46 research outputs found
Effect of spontaneous breathing on ventilator-induced lung injury in mechanically ventilated healthy rabbits: a randomized, controlled, experimental study
β-Arrestin2 Inhibits Expression of Inflammatory Cytokines in BEAS-2B Lung Epithelial Cells Treated with Cigarette Smoke Condensate via Inhibition of Autophagy
Background/Aims: β-arrestin2 has been shown to have a role in human inflammatory disease. However, the role of β-arrestin2 in cigarette smoke-induced inflammation in the lung remains unknown. The aims of this study were to investigate the effects of β-arrestin2 on cigarette smoke condensate (CSC)-induced expression of inflammatory cytokines in the BEAS-2B human bronchial epithelial cell line in vitro, and the mechanisms involved. Methods: The MTT assay determined cell viability of cultured BEAS-2B cells. Autophagy was assessed by western blot, adenoviral mRFP-GFP-LC3 transfection, and immunofluorescence. The effects of β-arrestin2 shRNA knockdown were studied by western blot and real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Western blot evaluated the AMPK/mTOR signaling pathway. Levels of inflammatory cytokines, interleukin (IL)-6, IL-8, and MCP-1 were measured in cell culture supernatants by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Results: CSC suppressed expression of β-arrestin2 in BEAS-2B cells, activated the AMPK/mTOR signaling pathway, increased cell autophagy and the expression of IL-6, IL-8, and MCP-1,pretreatment with the β-arrestin2 biased ligands, propranolol, and ICI118551 reversed these changes. Inhibition of autophagy reduced the expression of inflammatory cytokines following CSC. Conclusion: In the human bronchial epithelial cell line, BEAS-2B, β-arrestin2 reduced the expression of CSC-induced inflammatory cytokines by inhibiting autophagy, most likely via the AMPK/mTOR signaling pathway
Hyperoxemia and excess oxygen use in early acute respiratory distress syndrome : Insights from the LUNG SAFE study
Publisher Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.Background: Concerns exist regarding the prevalence and impact of unnecessary oxygen use in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). We examined this issue in patients with ARDS enrolled in the Large observational study to UNderstand the Global impact of Severe Acute respiratory FailurE (LUNG SAFE) study. Methods: In this secondary analysis of the LUNG SAFE study, we wished to determine the prevalence and the outcomes associated with hyperoxemia on day 1, sustained hyperoxemia, and excessive oxygen use in patients with early ARDS. Patients who fulfilled criteria of ARDS on day 1 and day 2 of acute hypoxemic respiratory failure were categorized based on the presence of hyperoxemia (PaO2 > 100 mmHg) on day 1, sustained (i.e., present on day 1 and day 2) hyperoxemia, or excessive oxygen use (FIO2 ≥ 0.60 during hyperoxemia). Results: Of 2005 patients that met the inclusion criteria, 131 (6.5%) were hypoxemic (PaO2 < 55 mmHg), 607 (30%) had hyperoxemia on day 1, and 250 (12%) had sustained hyperoxemia. Excess FIO2 use occurred in 400 (66%) out of 607 patients with hyperoxemia. Excess FIO2 use decreased from day 1 to day 2 of ARDS, with most hyperoxemic patients on day 2 receiving relatively low FIO2. Multivariate analyses found no independent relationship between day 1 hyperoxemia, sustained hyperoxemia, or excess FIO2 use and adverse clinical outcomes. Mortality was 42% in patients with excess FIO2 use, compared to 39% in a propensity-matched sample of normoxemic (PaO2 55-100 mmHg) patients (P = 0.47). Conclusions: Hyperoxemia and excess oxygen use are both prevalent in early ARDS but are most often non-sustained. No relationship was found between hyperoxemia or excessive oxygen use and patient outcome in this cohort. Trial registration: LUNG-SAFE is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02010073publishersversionPeer reviewe
Highly pathogenic coronaviruses: thrusting vaccine development in the spotlight
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) disease (COVID-19) has caused major public health crises. There have been more than 4,400,000 reported cases of COVID-2019 and more than 300,000 reported deaths to date (16/05/2020). SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 have attracted widespread global attention due to their high infectivity and pathogenicity. To date, there is no specific treatment proven effective against these viral infectious diseases. Vaccination is considered one of the most effective strategies to prevent viral infections. Therefore, the development of effective vaccines against highly pathogenic coronaviruses is essential. In this review, we will briefly describe coronavirus vaccine design targets, summarize recent advances in the development of coronavirus vaccines, and highlight current adjuvants for improving the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines
A novel approach for locating mice brain regions of <i>Cryptococcus neoformans</i> CNS invasion
Aim of this study was to locate the brain regions where Cryptococcus interact with brain cells and invade into brain. After 7 days of intratracheal inocula-tion of GFP-tagged Cryptococcus neoformans strains H99, serial cryosections (10 ?m) from 3 C57 BL/6 J mice brains were imaged with immunofluorescence microscopy. GFP-tagged H99 were found in some brain regions such as primary motor cortex-secondary motor cortex, caudate putamen, stratum lucidum of hippocampus, field CA1 of hippocampus, dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus, lateral posterior thalamic nucleus, laterorostral part, lateral posterior thalamic nucleus, mediorostral part, retrosplenial agranular cortex, lateral area of secondary visual cortex, and lacunosum molecular layer of the hippocampus. The results will be very useful for further exploring the mechanism of C. neoformans infection of brain.
