Older adults living in nursing home organizations are eager to get voluntary help, however, their past experiences with voluntary services are not satisfactory enough. To better carry out voluntary ...services and improve the effectiveness of services, it is necessary to have a deeper understanding of the experiences and needs of older adults for voluntary services.
The purposive sampling method was used to select 14 older adults from two nursing home organizations in Hangzhou and conduct semi-structured interviews, Collaizzi's seven-step method was used to analyze the data.
Older adults in nursing home organizations have both beneficial experiences and unpleasant service experiences in the process of receiving voluntary services; Beneficial experiences include solving problems meeting needs and feeling warmth and care, while unpleasant service experiences include the formality that makes it difficult to benefit truly, lack of organization, regularity, sustainability, and the mismatch between service provision and actual demands. The needs for voluntary services mainly focuses on emotional comfort, Cultural and recreational, and knowledge acquisition.
Older adults in nursing home organizations have varied voluntary experiences, and their voluntary service needs are diversified. Voluntary service needs of older adults should be accurately assessed, and voluntary service activities should be focused upon.
The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein oligomer responsible for activation of the inflammatory response by promoting the maturation and secretion of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β and IL-18. ...Dysregulation of this inflammasome has been linked to several autoimmune diseases, indicating that NLRP3 is tightly regulated to prevent aberrant activation. The regulation of NLRP3 activation remains unclear. Here, we report the identification of vitamin D receptor (VDR) as a negative regulator of NLRP3 oligomerization and activation. VDR can physically bind NLRP3 and block the association of NLRP3 with BRCC3. When BRCC3-mediated deubiquitination of NLRP3 is inhibited by VDR, NLRP3 activation is subsequently inhibited. In the absence of VDR, caspase-1 activation and IL-1β release are increased in response to LPS-induced inflammation or alum-induced peritoneal inflammation, indicating that VDR is a negative regulator of NLRP3 inflammasome activation
. In addition, vitamin D negatively regulates the NLRP3 inflammasome via VDR signaling to effectively inhibit IL-1β secretion. These studies demonstrate that VDR signaling constrains NLRP3 inflammasome activation and might be a potential treatment target for NLRP3 inflammasome-related diseases.
Purpose
The present study aimed to identify independent clinicopathological and socio-economic prognostic factors associated with overall survival of early-onset colorectal cancer (EO-CRC) patients ...and then establish and validate a prognostic nomogram for patients with EO-CRC.
Methods
Eligible patients with EO-CRC diagnosed from 2010 to 2017 were extracted from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Patients were randomly divided into a training cohort and a testing cohort. Independent prognostic factors were obtained using univariate and multivariate Cox analyses and were used to establish a nomogram for predicting 3- and 5-year overall survival (OS). The discriminative ability and calibration of the nomogram were assessed using C-index values, AUC values, and calibration plots.
Results
In total, 5585 patients with EO-CRC were involved in the study. Based on the univariate and multivariate analyses, 15 independent prognostic factors were assembled into the nomogram to predict 3- and 5-year OS. The nomogram showed favorable discriminatory ability as indicated by the C-index (0.840, 95% CI 0.827–0.850), and the 3- and 5-year AUC values (0.868 and 0.84869 respectively). Calibration plots indicated optimal agreement between the nomogram-predicted survival and the actual observed survival. The results remained reproducible in the testing cohort. The C-index of the nomogram was higher than that of the TNM staging system (0.840 vs 0.804,
P
< 0.001).
Conclusion
A novel prognostic nomogram for EO-CRC patients based on independent clinicopathological and socio-economic factors was developed, which was superior to the TNM staging system. The nomogram could facilitate postoperative individual prognosis prediction and clinical decision-making.
