The cumulative therapeutic effect of acupuncture in patients with migraine without aura: Evidence from dynamic alterations of intrinsic brain activity and effective connectivity

We explored the dynamic alterations of intrinsic brain activity and effective connectivity after acupuncture treatment to investigate the underlying neurological mechanism of acupuncture treatment in patients with migraine without aura (MwoA). The Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans were separately obtained at baseline, after the first and 12th acupuncture sessions in 40 patients with MwoA. Compared with the healthy controls (HCs), patients with MwoA mostly showed a decreased dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (dALFF) variability in the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), superior lobe of left cerebellum (Cerebellum_Crus1_L), right precuneus (PCUN.R), and so on. The decreased dALFF variability of RVM, Cerebellum_Crus1_L, and PCUN.R progressively recovered after the first and 12th acupuncture treatment sessions as compared to the baseline. There was gradually increased dynamic effective connectivity (DEC) variability in RVM outflow to the right middle frontal gyrus, left insula, right precentral gyrus, and right supramarginal gyrus, and gradually enhanced DEC variability from the right fusiform gyrus inflow to RVM. Furthermore, the gradually increased DEC variability was found from Cerebellum_Crus1_L outflow to the left middle occipital gyrus and the left precentral gyrus, from PCUN.R outflow to the right thalamus. These dALFF variabilities were positively correlated with the frequency of migraine attacks and negatively correlated with disease duration at baseline. The dynamic Granger causality analysis (GCA) coefficients of this DEC variability were positively correlated with Migraine-Specific Quality of Life Questionnaire scores and negatively correlated with the frequency of migraine attacks and visual analog scale (VAS) scores after 12th acupuncture sessions. Our results were analyzed by a longitudinal fMRI in the absence of a sham acupuncture control group and provided insight into the dynamic alterations of brain activity and effective connectivity in patients with MwoA after acupuncture intervention. Acupuncture might relieve MwoA by increasing the effective connectivity of RVM, Cerebellum_Crus1_L, and PCUN.R to make up for the decreased dALFF variability in these brain areas

Intramolecular Energy and Electron Transfer Within a Diazaperopyrenium-Based Cyclophane

Molecules capable of performing highly efficient energy transfer and ultrafast photo-induced electron transfer in well-defined multichromophoric structures are indispensable to the development of artificial photosynthetic systems. Herein, we report on the synthesis, characterization and photophysical properties of a rationally designed multichromophoric tetracationic cyclophane, DAPPBox^(4+), containing a diazaperopyrenium (DAPP^(2+)) unit and an extended viologen (ExBIPY^(2+)) unit, which are linked together by two p-xylylene bridges. Both ^1H NMR spectroscopy and single crystal X-ray diffraction analysis confirm the formation of an asymmetric, rigid, box-like cyclophane, DAPPBox^(4+). The solid-state superstructure of this cyclophane reveals a herringbone-type packing motif, leading to two types of π···π interactions: (i) between the ExBIPY^(2+) unit and the DAPP^(2+) unit (π···π distance of 3.7 Å) in the adjacent parallel cyclophane, as well as (ii) between the ExBIPY^(2+) unit (π···π distance of 3.2 Å) and phenylene ring in the closest orthogonal cyclophane. Moreover, the solution-phase photophysical properties of this cyclophane have been investigated by both steady-state and time-resolved absorption and emission spectroscopies. Upon photoexcitation of DAPPBox^(4+) at 330 nm, rapid and quantitative intramolecular energy transfer occurs from the ^1*ExBIPY^(2+) unit to the DAPP^(2+) unit in 0.5 ps to yield ^1*DAPP^(2+). The same excitation wavelength simultaneously populates a higher excited state of ^1*DAPP^(2+) which then undergoes ultrafast intramolecular electron transfer from ^1*DAPP^(2+) to ExBIPY^(2+) to yield the DAPP^(3+•) – ExBIPY^(+•) radical ion pair in τ = 1.5 ps. Selective excitation of DAPP^(2+) at 505 nm populates a lower excited state where electron transfer is kinetically unfavorable

Identification of a novel susceptibility locus at 13q34 and refinement of the 20p12.2 region as a multi-signal locus associated with bladder cancer risk in individuals of european ancestry

Candidate gene and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified 15 independent genomic regions associated with bladder cancer risk. In search for additional susceptibility variants, we followed up on four promising single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that had not achieved genome-wide significance in 6911 cases and 11 814 controls (rs6104690, rs4510656, rs5003154 and rs4907479, P < 1 7 10(-6)), using additional data from existing GWAS datasets and targeted genotyping for studies that did not have GWAS data. In a combined analysis, which included data on up to 15 058 cases and 286 270 controls, two SNPs achieved genome-wide statistical significance: rs6104690 in a gene desert at 20p12.2 (P = 2.19 7 10(-11)) and rs4907479 within the MCF2L gene at 13q34 (P = 3.3 7 10(-10)). Imputation and fine-mapping analyses were performed in these two regions for a subset of 5551 bladder cancer cases and 10 242 controls. Analyses at the 13q34 region suggest a single signal marked by rs4907479. In contrast, we detected two signals in the 20p12.2 region-the first signal is marked by rs6104690, and the second signal is marked by two moderately correlated SNPs (r(2) = 0.53), rs6108803 and the previously reported rs62185668. The second 20p12.2 signal is more strongly associated with the risk of muscle-invasive (T2-T4 stage) compared with non-muscle-invasive (Ta, T1 stage) bladder cancer (case-case P 64 0.02 for both rs62185668 and rs6108803). Functional analyses are needed to explore the biological mechanisms underlying these novel genetic associations with risk for bladder cancer