A novel approach for locating mice brain regions of Cryptococcus neoformans CNS invasion
Aim of this study was to locate the brain regions where Cryptococcus interact with brain cells and invade into brain. After 7 days of intratracheal inocula-tion of GFP-tagged Cryptococcus neoformans strains H99, serial cryosections (10 μm) from 3 C57 BL/6 J mice brains were imaged with immunofluorescence microscopy. GFP-tagged H99 were found in some brain regions such as primary motor cortex-secondary motor cortex, caudate putamen, stratum lucidum of hippocampus, field CA1 of hippocampus, dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus, lateral posterior thalamic nucleus, laterorostral part, lateral posterior thalamic nucleus, mediorostral part, retrosplenial agranular cortex, lateral area of secondary visual cortex, and lacunosum molecular layer of the hippocampus. The results will be very useful for further exploring the mechanism of C. neoformans infection of brain
Investigation of negative permeability metamaterials for wireless power transfer
In order to enhance the transmission efficiency of wireless power transfer (WPT), a negative permeability metamaterials (NPM) with a structure of honeycomb composed by units of hexagon-shaped spirals copper is proposed in this paper. The unit parameters of the NPM are optimized, to make sure the negative permeability at the special frequency. The S-parameters of the designed NPM are measured by a network analyzer and the permeability is extracted, it shows the honeycomb NPM has a negative permeability at 6.43 MHz. A two-coil WPT is setup and the transmission efficiency of WPT embedded with NPM at the different position and with different structure are investigated. The measured results show that the 2-slab honeycomb NPM have a good perform compared with the 1-slab NPM, and the efficiency can be increased up to 51%. The results show that honeycomb NPM embedded in the WPT help to improve the transmission efficiency remarkable
Polymeric microneedle-mediated transdermal delivery of melittin for rheumatoid arthritis treatment
Prompt Consistency for Zero-Shot Task Generalization
One of the most impressive results of recent NLP history is the ability of
pre-trained language models to solve new tasks in a zero-shot setting. To
achieve this, NLP tasks are framed as natural language prompts, generating a
response indicating the predicted output. Nonetheless, the performance in such
settings often lags far behind its supervised counterpart, suggesting a large
space for potential improvement. In this paper, we explore methods to utilize
unlabeled data to improve zero-shot performance. Specifically, we take
advantage of the fact that multiple prompts can be used to specify a single
task, and propose to regularize prompt consistency, encouraging consistent
predictions over this diverse set of prompts. Our method makes it possible to
fine-tune the model either with extra unlabeled training data, or directly on
test input at inference time in an unsupervised manner. In experiments, our
approach outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot learner, T0 (Sanh et al.,
2022), on 9 out of 11 datasets across 4 NLP tasks by up to 10.6 absolute points
in terms of accuracy. The gains are often attained with a small number of
unlabeled examples.Comment: Preprint. Code is available at
https://github.com/violet-zct/swarm-distillation-zero-sho