Fuzzy dispersion entropy (FuzDE) is a newly proposed entropy metric, which combines the superior characteristics of fuzzy entropy (FE) and dispersion entropy (DE) in signal analysis. However, FuzDE ...only reflects the feature from the original signal, which ignores the hidden information on the time scale. To address this problem, we introduce variable-step multiscale processing in FuzDE and propose variable-step multiscale FuzDE (VSMFuzDE), which realizes the characterization of abundant scale information, and is not limited by the signal length like the traditional multiscale processing. The experimental results for both simulated signals show that VSMFuzDE is more robust, more sensitive to dynamic changes in the chirp signal, and has more separability for noise signals; in addition, the proposed VSMFuzDE displays the best classification performance in both real-world signal experiments compared to the other four entropy metrics, the highest recognition rates of the five gear signals and four ship-radiated noises reached 99.2% and 100%, respectively, which achieves the accurate identification of two different categories of signals.
Permutation Lempel-Ziv complexity (PLZC) is a recently proposed method for analyzing signal complexity. However, PLZC only characterizes the signal complexity from single scale and has certain ...limitations. In order to overcome these shortcomings and improve the performance of feature extraction for underwater acoustic signal, this paper introduced coarse graining operation, proposed the multi-scale permutation Lempel-Ziv complexity (MPLZC), and proposed an automatic hybrid multi-feature extraction method for ship-radiated noise signal (S-S) based on multi-scale Lempel-Ziv complexity (MLZC), multi-scale permutation entropy (MPE) and MPLZC. The results of simulation and realistic experiments show that MPLZC can better reflect the change of signal complexity in detecting the dynamic change of signals, and more effectively distinguish white noise, pink noise and blue noise than MPE and MLZC; compared with the three feature extraction methods based on MLZC, MPE and MPLZC respectively, the proposed method has the highest recognition rates of six S-Ss under the same number of features, and the recognition rate reaches 100% when the number of features is 5; the introduction of MPLZC significantly improves the performance for ship-radiated noise signal of the automatic hybrid multi-feature extraction method. It is indicated that the proposed method, as a new underwater acoustic technology, is valid in other underwater acoustic signals.
Main conclusion
Two squalene synthase genes AlSQS1 and AlSQS2 were isolated from
Atractylodes lancea
and functionally characterized using in vitro enzymatic reactions.
Atractylodes lancea
is a ...traditional herb used for the treatment of rheumatic diseases, gastric disorders, and influenza. Its major active ingredients include sesquiterpenoids and triterpenes. Squalene synthase (SQS; EC 2.5.1.21) catalyzes the first enzymatic step in the central isoprenoid pathway towards sterol and triterpenoid biosynthesis. In this study, we aimed to investigate two SQSs from
A. lancea
using cloning and in vitro enzymatic characterization. Bioinformatics and phylogenetic analyses revealed that the AlSQSs exhibited high homology with other plant SQSs. Furthermore, AlSQS1 was observed to be localized in both the nucleus and cytoplasm, whereas AlSQS2 was localized in the cytoplasm and endoplasmic reticulum. To obtain soluble recombinant enzymes, AlSQS1 and AlSQS2 were successfully expressed as glutathione S-transferase (GST)-tagged fusion proteins in
Escherichia coli
Transetta (DE3). Approximately 68 kDa recombinant proteins were obtained using GST-tag affinity chromatography and Western blot analysis. Results of the in vitro enzymatic reactions established that both AlSQS1 and AlSQS2 were functional, which verifies their catalytic ability in converting two farnesyl pyrophosphates to squalene. The expression patterns of
AlSQS
and selected terpenoid genes were also investigated in two
A. lancea
chemotypes using available RNA sequencing data.
AlSQS1
and
AlSQS2
, which showed relatively similar expression in the three tissues, were more highly expressed in the stems than in the leaves and rhizomes. Methyl jasmonate (MeJA) was used as an elicitor to analyze the expression profiles of
AlSQSs
. The results of qRT-PCR analysis revealed that the gene expression of
AlSQS1
and
AlSQS2
plummeted at lowest value at 12 h and reached its peak at 24 h. This study is the first report on the cloning, characterization, and expression of SQSs in
A. lancea.
Therefore, our findings contribute novel insights that may be useful for future studies regarding terpenoid biosynthesis in
