Abstract
Context
Clinical trials examining the cardiovascular protective effects of quercetin in humans have reported conflicting results.
Objective
The aim of this systematic review was to summarize ...evidence of the effects of quercetin supplementation on plasma lipid profiles, blood pressure (BP), and glucose levels in humans by performing a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.
Data Sources
MEDLINE, Embase, and Scopus databases were searched electronically from their inception to July 2018 to identify randomized controlled trials that assessed the impact of quercetin on lipid profiles, BP, and glucose levels.
Study Selection
Randomized controlled trials assessing the effects of quercetin or a standardized quercetin-enriched extract on plasma lipid profiles, BP, and glucose levels in humans were eligible for inclusion.
Data Extraction
A random-effects model was used for data analysis. Continuous variables were expressed as weighted mean differences (WMDs) and 95%CIs. Subgroup analyses were conducted to explore possible influences of study characteristics. Sensitivity analyses were also performed, as were analyses of publication bias.
Results
Seventeen trials (n = 896 participants total) were included in the overall analysis. Pooled results showed that quercetin significantly lowered both systolic BP (WMD, −3.09 mmHg; 95%CI, −4.59 to −1.59; P = 0.0001) and diastolic BP (WMD, −2.86 mmHg; 95%CI, −5.09 to −0.63; P = 0.01). Neither lipid profiles nor glucose concentrations changed significantly. In subgroup analyses, significant changes in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides were observed in trials with a parallel design and in which participants consumed quercetin for 8 weeks or more.
Conclusion
Quercetin intake resulted in significantly decreased BP in humans. Moreover, participants who consumed quercetin for 8 weeks or more showed significantly changed levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides in trials with a parallel design.
Emotion recognition based on physiological signals has been a hot topic and applied in many areas such as safe driving, health care and social security. In this paper, we present a comprehensive ...review on physiological signal-based emotion recognition, including emotion models, emotion elicitation methods, the published emotional physiological datasets, features, classifiers, and the whole framework for emotion recognition based on the physiological signals. A summary and comparation among the recent studies has been conducted, which reveals the current existing problems and the future work has been discussed.
Lung cancer ranks as the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide and we performed this meta-analysis to investigate eligible studies and determine the prognostic effect of Ki-67.
In total, ...108 studies in 95 articles with 14,732 patients were found to be eligible, of which 96 studies reported on overall survival (OS) and 19 studies reported on disease-free survival (DFS) with relation to Ki-67 expression in lung cancer patients.
The pooled hazard ratio (HR) indicated that a high Ki-67 level could be a valuable prognostic factor for lung cancer (HR = 1.122 for OS, P < 0.001 and HR = 1.894 for DFS, P < 0.001). Subsequently, the results revealed that a high Ki-67 level was significantly associated with clinical parameters of lung cancer including age (odd ratio, OR = 1.246 for older patients, P = 0.018), gender (OR = 1.874 for males, P < 0.001) and smoking status (OR = 3.087 for smokers, P < 0.001). Additionally, significant positive correlations were found between Ki-67 overexpression and poorer differentiation (OR = 1.993, P = 0.003), larger tumor size (OR = 1.436, P = 0.003), and higher pathologic stages (OR = 1.867 for III-IV, P < 0.001). Furthermore, high expression of Ki-67 was found to be a valuable predictive factor for lymph node metastasis positive (OR = 1.653, P < 0.001) and advanced TNM stages (OR = 1.497 for stage III-IV, P = 0.024). Finally, no publication bias was detected in any of the analyses.
This study highlights that the high expression of Ki-67 is clinically relevant in terms of the prognostic and clinicopathological characteristics for lung cancer. Nevertheless, more prospective well-designed studies are warranted to validate these findings.
Carcinoma-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) are abundant and heterogeneous stromal cells in tumor microenvironment that are critically involved in cancer progression. Here, we demonstrate that two ...cell-surface molecules, CD10 and GPR77, specifically define a CAF subset correlated with chemoresistance and poor survival in multiple cohorts of breast and lung cancer patients. CD10+GPR77+ CAFs promote tumor formation and chemoresistance by providing a survival niche for cancer stem cells (CSCs). Mechanistically, CD10+GPR77+ CAFs are driven by persistent NF-κB activation via p65 phosphorylation and acetylation, which is maintained by complement signaling via GPR77, a C5a receptor. Furthermore, CD10+GPR77+ CAFs promote successful engraftment of patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), and targeting these CAFs with a neutralizing anti-GPR77 antibody abolishes tumor formation and restores tumor chemosensitivity. Our study reveals a functional CAF subset that can be defined and isolated by specific cell-surface markers and suggests that targeting the CD10+GPR77+ CAF subset could be an effective therapeutic strategy against CSC-driven solid tumors.