A Field Study on Thermal Comfort in Multi-Storey Residential Buildings in the Karst Area of Guilin

It is important to consider reducing energy use while improving occupants’ indoor thermal comfort. The actual thermal comfort needs and demands should be considered to determine the indoor thermal environment design. In previous studies, research has not been carried out on thermal comfort in karst areas. Thus, a long-term field investigation was carried out on multi-storey residential buildings in the karst area of Guilin city centre during summer (from August 2019 to September 2019) and winter (from December 2019 to January 2020). In this study, the indoor thermal environments of three categories of dwellings were analysed. A total of 77 residential buildings with 144 households were randomly selected, and 223 occupants from 18 to 80 years old participated. A total of 414 effective questionnaires were collected from the subjects. The results show that there was an obvious conflict between the predicted mean vote (PMV) and the thermal sensation vote (TSV). The neutrality temperatures calculated by the regression method were 24.2 °C in summer and 16.2 °C in winter. The thermal comfort range was observed at operative temperatures of 20.9–27.5 °C in summer and 12.2–20.1 °C in winter. The desired thermal sensation for people in the Guilin karst area was not always reflected in the thermal neutrality range. A preference for warmness was identified in the survey

On building a diabetes centric knowledge base via mining the web

Abstract Background Diabetes has become one of the hot topics in life science researches. To support the analytical procedures, researchers and analysts expend a mass of labor cost to collect experimental data, which is also error-prone. To reduce the cost and to ensure the data quality, there is a growing trend of extracting clinical events in form of knowledge from electronic medical records (EMRs). To do so, we first need a high-coverage knowledge base (KB) of a specific disease to support the above extraction tasks called KB-based Extraction. Methods We propose an approach to build a diabetes-centric knowledge base (a.k.a. DKB) via mining the Web. In particular, we first extract knowledge from semi-structured contents of vertical portals, fuse individual knowledge from each site, and further map them to a unified KB. The target DKB is then extracted from the overall KB based on a distance-based Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Results During the experiments, we selected eight popular vertical portals in China as data sources to construct DKB. There are 7703 instances and 96,041 edges in the final diabetes KB covering diseases, symptoms, western medicines, traditional Chinese medicines, examinations, departments, and body structures. The accuracy of DKB is 95.91%. Besides the quality assessment of extracted knowledge from vertical portals, we also carried out detailed experiments for evaluating the knowledge fusion performance as well as the convergence of the distance-based EM algorithm with positive results. Conclusions In this paper, we introduced an approach to constructing DKB. A knowledge extraction and fusion pipeline was first used to extract semi-structured data from vertical portals and individual KBs were further fused into a unified knowledge base. After that, we develop a distance based Expectation Maximization algorithm to extract a subset from the overall knowledge base forming the target DKB. Experiments showed that the data in DKB are rich and of high-quality

Alloying strategies for additive manufacturing of Ti6Al4V based alloys, composites and functionally graded materials: Microstructure and phase evolution of intra and inter-layer

The further developments of additive manufacturing (AM) provides a possibility for Ti6Al4V and its functionally graded materials (FGMs), but limits further applications due to its low ductility, low microhardness and poor wear resistance. The key lies in the presence of microstructures such as epitaxial columnar β-grain orientation and heterogeneous phase distribution in AM Ti6Al4V, as well as the interfacial bonding problems (intermetallic phases, delamination, cracking) in AM Ti6Al4V FGMs. In order to address these fundamental intra and inter-layer problems, firstly the microstructure and phase evolution process of AM Ti6Al4V columnar-to-equiaxed transformation (CET) promoted by some alloying strategies was summarized in this paper according to alloying elements and reinforcing particle types. Subsequently, controlled changes in the composition and microstructure of AM Ti6Al4V FGMs were achieved by adding interlayers/introducing gradient interfaces, and the metallurgical reactions and phase transformation mechanisms that inhibit the formation of intermetallic compounds and interfacial defects were explored. Finally, the difficulties and future research directions for alloying strategies to achieve high strength and ductility of AM Ti6Al4V were presented. This review aims to improve the reliability of AM Ti6Al4V and its FGMs for applications in critical load-bearing structures through in-situ alloying and multi-material for the microstructure design of AM Ti6Al4V

Increased leukocyte mitochondrial DNA copy number is associated with oral premalignant lesions: an epidemiology study

Although changes in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) copy number in peripheral blood leukocytes (PBLs) have been linked to increased susceptibility to several cancers, the relationship between the mtDNA copy number in PBLs and the risk of cancer precursors has not been investigated. In this study, we measured the relative mtDNA copy number in PBLs of 143 patients with histologically confirmed oral premalignant lesions (OPLs) and of 357 healthy controls that were frequency-matched to patients according to age, sex and race. OPL patients had a significantly higher mtDNA copy number than the controls (1.36 ± 0.74 versus 1.11 ± 0.32; P < 0.001). In analyses stratified by sex, race, alcohol consumption and smoking status, the mtDNA copy number was higher in the OPL patients than in the controls in all the strata. Using the median mtDNA copy number in the control group as a cutoff, we found that individuals with a high mtDNA copy number had significantly higher risk of having OPLs than individuals with a low mtDNA copy number (adjusted odds ratio, 1.93; 95% confidence interval, 1.23-3.05, P = 0.004). Analysis of the joint effect of alcohol consumption and smoking revealed even greater risk for OPLs. Our results suggest that high mtDNA copy number in PBLs is significantly associated with having OPLs. To our knowledge, this is the first epidemiologic study to show that the mtDNA copy number may indicate the risk of cancer precursors