Bexarotene enhances heart structure and function in diabetic rats by inhibiting ventricular remodeling and cardiomyocyte apoptosis

Purpose: To investigate the influence of bexarotene (Bex) on cardiac structure and function in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes mellitus (DM) rats, and the mechanism of action involved. Methods: Four groups of Sprague Dawley rats (n = 40) were used: normal control, DM, DM+ Bex (10 mg/kg/day), and DM+ Bex (20 mg/kg/day) (n = 10). The DM rat model was established by intraperitoneal injection of STZ. Cardiac structure and function of rats were determined and compared. Whole heart and left ventricle were weighed. The protein expressions of Bcl2 and Bax in rat myocardial tissue were determined using Western blotting. Results: Compared to control group, there was significant reduction in the levels of IVSd (inlet ventricular septal defect) and LVPWd (left ventricle posterior wall in diastole) in DM group, but significant increase in these parameters in DM +Bex (20 mg/kg/day) group, relative to DM-treated rats (p < 0.05). Moreover, there were higher expression levels of Bcl2 and Bax in DM group, when compared with normal control, but Bcl2/Bax ratio was significantly lower (p < 0.05). Furthermore, Bcl2 and Bax levels in DM + Bex (20 mg/kg/day) group were significantly lower than those in DM group, while Bcl2/Bax ratio increased significantly (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Bexarotene improves the cardiac structure of DM rats by lowering blood glucose, and by inhibiting ventricular remodeling and cardiomyocyte apoptosis. These findings may be beneficial in the development of new anti-DM drugs

Improved biological wastewater treatment and sludge characteristics by applying magnetic field to aerobic granules

Permanent magnets with non-uniform magnetic field and an electromagnet with 3–5 mT uniform magnetic field were applied to investigate their effects on both aerobic granulation and COD and ammonium removal in reactors with less than 7% coverage of magnetic field. It was found that both types of magnets had little influence on the granulation speed and the settling ability of granular sludge at the steady state. However, the maximum specific COD degradation rate and the maximum specific NH4+-N removal rate were increased by 45–54% and 30–50%, respectively, in the magnetic fields. Mean effluent COD with the electromagnet and the permanent magnet field, respectively, at the steady state, was 28 mg l?1 and 6 mg l?1, respectively, lower than the control at a statistical significance level of alpha = 0.05. No statistically significant increase in NH4+-N removal was observed at the steady state probably due to almost complete NH4+-N removal before the end of the cycle. In addition, it was found that extracellular polymeric substances in granular sludge with electromagnet were 77% more while soluble microbial products were much less compared with the control, suggesting a positively changed metabolism of granular sludge at steady state. The results in this study indicated that low-intensity magnetic field has a great potential to be applied in granular sludge for an improved wastewater treatment

Existence of Solutions for Nonhomogeneous A

We study the following nonhomogeneous A-harmonic equations: d*A(x,du(x))+B(x,u(x))=0,    x∈Ω,  u(x)=0,  x∈∂Ω, where Ω⊂ℝn is a bounded and convex Lipschitz domain, A(x,du(x)) and B(x,u(x)) satisfy some p(x)-growth conditions, respectively. We obtain the existence of weak solutions for the above equations in subspace 01,p(x)(Ω,Λl-1) of W01,p(x)(Ω,Λl-1)

An Analysis of the Construction and Development of ‘Starry Star’ Training Camp in Zhengzhou City

Since 2017, the Ministry of Education has taken the lead in establishing the \u27Starry Star\u27 pilot training camp. As a leading city of school football campaign/activity, Zhengzhou City takes up heavy responsibility of continuously promoting the rapid development of school football in Henan Province. This paper adopts such methodologies such as literature, fieldwork, mathematical statistics and logical analysis to identify the weaknesses in the current phase of construction and to make reasonable recommendations according to policies and the actual situation for pointing out the direction for the future development. In terms of organizational leadership, all relevant policies and documents are well-developed reflecting the high degree of importance attached to each training camp, but very few of them have omissions in the development of the system of admissions and training management regulations. In terms of condition guarantee, three aspects are prominent, including the treatment of coaches (calculation of hours), the size of the training grounds at each training site not meeting the requirements of the camps\u27 participation groups (due to limited size of the campus), and the lack of implementation of supporting funds (in the surrounding counties). In terms of competition and training, all schools lost points to varying degrees in the various detailed assessment indicators of the survey and assessment such as inappropriate teaching attitude of the teaching staff, unsystematic training syllabus, unfinished work arrangements for two tournaments and one practice and insufficient attention to the campers\u27 performance in cultural subjects. In terms of reserve training and training participation rate, nearly 30% of the camps failed to send outstanding athletes to higher level schools; half of the camps failed to ensure over 90% attendance of campers. It is suggested that relevant authorities should in future give standardized and clear policies regarding admissions and other related systems. Further, the authorities should clarify the way of coaches\u27 salary and title appraisal, focus on the implementation of matching funds for training camps, and gradually adjust the correspondence between matching camper groups and camp site conditions. As the main task of the Starry Star training camps, more attention should be placed in future work, improving policies, seriously correcting and dealing with various situations that affect the quality of race training in each camp. The authorities should optimize the way of supplying outstanding athletes, and at the same time strengthen regular inspections and random checks for the attendance, putting equal emphasis on training quality and participation

DMP_MI: an effective diabetes mellitus classification algorithm on imbalanced data with missing values

© 2019 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved. As a widely known chronic disease, diabetes mellitus is called a silent killer. It makes the body produce less insulin and causes increased blood sugar, which leads to many complications and affects the normal functioning of various organs, such as eyes, kidneys, and nerves. Although diabetes has attracted high attention in research, due to the existence of missing values and class imbalance in the data, the overall performance of diabetes classification using machine learning is relatively low. In this paper, we propose an effective Prediction algorithm for Diabetes Mellitus classification on Imbalanced data with Missing values (DMP_MI). First, the missing values are compensated by the Naïve Bayes (NB) method for data normalization. Then, an adaptive synthetic sampling method (ADASYN) is adopted to reduce the influence of class imbalance on the prediction performance. Finally, a random forest (RF) classifier is used to generate predictions and evaluated using comprehensive set of evaluation indicators. Experiments performed on Pima Indians diabetes dataset from the University of California at Irvine, Irvine (UCI) Repository, have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed DMP_MI