A. lancea.
Most of the existing studies on the improvement of entropy are based on the theory of single entropy, ignoring the relationship between one entropy and another. Inspired by the synergistic ...relationship between bubble entropy (BE) and permutation entropy (PE), which has been pointed out by previous authors, this paper aims to explore the relationship between bubble entropy and dispersion entropy. Since dispersion entropy outperforms permutation entropy in many aspects, it provides better stability and enhances the computational efficiency of permutation entropy. We also speculate that there should be potential synergy between dispersion entropy and bubble entropy. Through experiments, we demonstrated the synergistic complementarity between BE and DE and proposed a double feature extraction method based on BE and DE. For the single feature extraction experiment, dispersion entropy and bubble entropy have better recognition performance for sea state signals and bearing signals, respectively; in double feature extraction, the combination of bubble entropy and dispersion entropy makes the recognition rate of sea state signals increase by 10.5% and the recognition rate of bearing signals reach 99.5%.
Peucedanum praeruptorum
Dunn is a well-known Chinese medicinal plant that mainly contains coumarins derived from the phenylpropanoid pathway. Phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) is the first key enzyme ...in the phenylpropanoid pathway and catalyzes the formation of trans-cinnamic acid (t-CA) by L-phenylalanine (L-Phe). Two
PAL
s (
PpPAL1
and
PpPAL2
) were cloned and verified in this study, demonstrating that there is a multi-gene family of
PAL
in
P. praeruptorum. PpPAL1
(GenBank accession number: MZ355581) and
PpPAL2
(GenBank accession number: MZ355582) contained open reading frame of 2157 bp encoding 718 amino acids and 2118 bp encoding 705 amino acids, respectively. BLAST analysis showed that the amino acid sequences of two novel PpPALs were highly similar to other known plant PAL proteins. To confirm their functions, the two
PpPAL
s were cloned into the pET-30a vector and expressed in
Escherichia coli
Transetta (DE3). The enzymatic activity of the two PAL recombinant proteins was subsequently detected. They both catalyzed the conversion of L-Phe to t-CA, but the activity of PpPAL2 was higher than that of PpPAL1. Phylogenetic results revealed that PpPAL1 and PpPAL2 were classified into different clusters. In addition, tissue-specific expression of the two
PpPAL
s was different of both non-bolting and bolting plants. These results might be useful for future studies regarding phenylpropanoid biosynthesis and improving the content of medicinal components in
P. praeruptorum
.
To study the influence of acupuncture at Waiguan (TE5) on the functional connectivity of the central nervous system of patients with ischemic stroke.
Twenty-four patients with ischemic stroke in the ...left basal ganglia were randomized based on gender to receive TE5 acupuncture (n = 12) or nonacupoint acupuncture (n = 12). Each group underwent sham acupuncture and then verum acupuncture while being scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Six regions of interest (ROI) were defined, including bilateral motor, somatosensory, and bilateral basal ganglia areas. The functional connectivity between these ROIs and all voxels of the brain was analyzed in Analysis of Functional NeuroImages (AFNI) to explore the differences between verum acupuncture and sham acupuncture at TE5 and between TE5 acupuncture and nonacupoint acupuncture. The participants were blinded to the allocation.
The effect of acupuncture on six seed-associated networks was explored. The result demonstrated that acupuncture at Waiguan (TE5) can regulate the sensorimotor network of the ipsilesional hemisphere, stimulate the contralesional sensorimotor network, increase cooperation of bilateral sensorimotor networks, and change the synchronization between the cerebellum and cerebrum. Furthermore, a lot of differences of effect existed between verum acupuncture and sham acupuncture at TE5, but there was little difference between TE5 acupuncture and nonacupoint acupuncture.
The modulation of synchronizations between different regions within different brain networks might be the mechanism of acupuncture at Waiguan (TE5). Stimulation of the contralesional sensorimotor network and increase of cooperation of bilateral hemispheres imply a compensatory effect of the intact hemisphere, whereas changes in synchronization might influence the sensorimotor function of the affected side of the body.
Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR-ONRC-08000255.
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