Mangiferin ameliorates insulin resistance in a rat model of polycystic ovary syndrome via inhibition of inflammation

Purpose: To examine the effect of mangiferin on insulin resistance (IR) in a rat polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) model.Methods: The rat PCOS model was established via subcutaneous injection of 6 mg/kg of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), and mangiferin was orally administered. Body and ovarian weights were recorded. Serum levels of glucose, insulin, and related inflammatory cytokines were evaluated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, while the expression levels of key proteins were analyzed by western blotting.Results: DHEA significantly increased ovarian weight and the ratio of ovarian weight/body weight (p <0.001), while mangiferin treatment decreased them (p < 0.001). Mangiferin also lowered DHEA-induced enhancements in serum glucose and insulin levels (p < 0.001). The mRNA and, expression and concentrations of inflammatory cytokines (interleukin-6(IL-6), interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α)) were also significantly reduced by mangiferin treatment (p < 0.001). Furthermore, mangiferin suppressed phosphorylation of nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) but increased the phosphorylation of protein kinase B (AKT, p < 0.001).Conclusion: These results reveal that mangiferin not only decreases inflammatory cytokine levels by regulating NF-κB signaling pathway but also ameliorates IR in a rat PCOS model via regulating AKT signaling pathway. Thus, mangiferin is a potential therapeutic strategy for the management of PCOS. Keywords: Polycystic ovary syndrome, Mangiferin, Inflammation, Insulin resistance, NF-κB, AK

A nested land uses–landscapes–livelihoods approach to assess the real costs of land-use transitions: Insights from southeast Asia

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is viewed as an effective way to mitigate climate change by compensating stewards of forested areas for minimizing forestland conversion and protecting forest services. Opportunity costs assess the cost of foregone opportunity when preserving the forest instead of investing in an alternative activity or resource use. This paper questions the calculation method of opportunity costs using averaged economic benefits and co-benefits of different land-use transitions. We propose a nested approach to land-use transitions at the interface between landscapes and livelihoods and assessing a wide range of potential socio-ecological costs and benefits. Combining household surveys and focus groups with participatory mapping, we applied the approach in villages of Laos, Vietnam and China positioned along a broad transition trajectory from subsistence shifting cultivation to intensive commercial agriculture. By looking beyond the economics of land use, we highlight important linkages between land-use changes and livelihood differentiation, vulnerability and inequalities. Our results show the importance of addressing the impacts of land-use transitions on a wide range of potential ecological and socioeconomic costs and benefits at multiple levels

The exposure-response relationship between temperature and childhood hand, foot and mouth disease: A multicity study from mainland China.

BACKGROUND: Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is a rising public health issue in the Asia-Pacific region. Numerous studies have tried to quantify the relationship between meteorological variables and HFMD but with inconsistent results, in particular for temperature. We aimed to characterize the relationship between temperature and HFMD in various locations and to investigate the potential heterogeneity. METHODS: We retrieved the daily series of childhood HFMD counts (aged 0-12 years) and meteorological variables for each of 143 cities in mainland China in the period 2009-2014. We fitted a common distributed lag nonlinear model allowing for over dispersion to each of the cities to obtain the city-specific estimates of temperature-HFMD relationship. Then we pooled the city-specific estimates through multivariate meta-regression with city-level characteristics as potential effect modifiers. RESULTS: We found that the overall pooled temperature-HFMD relationship was shown as an approximately inverted V shape curve, peaking at the 91th percentile of temperature with a risk ratio of 1.30 (95% CI: 1.23-1.37) compared to its 50th percentile. We found that 68.5% of the variations of city-specific estimates was attributable to heterogeneity. We identified rainfall and altitude as the two main effect modifiers. CONCLUSIONS: We found a nonlinear relationship between temperature and HFMD. The temperature-HFMD relationship varies depending on geographic and climatic conditions. The findings can help us deepen the understanding of weather-HFMD relationship and provide evidences for related public health decisions

EDMAE: An Efficient Decoupled Masked Autoencoder for Standard View Identification in Pediatric Echocardiography

This paper introduces the Efficient Decoupled Masked Autoencoder (EDMAE), a novel self-supervised method for recognizing standard views in pediatric echocardiography. EDMAE introduces a new proxy task based on the encoder-decoder structure. The EDMAE encoder is composed of a teacher and a student encoder. The teacher encoder extracts the potential representation of the masked image blocks, while the student encoder extracts the potential representation of the visible image blocks. The loss is calculated between the feature maps output by the two encoders to ensure consistency in the latent representations they extract. EDMAE uses pure convolution operations instead of the ViT structure in the MAE encoder. This improves training efficiency and convergence speed. EDMAE is pre-trained on a large-scale private dataset of pediatric echocardiography using self-supervised learning, and then fine-tuned for standard view recognition. The proposed method achieves high classification accuracy in 27 standard views of pediatric echocardiography. To further verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the authors perform another downstream task of cardiac ultrasound segmentation on the public dataset CAMUS. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms some popular supervised and recent self-supervised methods, and is more competitive on different downstream tasks.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables, Published in Biomedical Signal Processing and Contro

