety of conditions. In this report, an extended-spectrum beta-lactamase–producing
E. coli
bacteremia was shown to have been ...transmitted from donor stool to several patients in clinical trials, causing sepsis in two; one patient died.
This study explores the non-linear effects of real income, energy use, and country risks on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in a panel of 111 countries from 1985 to 2014. By applying the panel smooth ...transition regression model, we find that real income, energy use, and country risks have different impacts on CO2 emissions when using country risks as thresholds. As to the full sample, the results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between CO2 emissions and economic risk, and that the financial and political risk indices have monotonically increasing effects on CO2 emissions. As country risks decrease, the positive effects of real income and energy use on CO2 emissions are first large and then become small. Moreover, with country risks changing, low-income countries have larger sensitivities to CO2 emissions.
•To explore the impacts of country risks on the CO2-income-energy-risk nexus.•An inverted U-shaped relationship between CO2 emissions and economic risk.•The financial and political stability have increasing effects on CO2 emissions.•A stable environment reduces the impacts of income and energy on CO2 emissions.•The EKC hypothesis for CO2 emissions is confirmed in this study.
This study applies the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model to explore the impacts of real income, energy, and investment on the CO2-income nexus for 99 countries covering the period from ...1971 to 2010. We find that in the full sample, as real income rises, CO2 emissions rapidly increase first, and then their increasing rate starts to slow down, while the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for CO2 emissions is supported from the composite results of three income groups. Our results show that decreasing energy usage, improving energy efficiency, and enhancing clean energy usage could effectively ease the impacts of real income on CO2 emissions. Moreover, countries with different energy trade conditions and income levels have different CO2-income correlations, indicating that one size does not fit all.
•We explore the non-linear CO2-income nexus.•The EKC hypothesis is found from the composite results of three income groups.•A small CO2-income nexus is found in countries with lower energy usage.•The CO2-income nexus in more energy efficiency and clean energy usage is smaller.•The energy trade conditions and income levels will influence the CO2-income nexus.
Video Captioning by Adversarial LSTM Yang Yang; Jie Zhou; Jiangbo Ai ...
IEEE transactions on image processing,
11/2018, Letnik:
27, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to video captioning based on adversarial learning and long short-term memory (LSTM). With this solution concept, we aim at compensating for the deficiencies ...of LSTM-based video captioning methods that generally show potential to effectively handle temporal nature of video data when generating captions but also typically suffer from exponential error accumulation. Specifically, we adopt a standard generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture, characterized by an interplay of two competing processes: a "generator" that generates textual sentences given the visual content of a video and a "discriminator" that controls the accuracy of the generated sentences. The discriminator acts as an "adversary" toward the generator, and with its controlling mechanism, it helps the generator to become more accurate. For the generator module, we take an existing video captioning concept using LSTM network. For the discriminator, we propose a novel realization specifically tuned for the video captioning problem and taking both the sentences and video features as input. This leads to our proposed LSTM-GAN system architecture, for which we show experimentally to significantly outperform the existing methods on standard public datasets.
Background
Caregivers of patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT) experience an immense caregiving burden before, during, and after HCT.
Methods
We conducted an unblinded, ...randomized trial of a psychosocial intervention (BMT‐CARE) for caregivers of patients undergoing autologous and allogeneic HCT at Massachusetts General Hospital. Caregivers were randomly assigned to BMT‐CARE or usual care. BMT‐CARE was tailored to the HCT trajectory and integrated treatment‐related education and self‐care with cognitive‐behavioral skills to promote coping. Caregivers assigned to BMT‐CARE met with a trained interventionist (a psychologist or a social worker) in person, via telephone, or via videoconferencing for 6 sessions starting before HCT and continuing up to day +60 after HCT. The primary endpoint was feasibility, which was defined as at least 60% of eligible caregivers enrolling and completing 50% or more of the intervention sessions. We assesed caregiver quality of life (QOL; Caregiver Oncology Quality of Life Questionnaire), caregiving burden (Caregiver Reaction Assessment), psychological distress (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), self‐efficacy (Cancer Self‐Efficacy Scale–Transplant), and coping (Measures of Current Status) at baseline and 30 and 60 days after HCT. We used mixed linear effect models to assess the effect of BMT‐CARE on outcomes longitudinally.
Results
We enrolled 72.5% of eligible caregivers (100 of 138), and 80% attended 50% or more of the intervention sessions. Caregivers randomized to BMT‐CARE reported improved QOL (B = 6.11; 95% CI, 3.50‐8.71; P < .001), reduced caregiving burden (B = –6.02; 95% CI, –8.49 to –3.55; P < .001), lower anxiety (B = –2.18; 95% CI, –3.07 to –1.28; P < .001) and depression symptoms (B = –1.23; 95% CI, –1.92 to –0.54; P < .001), and improved self‐efficacy (B = 7.22; 95% CI, 2.40‐12.03; P = .003) and coping skills (B = 4.83; 95% CI, 3.04‐6.94; P < .001) in comparison with the usual‐care group.
Conclusions
A brief multimodal psychosocial intervention tailored for caregivers of HCT recipients is feasible and may improve QOL, mood, coping, and self‐efficacy while reducing the caregiving burden during the acute HCT period.
In this randomized clinical trial of 100 caregivers of patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HCT), a brief psychosocial intervention (BMT‐CARE) is found to be feasible with high enrollment and retention rates and to lead to improvements in caregiver quality of life, psychological distress, coping, and self‐efficacy while reducing the caregiving burden during the acute HCT period. Thus, BMT‐CARE is a promising intervention and should be tested in future multisite trials.
The present paper represents a continuation of 26. There, a continuous dependence result for the solution of an elliptic variational–hemivariational inequality was obtained and then used to prove the ...existence of optimal pairs for two associated optimal control problems. In the current paper we complete this study with more general results. Indeed, we prove the continuous dependence of the solution with respect to a parameter which appears in all the data of the problem, including the set of constraints, the nonlinear operator and the two functionals which govern the variational–hemivariational inequality. This allows us to consider a general associated optimal control problem for which we prove the existence of optimal pairs, together with a new convergence result. The mathematical tools developed in this paper are useful in the analysis and control of a large class of boundary value problems which, in a weak formulation, lead to elliptic variational–hemivariational inequalities. To provide an example, we illustrate our results in the study of an inequality which describes the equilibrium of an elastic body in frictional contact with a foundation made of a rigid body covered by a layer of soft material.
The automatic scoring of English composition is an inevitable trend of the rapid development of computer technology and artificial intelligence technology. This makes the research on the automatic ...scoring system of the composition more theoretical and feasible. The integration of information technology and English curriculum has deepened the application of artificial intelligence in the field of teaching, creating a new opportunity for the optimization of English teaching process, and opening up a new space for the creation of intelligent and personalized English teaching environment. Based on the integration of information technology and curriculum, aiming at improving the quality and effect of English teaching in middle schools, this paper explores the application of artificial intelligence in English teaching in middle schools by using relevant theories of curriculum theory, literature analysis and field investigation. An implementation plan of College English assisted instruction system based on AI technology is proposed. Combined with English teaching, some functions of the English teaching system are improved and humanized. The application of artificial intelligence technology in English teaching is explored in order to improve the quality and effect of English teaching.
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