Internship at FoE Japan

Poster created by students in the 2017 IWU Freeman Asia Internship Program

Huobahuagen tablet improves renal function in diabetic kidney disease: a real-world retrospective cohort study

ObjectiveWe aimed to explore the value of Huobahuagen tablet (HBT) in improving decreased renal function for patients with diabetic kidney disease (DKD) over time.MethodsThis was a single-center, retrospective, real-world study on eligible 122 DKD patients who continued to use HBT + Huangkui capsule (HKC) therapy or HKC therapy without interruption or alteration in Jiangsu Province Hospital of Chinese Medicine from July 2016 to March 2022. The primary observation outcomes included estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) at baseline and 1-, 3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month follow-up visits and changes in eGFR from baseline (ΔeGFR). Propensity score (PS) and inverse probability treatment weighting (IPTW) were used to control for confounders.ResultseGFR was significantly higher in the HBT + HKC group than in the HKC alone group at the 6-, 9-, and 12-month follow-up visits (p = 0.0448, 0.0002, and 0.0037, respectively), indicating the superiority of HBT + HKC over HBT alone. Furthermore, the ΔeGFR of the HBT + HKC group was significantly higher than that of the HKC alone group at the 6- and 12-month follow-up visits (p = 0.0369 and 0.0267, respectively). In the DKD G4 patients, eGFR was higher in the HBT + HKC group at the 1-, 3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month follow-up visits compared with baseline, with statistically significant differences at the 1-, 3-, and 6- month follow-up visits (p = 0.0256, 0.0069, and 0.0252, respectively). The fluctuations in ΔeGFR ranged from 2.54 ± 4.34 to 5.01 ± 5.55 ml/min/1.73 m2. Change in the urinary albumin/creatinine ratio from baseline did not exhibit a significant difference between the two groups at any of the follow-up visits (p > 0.05 for all). Adverse event incidence was low in both groups.ConclusionThe findings of this study based on real-world clinical practice indicate that HBT + HKC therapy exhibited better efficacy in improving and protecting renal function with a favorable safety profile than HKC therapy alone. However, further large-scale prospective randomized controlled trials are warranted to confirm these results

POLICY AND PROGRAMMATIC OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO NUTRITIOUS FOODS AMONG CHILDREN IN CLEVELAND COUNTY

The social and community context in which an individual lives is an essential social determinant of health (SDoH) that has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on quality of life and health. The social and community context interacts reciprocally with food insecurity (FI), making it essential to address FI. Thousands of children under the age of 18 are impacted by FI in Cleveland County, which has detrimental impacts on this vulnerable population’s social, emotional, and physical well-being. The Cleveland County Commissioners can appropriate funds to create a Meal Express Summer Food Program (MESFP) and establish the Mobile Meals for Children (MMC) program to address childhood FI. The MESFP will deliver federally funded summer meals, while the MMC program will deliver groceries to food-insecure households Both opportunities expand on evidence-based activities that will provide services and support to the community's children who need it most.Master of Public Healt

POLICY AND PROGRAMMATIC OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO NUTRITIOUS FOODS AMONG CHILDREN IN CLEVELAND COUNTY

The social and community context in which an individual lives is an essential social determinant of health (SDoH) that has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on quality of life and health. The social and community context interacts reciprocally with food insecurity (FI), making it essential to address FI. Thousands of children under the age of 18 are impacted by FI in Cleveland County, which has detrimental impacts on this vulnerable population’s social, emotional, and physical well-being. The Cleveland County Commissioners can appropriate funds to create a Meal Express Summer Food Program (MESFP) and establish the Mobile Meals for Children (MMC) program to address childhood FI. The MESFP will deliver federally funded summer meals, while the MMC program will deliver groceries to food-insecure households Both opportunities expand on evidence-based activities that will provide services and support to the community's children who need it most.Master of Public Healt

POLICY AND PROGRAMMATIC OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO NUTRITIOUS FOODS AMONG CHILDREN IN CLEVELAND COUNTY

The social and community context in which an individual lives is an essential social determinant of health (SDoH) that has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on quality of life and health. The social and community context interacts reciprocally with food insecurity (FI), making it essential to address FI. Thousands of children under the age of 18 are impacted by FI in Cleveland County, which has detrimental impacts on this vulnerable population’s social, emotional, and physical well-being. The Cleveland County Commissioners can appropriate funds to create a Meal Express Summer Food Program (MESFP) and establish the Mobile Meals for Children (MMC) program to address childhood FI. The MESFP will deliver federally funded summer meals, while the MMC program will deliver groceries to food-insecure households Both opportunities expand on evidence-based activities that will provide services and support to the community's children who need it most.Master of Public Healt