Epidemiology of recurrent hand, foot and mouth disease, China, 2008–2015

Using China’s national surveillance data on hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) for 2008–2015, we described the epidemiologic and virologic features of recurrent HFMD. A total of 398,010 patients had HFMD recurrence; 1,767 patients had 1,814 cases of recurrent laboratory-confirmed HFMD: 99 reinfections of enterovirus A71 (EV-A71) with EV-A71, 45 of coxsackievirus A16 (CV-A16) with CV-A16, 364 of other enteroviruses with other enteroviruses, 383 of EV-A71 with CV-A16 and CV-A16 with EV-A71, and 923 of EV-A71 or CV-A16 with other enteroviruses and other enteroviruses with EV-A71 or CV-A16. The probability of HFMD recurrence was 1.9% at 12 months, 3.3% at 24 months, 3.9% at 36 months, and 4.0% at 38.8 months after the primary episode. HFMD severity was not associated with recurrent episodes or time interval between episodes. Elucidation of the mechanism underlying HFMD recurrence with the same enterovirus serotype and confirmation that HFMD recurrence is not associated with disease severity is needed. © 2018, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). All rights reserved

MiR-365-3p is a negative regulator in IL-17-mediated asthmatic inflammation

BackgroundInterleukin-17, the major proinflammatory cytokine secreted by Th17 cells, makes essential contribution to pathogenesis of severe asthma, while the detailed mechanisms, especially the involvement of microRNAs which are also important participants in asthma progression, remains largely unclear.MethodsIn this study, we established a house dust mite (HDM) extract-induced murine asthmatic models and the miRNA expression in the lung tissues of mice were profiled by miRNA microarray assay. The effect of miR-365-3p on IL-17-mediated inflammation was examined by qRT-PCR and immunoblotting analysis. The involvement of ARRB2 as target gene of miR-365-3p was verified by overexpression or RNA interference.ResultsHDM extract-induced asthmatic inflammation was proved to be IL17-mediated and miR-365-3p was screened out to be the only miRNA exclusively responsive to IL-17. miR-365-3p, whose expression was significantly downregulated upon IL-17 stimulation, was demonstrated to exert remarkable anti-inflammatory effect to decrease IL-17-provoked inflammatory cytokines (KC/IL-8 and IL-6) in both airway epithelial cells and macrophages of murine and human origins, verifying its universal antagonizing activity against IL-17-initiated inflammation across the two species. ARRB2 was characterized as the key target of miR-365-3p to negate IL-17-induced inflammatory cytokines.ConclusionTaken together, our data supported the notion that miR-365-3p, which was diminished by IL-17 in murine and human asthmatic pathogenesis, functioned as an essential negative mediator in IL-17-stimuated inflammatory response by targeting ARRB2, which would shed new light to the understanding and therapeutics thereof of asthmatic inflammation

Accuracy of epidemiological inferences based on publicly available information: retrospective comparative analysis of line lists of human cases infected with influenza A(H7N9) in China

Background: Appropriate public health responses to infectious disease threats should be based on best-available evidence, which requires timely reliable data for appropriate analysis. During the early stages of epidemics, analysis of ‘line lists’ with detailed information on laboratory-confirmed cases can provide important insights into the epidemiology of a specific disease. The objective of the present study was to investigate the extent to which reliable epidemiologic inferences could be made from publicly-available epidemiologic data of human infection with influenza A(H7N9) virus. Methods: We collated and compared six different line lists of laboratory-confirmed human cases of influenza A(H7N9) virus infection in the 2013 outbreak in China, including the official line list constructed by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention plus five other line lists by HealthMap, Virginia Tech, Bloomberg News, the University of Hong Kong and FluTrackers, based on publicly-available information. We characterized clinical severity and transmissibility of the outbreak, using line lists available at specific dates to estimate epidemiologic parameters, to replicate real-time inferences on the hospitalization fatality risk, and the impact of live poultry market closure. Results: Demographic information was mostly complete (less than 10% missing for all variables) in different line lists, but there were more missing data on dates of hospitalization, discharge and health status (more than 10% missing for each variable). The estimated onset to hospitalization distributions were similar (median ranged from 4.6 to 5.6 days) for all line lists. Hospital fatality risk was consistently around 20% in the early phase of the epidemic for all line lists and approached the final estimate of 35% afterwards for the official line list only. Most of the line lists estimated >90% reduction in incidence rates after live poultry market closures in Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou. Conclusions: We demonstrated that analysis of publicly-available data on H7N9 permitted reliable assessment of transmissibility and geographical dispersion, while assessment of clinical severity was less straightforward. Our results highlight the potential value in constructing a minimum dataset with standardized format and definition, and regular updates of patient status. Such an approach could be particularly useful for diseases that spread across multiple countries

Knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) relating to avian influenza in urban and rural areas of China

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Studies have revealed that visiting poultry markets and direct contact with sick or dead poultry are significant risk factors for H5N1 infection, the practices of which could possibly be influenced by people's knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAPs) associated with avian influenza (AI). To determine the KAPs associated with AI among the Chinese general population, a cross-sectional survey was conducted in China.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We used standardized, structured questionnaires distributed in both an urban area (Shenzhen, Guangdong Province; n = 1,826) and a rural area (Xiuning, Anhui Province; n = 2,572) using the probability proportional to size (PPS) sampling technique.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Approximately three-quarters of participants in both groups requested more information about AI. The preferred source of information for both groups was television. Almost three-quarters of all participants were aware of AI as an infectious disease; the urban group was more aware that it could be transmitted through poultry, that it could be prevented, and was more familiar with the relationship between AI and human infection. The villagers in Xiuning were more concerned than Shenzhen residents about human AI viral infection. Regarding preventative measures, a higher percentage of the urban group used soap for hand washing whereas the rural group preferred water only. Almost half of the participants in both groups had continued to eat poultry after being informed about the disease.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our study shows a high degree of awareness of human AI in both urban and rural populations, and could provide scientific support to assist the Chinese government in developing strategies and health-education campaigns to prevent AI infection among the general population.</p