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•CD10 and GPR77 define a new CAF subset•CD10+GPR77+ CAFs sustain cancer stemness and promote tumor chemoresistance•Complement signaling maintains NF-κB activation•Targeting CD10+GPR77+ CAFs restores chemosensitivity
CD10 and GPR77 identify a cancer stemness-sustaining cancer-associated fibroblast subset.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) as positive modulators of immune response have revolutionized the treatment of cancer and have achieved impressive efficacy in melanoma and numerous solid tumor ...malignancies. These agents are being investigated in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) to further enhance response rate as induction therapy and to improve relapse-free survival (RFS) post chemotherapy and bone marrow transplantation. PD-1 and CTLA-4 are the two most actively investigated checkpoint receptors, which play a role in different stages of anti-tumor immune response. This study reviews data from ongoing phase I, II clinical trials evaluating PD-1 and CTLA-4 inhibitors on AML patients and discusses especially efficacy and adverse events as well as prospects of these drugs in treating AML. Single anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody infusion shows rather modest clinical efficacy. While combinations of PD-1 inhibitor with hypomethylating agents (HMAs) represent encouraging outcome for relapsed/refractory (R/R) AML patients as well as for elderly patients as first-line therapy option. Adding PD-1 inhibitor to traditional induction therapy regimen is also safe and feasible. CTLA-4 inhibitor ipilimumab exhibits specific potency in treating relapsed AML patients with extramedullary disease in later post-transplantation stage. In terms of side effects, irAEs found in these trials can mostly be appropriately managed with steroids but are occasionally fatal. More rationally designed combinational therapies are under investigation in ongoing clinical trials and will further advance our understanding of checkpoint inhibitors as well as lead us to the most appropriate application of these agents.
Observational studies suggested that tobacco smoking was associated with diabetic nephropathy (DN). However, the results were conflicting and inconsistent. In the study, we performed a meta-analysis ...to assess the relationship between tobacco smoking and the development of DN.
We searched in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and the Cochrane Library (CENTRAL) from database inception until Mar 8, 2018, and updated our search on May 1, 2018. We screened the reference lists of the retrieved articles. Only original prospective cohort studies which have investigated the association between smoking and DN incidence or its progression were included. Pooled HRs and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using a random effects model.
A total of 9 prospective cohort studies were identified, including more than 203337 participants. Compared with those of no smoking, smoking participants increased the risk of developing DN (HR = 1.07, 95% CI: 1.01-1.13, P = 0.01). The subgroup analysis showed that the current and total smoking may increase the risk of DN, but these results did not reach statistical significance (current: HR = 1.69, 95% CI = 0.79-3.64, p = 0.17; total: HR = 1.17, 95% CI = 0.97-1.41, p = 0.10), whereas former smoking significantly increased the risk of DN (HR = 1.04, 95% CI = 1.03-1.05, p<0.001). Compared with no-smokers, smokers showed an elevated risk of developing DN (HR = 1.05; 95% CI, 1.00-1.11, P = 0.05). In patients with T2DM, those who smoked were at an increased risk of developing DN, as compared to those who had never smoked (HR = 1.05; 95% CI, 1.00-1.11, P = 0.05). However, compared to no smoking, smoking did not increase the risk of DN development in patients with T2DM (HR = 1.15; 95% CI, 0.9-1.47, P = 0.25). Univariate and multivariate meta-regression did not find any confounding factors. No publication bias was found in the meta-analysis.
The present study highlighted that smoking was an independent risk factor for DN, especially in patients with T1DM. This is the first meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies to discuss the relationship between smoking and DN.
Information on major depressive disorder (MDD) and subthreshold depressive symptoms (SDS) is rarely reported in south China. This study examines the prevalence rates and patterns of MDD and SDS of a ...large representative sample of adult residents in south China.
The Guangdong Mental Health Survey was conducted on adults (over 18 years) from September to December 2021. Multistage stratified cluster sampling was used and face-to-face interviews were done with a two-stage design by trained lay interviewers and psychiatrists. A total of 16,377 inhabitants were interviewed using standardized assessment tools. Data were weighted to adjust for differential probabilities of selection and differential response.