POLICY AND PROGRAMMATIC OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO NUTRITIOUS FOODS AMONG CHILDREN IN CLEVELAND COUNTY

The social and community context in which an individual lives is an essential social determinant of health (SDoH) that has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on quality of life and health. The social and community context interacts reciprocally with food insecurity (FI), making it essential to address FI. Thousands of children under the age of 18 are impacted by FI in Cleveland County, which has detrimental impacts on this vulnerable population’s social, emotional, and physical well-being. The Cleveland County Commissioners can appropriate funds to create a Meal Express Summer Food Program (MESFP) and establish the Mobile Meals for Children (MMC) program to address childhood FI. The MESFP will deliver federally funded summer meals, while the MMC program will deliver groceries to food-insecure households Both opportunities expand on evidence-based activities that will provide services and support to the community's children who need it most.Master of Public Healt

Task-aware Distributed Source Coding under Dynamic Bandwidth

Efficient compression of correlated data is essential to minimize communication overload in multi-sensor networks. In such networks, each sensor independently compresses the data and transmits them to a central node due to limited communication bandwidth. A decoder at the central node decompresses and passes the data to a pre-trained machine learning-based task to generate the final output. Thus, it is important to compress the features that are relevant to the task. Additionally, the final performance depends heavily on the total available bandwidth. In practice, it is common to encounter varying availability in bandwidth, and higher bandwidth results in better performance of the task. We design a novel distributed compression framework composed of independent encoders and a joint decoder, which we call neural distributed principal component analysis (NDPCA). NDPCA flexibly compresses data from multiple sources to any available bandwidth with a single model, reducing computing and storage overhead. NDPCA achieves this by learning low-rank task representations and efficiently distributing bandwidth among sensors, thus providing a graceful trade-off between performance and bandwidth. Experiments show that NDPCA improves the success rate of multi-view robotic arm manipulation by 9% and the accuracy of object detection tasks on satellite imagery by 14% compared to an autoencoder with uniform bandwidth allocation

Role of TRPM2 channel in temporal lobe epilepsy-associated neuroinflammation

Objective To investigate the role of transient receptor potential melatonin 2 （TRPM2） ion channels in microglia and astrocytes in temporal lobe epilepsy （TLE） -associated neuroinflammation. Methods Rats were randomly divided into the control group and epilepsy group. Seizure models were induced by lithium chloride-pilocarpine in the epilepsy group， and those in the control group were injected with the same dose of saline. The TLE rats were randomly divided into 7 subgroups according to the observation time after model establishment： acute phase （3 h group， 6 h group， 1 d group， 2 d group）， latent phase （14 d group） and chronic phase （30 d group， 90 d group） subgroups （n = 5）. The expression level of TRPM2 in the hippocampus of TLE rats at different stages were detected， and the cellular localization of TRPM2 in the brain of TLE rats was investigated. BV2 and C8 cell lines were induced by hydrogen peroxide （H2O2）. The levels of IL1-β， IL-6 and TNF-α released by BV2 and C8 cells were observed by ELISA. The levels of TRPM2， poly （ADP-ribose） polymerase 1 （PARP-1）， glycogen synthase kinase-3β （GSK-3β） and phosphorylated nuclear factor-κb p65 （p-NF-κb p65） were measured in H2O2-induced BV2 and C8 cells. Meantime， the activity of Calcineurin （CaN） in H2O2-induced BV2 was observed. Results The TRPM2 expression in 2d epileptic rat hippocampus was increased （P < 0.05）. The expression of TRPM2 and the release of inflammatory cytokines were increased in H2O2 induced-BV2 and C8 cells （both P < 0.05）. H2O2 could up-regulate the expression of PARP-1 and p-NF-κB p65 and enhance the activity of CaN in BV2 cells （all P < 0.05）. Conclusions Oxidative stress can up-regulate the expression levels of TRPM2 and pro-inflammatory cytokines in microglia and astrocytes. Oxidative stress caused by recurrent epilepsy may mediate the occurrence of TLE-associated neuroinflammation through the TRPM2/ CaN/p-NF-κB p65 pathway in microglia