Effect of total flavonoids of Cuscuta chinensis Lam. (Convolvulaceae) on oxidative stress injury in mouse testis and epididymis, and on serum levels of reproductive hormones in oligoasthenospermia mice model

Purpose: To investigate the effect of total flavonoids of Cuscuta chinensis (TFCC) on oxidative stress injury in testis and epididymis, and serum levels of reproductive hormones in an oligoasthenospermia (OAS) mice model. Methods: Thirty male Wistar mice were randomly assigned to three groups of 10 mice each: control group, OAS group and TFCC group. With the exception of control group, OAS was orally induced in the mice with ornidazole. The TFCC group received TFCC. Reactive oxygen species (ROS), malondialdehyde (MDA) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) were determined. Serum levels of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH) and testosterone were also measured. Results: The levels of ROS and MDA in the testis and epididymis significantly increased in OAS group, when compared to control mice (p < 0.05). However, TFCC administration significantly reduced their levels in these tissues (p < 0.05). In contrast, SOD activity significantly decreased in the testis and epididymis of mice in OAS group, relative to control group, but increased significantly after TFCC exposure (p < 0.05). Serum FSH and LH were markedly elevated in OAS group, but treatment with TFCC significantly reduced the levels of these hormones (p < 0.05). Conclusion: These results suggest that TFCC effectively improves sperm quality and reduces oxidative damage in testis and epididymis of mice with oligoasthenospermia via a mechanism involving the regulation of serum levels of reproductive hormones. Thus, TFCC may be useful in the treatment of oligoasthenospermia

Investor attention and carbon return: evidence from the EU-ETS

This paper firstly puts forward to employ investor attention obtained from Google trends to explain and forecast carbon futures return in the European Union-Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS). Our empirical results show that investor attention is a granger cause to changes in carbon return. Furthermore, investor attention generates both linear and non-linear effects on carbon return. The results demonstrate that investor attention shows excellent explanatory power on carbon return. Moreover, we conduct several out-of-sample forecasts to explore the predictive power of investor attention. The results indicate that incorporating investor attention indeed improve the accuracy of out-of-sample forecasts both in short and long horizons and can generate significant economic values. All results demonstrate that investor attention is a non-negligible pricing factor in carbon market

Piezoelectric Materials for Medical Applications

This chapter describes the history and development strategy of piezoelectric materials for medical applications. It covers the piezoelectric properties of materials found inside the human body including blood vessels, skin, and bones as well as how the piezoelectricity innate in those materials aids in disease treatment. It also covers piezoelectric materials and their use in medical implants by explaining how piezoelectric materials can be used as sensors and can emulate natural materials. Finally, the possibility of using piezoelectric materials to design medical equipment and how current models can be improved by further research is explored. This review is intended to provide greater understanding of how important piezoelectricity is to the medical industry by describing the challenges and opportunities regarding its future development

Management of mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B virus: Propositions and challenges

AbstractChronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection due to mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) during perinatal period remains an important global health problem. Despite standard passive–active immunoprophylaxis with hepatitis B immunoglobulin (HBIG) and hepatitis B vaccine in neonates, up to 9% of newborns still acquire HBV infection, especially these from hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) positive mothers. Management of HBV infection in pregnancy still need to draw careful attention because of some controversial aspects, including the failure of passive-active immunoprophylaxis in a fraction of newborns, the effect and necessity of periodical hepatitis B immunoglobulin (HBIG) injection to the mothers, the safety of antiviral prophylaxis with nucleoside/nucleotide analogs, the benefit of different delivery ways, and the safety of breastfeeding. In this review, we highlight these unsettled issues of preventive strategies in perinatal period, and we further aim to provide an optimal approach to the management of preventing MTCT of HBV infection

Giant perivascular spaces: two case reports

Giant perivascular spaces or Virchow-Robin spaces (VRSs) are uniquely inherent developmental malformation and are generally lined by ependymal or leptomeningeal cells. The cerebral hemispheres with VRSs present multiple cysts of curvilinear, round, oval, or layered configuration, which have the same signal intensity as the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and represent extremely dilated VRSs. The cortex became extremely thin with a well-defined margin. Herein, we report two cases of true giant perivascular spaces and present a review of pertinent literature. A patient has multiple cysts in the unilateral and bilateral and has polycystic liver. The clinical presentation, image logical features, and diagnosis are discussed

Distinct patterns of fasting plasma glucose and lipid profile levels over time in adults tested positive for HIV on HAART in Shanghai, China, revealed using growth mixture models

ObjectivesThis study sought to identify potential change patterns and predictors of fasting plasma glucose (FPG) and lipid levels after initiating highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART).MethodsA retrospective cohort study was conducted on 1,572 patients tested positive for HIV who initiated HAART between January 2010 and October 2020 in Shanghai, China. The growth mixture models (GMM) were used for capturing subgroups of FPG trajectories as well as triglyceride (TG) and total cholesterol (TC) dual-trajectories. Multinomial logistic regression models identified correlates of given trajectories.ResultsThe median follow-up time was 2.0 years (IQR 1.0–4.7). Three FPG trajectory subgroups were identified as FPG low-stable (62.3%), medium-stable (30.5%), and high-increasing (7.2%). Furthermore, three subgroups of TG and TC dual-trajectories were identified as TG and TC high-slight increasing (13.7%), low-rapid increasing (27.6%), and a subgroup of medium-stable TC and slight-decreasing TG (58.7%). Older age, high TG, FPG, BMI, CD4 count of <200 at baseline, and initial use of zidovudine (AZT) and protease inhibitors (PIs) helped to identify the class with increasing glucose or lipid metabolism trajectories.ConclusionThe change patterns of plasma glucose and lipid in patients tested positive for HIV were heterogeneous and tailored interventions should be considered in specific subgroups

ESSM: An Extractive Summarization Model with Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Information and Span Mask Encoding

Extractive reading comprehension is to extract consecutive subsequences from a given article to answer the given question. Previous work often adopted Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) that could cause semantically correlated words to be separated. Also, previous features extraction strategy cannot effectively capture the global semantic information. In this paper, an extractive summarization model is proposed with enhanced spatial-temporal information and span mask encoding (ESSM) to promote global semantic information. ESSM utilizes Embedding Layer to reduce semantic segmentation of correlated words, and adopts TemporalConvNet Layer to relief the loss of feature information. The model can also deal with unanswerable questions. To verify the effectiveness of the model, experiments on datasets SQuAD1.1 and SQuAD2.0 are conducted. Our model achieved an EM of 86.31% and a F1 score of 92.49% on SQuAD1.1 and the numbers are 80.54% and 83.27% for SQuAD2.0. It was proved that the model is effective for extractive QA task