Abstract Background Whether ZES can further improve angiographic and clinical outcomes compared to SES still remains uncertain. Objectives The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy and safety ...of zotarolimus-eluting stents (ZES) compared with sirolimus-eluting stents (SES) in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI). Methods Major electronic information sources were explored for randomized controlled trials comparing ZES with SES among patients undergoing PCI during at least 9 months follow-up. The primary efficacy outcomes were target lesion revascularization (TLR), target vessel revascularization (TVR), and major adverse cardiac events (MACE); safety outcomes were stent thrombosis (ST), myocardial infarction (MI), and cardiac death. Results Seven comparative studies were identified (a total of 5983 patients). When compared with ZES at 12-month follow‐up, SES significantly reduced risk of MACE (relative risk RR: 0.74, 95% confidence interval CI: 0.61 to 0.89, p = 0.002), and TLR (RR:0.39; 95% CI: 0.29 to 0.52; p < 0.00001), without significant differences in terms of TVR (RR:0.68, 95% CI: 0.38 to 1.20; p = 0.18), ST (RR:0.71; 95% CI: 0.39 to 1.31; p = 0.28), cardiac death (RR:0.83; 95% CI: 0.49–1.42, p = 0.50) or MI (RR:1.08; 95%CI: 0.80 to 1.45; p = 0.62). Conclusions At 12-month follow-up, SES are superior to ZES in reducing the incidences of TLR and MACE in patients undergoing PCI, without significant differences in terms of TVR, ST, cardiac death, and MI.
Enzyme-mediated nanostructures have gained increasing interests and shown promising applications in functional delivery for food and pharmaceuticals. In our previous study, we fabricated three types ...of spherical soy protein nanoparticles (SPNP) by flavorzyme to different degree of hydrolysis (DH, 3%, 7% and 11%). These SPNPs exhibited similar subunit composition, secondary structure and surface properties, but differ in size, which is 89 nm, 106 nm and 151 nm, respectively. This study further applied them in emulsion systems for functional delivery. We systematically studied the emulsifying activities, interfacial properties including wettability, interfacial packing pattern, interfacial adsorption and dilatational rheological behavior of SPNPs, and their performance in modulating lipolysis of the emulsions under the influence of lipase, bile salts, pepsin and trypsin. All SPNPs behaved as Pickering-like stabilizers with moderate wettability at oil-water interface with three phase contact angle of 92–101°, and the SPNP with the smallest size has better emulsifying activities (D3,2 = 3.22 ± 0.00 μm in SDS solution) than native soy protein isolate (SPI) (D3,2 = 4.04 ± 0.03 μm in SDS solution). These SPNPs formed similar viscoelastic oil-water interfaces (Ed' = 20.2–21.5 mN/m), which were more glassy-like with weak in-plane interactions compared to SPI (Ed' = 28.6 ± 0.5 mN/m). All SPNPs can delay lipolysis of emulsions by lowering the access/replacement of lipase and bile salts and depressing the proteolysis by trypsin at interface in similar ways. Our work elucidated the role of particle size of enzyme-mediated plant protein-based particle in emulsion stabilization and lipolysis control, and is expected to give the theoretical support for the design of functional food emulsions with controllable energy intake.
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•Flavorzyme-mediated soy protein nanoparticles (SPNP) are Pickering-like stabilizers.•SPNPs with smaller size have higher emulsifying activities.•SPNPs behave similarly in interfacial rheology and emulsion digestion.•SPNPs form glassy-like and weak interface compared to native soy protein.•SPNPs are resistant to proteolysis at interface and can delay lipolysis of emulsions.
Many countries are facing a shortage of modern language teachers, including teachers of Chinese as a second language (CSL), which is believed to relate to pre-service teachers’ motivations. Thus, ...this study aims to explore pre-service CSL teachers’ motivations and the background variables that might influence their motivations. The participants were 411 pre-service CSL teachers. A 33-item questionnaire adopted from the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice (FIT-Choice) scale was administered, including nine FIT-Choice subscales and two new subscales. First, exploratory factor analysis of data from the first random split-half sample of participants suggested a 6-factor structure, which was confirmed in the subsequent confirmatory factor analysis of data from the second random split-half sample of participants. The results show that pre-service CSL teachers had strong intrinsic value, cross-cultural value and altruistic value but weak extrinsic value. Second, structural equation modelling analysis was performed with questionnaire data from 296 participants who provided complete demographic information. Age, annual family income and frequency of contact with foreigners significantly predicted the participants’ motivations, yet their predictive power varied. The implications for understanding the theoretical framework of teacher motivation and the professional development of CSL teachers were discussed.
