Mitogenesis of Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Stimulated by Platelet-Derived Growth Factor-bb Is Inhibited by Blocking of Intracellular Signaling by Epigallocatechin-3- O

Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) is known to exhibit antioxidant, antiproliferative, and antithrombogenic effects and reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Key events in the development of cardiovascular disease are hypertrophy and hyperplasia according to vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation. In this study, we investigated whether EGCG can interfere with PDGF-bb stimulated proliferation, cell cycle distribution, and the gelatinolytic activity of MMP and signal transduction pathways on RAOSMC when it was treated in two different ways—cotreatment with PDGF-bb and pretreatment of EGCG before addition of PDGF-bb. Both cotreated and pretreated EGCG significantly inhibited PDGF-bb induced proliferation, cell cycle progression of the G0/G1 phase, and the gelatinolytic activity of MMP-2/9 on RAOSMC. Also, EGCG blocked PDGF receptor-β (PDGFR-β) phosphorylation on PDGF-bb stimulated RAOSMC under pretreatment with cells as well as cotreatment with PDGF-bb. The downstream signal transduction pathways of PDGFR-β, including p42/44 MAPK, p38 MAPK, and Akt phosphorylation, were also inhibited by EGCG in a pattern similar to PDGFR-β phosphorylation. These findings suggest that EGCG can inhibit PDGF-bb stimulated mitogenesis by indirectly and directly interrupting PDGF-bb signals and blocking the signaling pathway via PDGFR-β phosphorylation. Furthermore, EGCG may be used for treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease through blocking of PDGF-bb signaling

Blood transfusion had no influence on the 5-year biochemical recurrence after robot-assisted radical prostatectomy: a retrospective study

Background Although red blood cells (RBC) transfusion is known to be significantly associated with biochemical recurrence in patients undergoing open prostatectomy, its influence on biochemical recurrence after robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy remains unclear. Therefore, this study aimed to validate the effect of RBC transfusion on the 5-year biochemical recurrence in patients undergoing robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy. Methods This study retrospectively analyzed the medical records of patients who underwent robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy at single tertiary academic hospital between October 2007 and December 2014. Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was performed to identify any potential variables associated with 5-year biochemical recurrence. Results A total of 1311 patients were included in the final analysis. Of these, 30 patients (2.3%) were transfused with RBC either during robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy or during their hospital stay, which corresponded to 5-year biochemical recurrence of 15.7%. Multivariate Cox proportional hazard regression analysis showed that RBC transfusion had no influence on the 5-year biochemical recurrence. Variables including pathologic T stage (Hazard ratio [HR] 3.5, 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.4–5.1 p < 0.001), N stage (HR 2.3, 95% CI 1.5–3.7, p < 0.001), Gleason score (HR 2.4, 95% CI 1.8–3.2, p < 0.001), and surgical margin (HR 2.0, 95% CI 1.5–2.8, p < 0.001) were independently associated with the 5-year biochemical recurrence. Conclusions RBC transfusion had no significant influence on the 5-year biochemical recurrence in patients undergoing robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy

Efficient Implementations of Rainbow and UOV using AVX2

A signature scheme based on multivariate quadratic equations, Rainbow, was selected as one of digital signature finalists for NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Round 3. In this paper, we provide efficient implementations of Rainbow and UOV using the AVX2 instruction set. These efficient implementations include several optimizations for signing to accelerate solving linear systems and the Vinegar value substitution. We propose a new block matrix inversion (BMI) method using the Lower-Diagonal-Upper decomposition of blocks matrices based on the Schur complement that accelerates solving linear systems. Compared to UOV implemented with Gaussian elimination, our implementations with the BMI result in speedups of 12.36%, 24.3%, and 34% for signing at security categories I, III, and V, respectively. Compared to Rainbow implemented with Gaussian elimination, our implementations with the BMI result in speedups of 16.13% and 20.73% at the security categories III and V, respectively. We show that precomputation for the Vinegar value substitution and solving linear systems dramatically improve their signing. UOV with precomputation is 16.9 times, 35.5 times, and 62.8 times faster than UOV without precomputation at the three security categories, respectively. Rainbow with precomputation is 2.1 times, 2.2 times, and 2.8 times faster than Rainbow without precomputation at the three security categories, respectively. We then investigate resilience against leakage or reuse of the precomputed values in UOV and Rainbow to use the precomputation securely: leakage or reuse of the precomputed values leads to their full secret key recoveries in polynomial-time