The weighted prevalence rates of MDD and SDS were 2.5 % (95%CI: 2.2 %–2.9 %) and 14.7 % (95%CI: 14.0 %–15.5 %), respectively. Multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that female, younger age, living in urban area, higher education, unmarried, irregular meal pattern, lack of physical exercise, chronic diseases, irregular napping pattern and short sleep were positively associated with SDS. Besides, female, younger age, unmarried, irregular meal pattern, lack of physical exercise, chronic diseases, short sleep and poor mental health were positively associated with MDD.
The cross-sectional nature of the study limited causal inferences.
The prevalence of MDD in Guangdong province in 2021 is higher than in mainland China in 2013. Given the higher prevalence of SDS, and high burden of depression, it also offers valuable opportunities for policymakers and health-care professionals to explore the factors affecting mental health in Guangdong province, especially during the COVID-19 epidemic.
•The weighted prevalence rates of MDD and SDS among adults in south China were 2.5% and 14.7%, respectively.•People with one or more chronic diseases were more likely to suffer from MDD and SDS.•Female, younger, unmarried, irregular meal, lack of exercise and short sleep were the common risk factors for MDD and SDS.
This paper focuses on the routing algorithm for the communications between vehicles and places in urban vehicular ad hoc networks. As one of the basic transportation facilities in an urban setting, ...buses periodically run along their fixed routes and cover many city streets. The trajectory of bus lines can be seen as a submap of a city. Based on the characters of bus networks, we propose a bus-trajectory-based street-centric (BTSC) routing algorithm, which uses buses as the main relay to deliver messages. In BTSC, we build a routing graph based on the trajectories of bus lines by analyzing the probability of bus appearing on every street. We propose two novel concepts, i.e., the probability of street consistency and the probability of path consistency, which are used as metrics to determine routing paths for message delivery. This aims to choose the best path with higher density of busses and lower probability of transmission direction deviating from the routing path. In order to improve the bus forwarding opportunity, we design a bus-based forwarding strategy with ant colony optimization to find a reliable and a steady multihop link between two relay buses in order to decrease the end-to-end delay. The BTSC makes improvements in the selection of routing paths and a strategy of message forwarding. Simulation results show that our proposed routing algorithm has a better performance in terms of the transmission ratio, transmission delay, and adaptability to different networks.
The developments in positioning and mobile communication technology have made the location-based service (LBS) applications more and more popular. For privacy reasons and due to lack of trust in the ...LBS providers, k-anonymity and l-diversity techniques have been widely used to preserve privacy of users in distributed LBS architectures in Internet of Things (IoT). However, in reality, there are scenarios where the locations of users are identical or similar/near each other in IoT. In such scenarios the k locations selected by k-anonymity technique are the same and location privacy can be easily compromised or leaked. To address the issue of privacy preservation, in this paper, we introduce the location labels to distinguish locations of mobile users to sensitive and ordinary locations. We design a location-label based (LLB) algorithm for protecting location privacy of users while minimizing the response time for LBS requests. We also evaluate the performance and validate the correctness of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations.
•We design an efficient framework for protecting the users’ privacy.•We propose a location-label based approach for privacy preservation.•We design three protocols for improving the response time and privacy level.•We validate and evaluate our approach by conducting extensive simulations.
Osteosarcoma, an aggressive malignant cancer, has a high lung metastasis rate and lacks therapeutic target. Here, we reported that chromobox homolog 4 (CBX4) was overexpressed in osteosarcoma cell ...lines and tissues. CBX4 promoted metastasis by transcriptionally up-regulating Runx2 via the recruitment of GCN5 to the Runx2 promoter. The phosphorylation of CBX4 at T437 by casein kinase 1α (CK1α) facilitated its ubiquitination at both K178 and K280 and subsequent degradation by CHIP, and this phosphorylation of CBX4 could be reduced by TNFα. Consistently, CK1α suppressed cell migration and invasion through inhibition of CBX4. There was a reverse correlation between CK1α and CBX4 in osteosarcoma tissues, and CK1α was a valuable marker to predict clinical outcomes in osteosarcoma patients with metastasis. Pyrvinium pamoate (PP) as a selective activator of CK1α could inhibit osteosarcoma metastasis via the CK1α/CBX4 axis. Our findings indicate that targeting the CK1α/CBX4 axis may benefit osteosarcoma patients with metastasis.
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