Although there have been studies investigating the relationship between information disclosure and voluntary compliance behaviors, the terrain of such research is largely fragmented and has been ...rarely tested empirically in the pandemic contexts. This article reviewed the intervention and control of the pandemic from the perspective of information disclosure with reflections on the experience in China. Furthermore, the authors propose a comprehensive framework demonstrating the overall landscape of information disclosure and voluntary compliance behaviors with highlights on (a) the tensions between privacy and information transparency; (b) the trade-offs between policy rigorousness and compliance behaviors; (c) different sources of information and how they influence public behaviors differently; and most importantly, (d) how the variegated configurations and contextualization of factors result in different influencing and moderating mechanisms between information disclosure and voluntary compliance behaviors. In the end, the authors call for future research and reforms in pandemic control practice to focus on the dynamics of information disclosure, government actions, and public compliance behaviors, which has been largely neglected so far.
Summary
Purpose
To analyze the prevalence and significance of FOXP3+ infiltration into (pre)malignant skin carcinomas following ultraviolet radiation (UVR) exposure. The possible pathways that UVR ...impacts on FOXP3 are to be discussed.
Background
FOXP3+ regulatory T cells (FOXP3+ Tregs) are correlated to cutaneous squamous tumor progression. However, there is no information describing the prevalence of FOXP3+ infiltration in cutaneous premalignant and malignant squamous carcinomas with UVR exposure.
Methods
We investigated the prevalence of FOXP3+ infiltration in 14 patients with Bowen's disease, 40 squamous cell carcinoma SCC patients and 21 patients with basal cell carcinoma (BCC) by immunohistochemistry.
Results
The percentages of FOXP3+ vs. total peri‐neoplasm infiltration cells (FOXP3+ PCT) were significantly higher in Bowen's disease and well‐differentiated SCC that were exposed to UVR than these diseases not exposed to UVR (t = 3.5776, P = 0.0038; t’ = 5.9214, P < 0.01, respectively). FOXP3+ PCT was also higher in less pigmented than pigmented sites in BCC (t = 3.369, P = 0.0032).
Conclusions
This study shed some light on the effect of UVR on FOXP3+ infiltration in skin (pre)malignant carcinomas. Our data suggested that FOXP3+ infiltration was positively related to UVR exposure. The mechanisms merit further investigation.
As a new group of important effector molecules involved in multiple cancer types, including breast cancer, lung cancer and oral squamous cell carcinoma, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have attracted ...considerable attention recently. However, the underlying cause that induces the dysregulated lncRNAs in cancer remains poorly understood. In the present study, the regulatory model of the lncRNA placenta‑specific protein 2 (PLAC2) upregulation in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) was investigated and its biological functions in OSCC malignant progression was identified. A reverse transcription‑quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay identified that PLAC2 is upregulated in OSCC cell lines and primary tissue samples. Furthermore, bioinformatic analysis followed by chromatin immunoprecipitation verified an enriched histone H3 on lysine 27 (H3K27) acetylation (H3K27ac) at the promoter region of the PLAC2 gene. Knockdown of cAMP‑response element binding protein‑binding protein (CBP) significantly reduced the enrichment level of H3K27ac, and thereby induced a decreased expression of PLAC2. Functionally, overexpression of PLAC2 promotes OSCC cell proliferation, migration and invasion, whereas knockdown of PLAC2 exerted an opposite effect. Furthermore, the Wnt/β‑catenin signaling pathway was activated by PLAC2 and mediated the PLAC2‑induced malignant progress of OSCC. In conclusion, the present results indicated that lncRNA PLAC2 is transcriptionally activated by H3K27ac modification at the promoter region in OSCC, and promotes cell growth and metastasis via activating Wnt/β‑catenin signaling pathway. Therefore, PLAC2 may serve as a promising biomarker for OSCC prognosis and therapy.
Graphene (GR)-wrapped WO3 nanosphere composite was synthesized by using a facile sol–gel method. The morphology and structural properties of the GR-WO3 nanocomposites were characterized by ...field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Raman spectroscopy. The GR-wrapped WO3 nanospheres composite exhibits p-type gas sensing behavior and the response of GR-WO3 sensor toward NO2 shows a linear increase with an increase in the concentration from 7 to 56ppm at room temperature. Upon exposure to 56ppm NO2, its response value becomes 40.8%, but there is no responsiveness for the sensors based on pure WO3 and graphene sensors. The effective charge transfer through chemically bonded interfacial contact between graphene and WO3 nanospheres is proposed to be responsible for the room temperature sensing performance. This work may provide a new insight into the structural design of GR-base nanocomposites and has a potential prospect in the environment monitoring or disease detection of NO2 at room temperature.
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•A lab-made MIR spectroscopic probe is innovatively used in the in-situ research on breast cancerization and multi-type diagnosis.•Study on the changes in macromolecular content and ...structure in breast cancerization process is reached at different grades.•The optimal trinary classification of breast tissues is successfully achieved by combining 1D-CNN with HOF-ATR-MIR spectroscopy.
Mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy can characterize the content and structural changes of macromolecular components in different breast tissues, which can be used for feature extraction and model training by machine learning to achieve accurate classification and recognition of different breast tissues. In parallel, the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) stands out in the field of deep learning for its ability to efficiently process sequential data, such as spectroscopic signals. In this study, MIR spectra of breast tissue were collected in situ by coupling the self-developed MIR hollow optical fiber attenuated total reflection (HOF-ATR) probe with a Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) spectrometer. Staging analysis was conducted on the changes in macromolecular content and structure in breast cancer tissues. For the first time, a trinary classification model was established based on 1D-CNN for recognizing normal, paracancerous and cancerous tissues. The final predication results reveal that the 1D-CNN model based on baseline correction (BC) and data augmentation yields more precise classification results, with a total accuracy of 95.09%, exhibiting superior discrimination ability than machine learning models of SVM-DA (90.00%), SVR (88.89%), PCA-FDA (67.78%) and PCA-KNN (70.00%). The experimental results suggest that the application of 1D-CNN enables accurate classification and recognition of different breast tissues, which can be considered as a precise, efficient and intelligent novel method for breast cancer diagnosis.
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•The speciation of Hg, As, Pb, Cd, and Cr were studied from different ash hoppers.•The unburned carbon and the particle size of fly ash are major factors to control the ...speciation.•The arsenic, chromium, and cadmium have the most potential to be leached out.
In the power plants, the particle size of fly ash was gradually decreased from the front row to the last row of the hopper. The high mercury captured rate was shown with the high unburned carbon content in the front row of the hopper. 80% of mercury captured in the front hopper was in the residual fraction and the rest was in the oxidizable fraction. The other four trace elements tended to be captured more with the smaller particle size of fly ash in the latter hoppers. Above 90% of lead in fly ash at different hoppers was in the speciation of the residual fraction. This indicated that the lead was the less tendency to be leached out during landfill. The speciation of acid-soluble, reducible, and oxidizable fraction for As, Cr and Cd was significantly increased in the fly ash at different hoppers. This indicated that the combustion technology in each power plant had a significantly impact on the speciation of these trace elements in different hoppers. Thus, the usage of the separation technology method to better understand the behavior of trace elements in the fly ash to avoid fly ash’s disposal through increasing the beneficial use of fly ash.
In recent years, proteins with designed surface properties as interfacial stabilizers to obtain functional emulsions with controlled lipolysis has received increasing attention. In this work, four ...types of soy proteins (I, II, III, IV) with different surface properties were obtained by controlled enzymatic hydrolysis (Neutrase). Protein particle size, morphology, surface hydrophobicity and interfacial wettability were analyzed along with changes in subunits composition and secondary structure, aiming to establish a certain relationship between protein surface properties and its capacity in modulating emulsion properties. Specifically, Type I (α’, α, β, A and B subunits) as protein nanoparticles showed high surface hydrophobicity (+84%) and could form a thick interface to delay lipolysis (k1-24.0%, k-24.2%) through Pickering effect. Type II (α, β, A and B subunits) as protein aggregates in larger size showed high surface hydrophobicity (+45%) and roughness, which could enhance viscosity (equivalent to that of φ0.3–0.4 oil fraction) and delay lipolysis (k1-24.0%) by bridge flocculation. Further hydrolysis caused partial precipitation (originated from β and B subunits) and the soluble portion (Type III and IV) with decreased surface hydrophobicity and increased structural flexibility showed poor emulsification capacity and formed weak interface. It can be concluded that regulating subunit composition by enzymatic hydrolysis is an effective way to obtain proteins with multi-surface properties, which plays a vital role in modulating emulsion viscosity and lipolysis behavior. Results from the present study could provide a new strategy for the design of low-calorie emulsions for weight management.
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•Protein with different surface properties can be regulated by enzymatic hydrolysis.•Emulsion formation and lipolysis behavior are closely related to surface properties.•Protein particles act as Pickering stabilizer can delay lipolysis of emulsions.•Protein aggregates promote flocculation network formation and delay lipolysis.
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