Association of respiratory symptoms and lung function with occupation in the multinational Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study

Background Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has been associated with exposures in the workplace. We aimed to assess the association of respiratory symptoms and lung function with occupation in the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease study. Methods We analysed cross-sectional data from 28 823 adults (≥40 years) in 34 countries. We considered 11 occupations and grouped them by likelihood of exposure to organic dusts, inorganic dusts and fumes. The association of chronic cough, chronic phlegm, wheeze, dyspnoea, forced vital capacity (FVC) and forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1)/FVC with occupation was assessed, per study site, using multivariable regression. These estimates were then meta-analysed. Sensitivity analyses explored differences between sexes and gross national income. Results Overall, working in settings with potentially high exposure to dusts or fumes was associated with respiratory symptoms but not lung function differences. The most common occupation was farming. Compared to people not working in any of the 11 considered occupations, those who were farmers for ≥20 years were more likely to have chronic cough (OR 1.52, 95% CI 1.19–1.94), wheeze (OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.16–1.63) and dyspnoea (OR 1.83, 95% CI 1.53–2.20), but not lower FVC (β=0.02 L, 95% CI −0.02–0.06 L) or lower FEV1/FVC (β=0.04%, 95% CI −0.49–0.58%). Some findings differed by sex and gross national income. Conclusion At a population level, the occupational exposures considered in this study do not appear to be major determinants of differences in lung function, although they are associated with more respiratory symptoms. Because not all work settings were included in this study, respiratory surveillance should still be encouraged among high-risk dusty and fume job workers, especially in low- and middle-income countries.publishedVersio

Prevalence of chronic cough, its risk factors and population attributable risk in the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study: a multinational cross-sectional study

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Background: Chronic cough is a common respiratory symptom with an impact on daily activities and quality of life. Global prevalence data are scarce and derive mainly from European and Asian countries and studies with outcomes other than chronic cough. In this study, we aimed to estimate the prevalence of chronic cough across a large number of study sites as well as to identify its main risk factors using a standardised protocol and definition. Methods: We analysed cross-sectional data from 33,983 adults (≥40 years), recruited between Jan 2, 2003 and Dec 26, 2016, in 41 sites (34 countries) from the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study. We estimated the prevalence of chronic cough for each site accounting for sampling design. To identify risk factors, we conducted multivariable logistic regression analysis within each site and then pooled estimates using random-effects meta-analysis. We also calculated the population attributable risk (PAR) associated with each of the identifed risk factors. Findings: The prevalence of chronic cough varied from 3% in India (rural Pune) to 24% in the United States of America (Lexington,KY). Chronic cough was more common among females, both current and passive smokers, those working in a dusty job, those with a history of tuberculosis, those who were obese, those with a low level of education and those with hypertension or airflow limitation. The most influential risk factors were current smoking and working in a dusty job. Interpretation: Our findings suggested that the prevalence of chronic cough varies widely across sites in different world regions. Cigarette smoking and exposure to dust in the workplace are its major risk factors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Prevalence of chronic cough, its risk factors and population attributable risk in the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study: a multinational cross-sectional study

Background: Chronic cough is a common respiratory symptom with an impact on daily activities and quality of life. Global prevalence data are scarce and derive mainly from European and Asian countries and studies with outcomes other than chronic cough. In this study, we aimed to estimate the prevalence of chronic cough across a large number of study sites as well as to identify its main risk factors using a standardized protocol and definition. Methods: We analyzed cross-sectional data from 33,983 adults (≥40 years), recruited between Jan 2, 2003 and Dec 26, 2016, in 41 sites (34 countries) from the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study. We estimated the prevalence of chronic cough for each site accounting for sampling design. To identify risk factors, we conducted multivariable logistic regression analysis within each site and then pooled estimates using random-effects meta-analysis. We also calculated the population-attributable risk (PAR) associated with each of the identified risk factors. Findings: The prevalence of chronic cough varied from 3% in India (rural Pune) to 24% in the United States of America (Lexington, KY). Chronic cough was more common among females, both current and passive smokers, those working in a dusty job, those with a history of tuberculosis, those who were obese, those with a low level of education, and those with hypertension or airflow limitation. The most influential risk factors were current smoking and working in a dusty job. Interpretation: Our findings suggested that the prevalence of chronic cough varies widely across sites in different world regions. Cigarette smoking and exposure to dust in the workplace are its major risk factors.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cohort Profile: Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study

The Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study was established to assess the prevalence of chronic airflow obstruction, a key characteristic of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and its risk factors in adults (≥40 years) from general populations across the world. The baseline study was conducted between 2003 and 2016, in 41 sites across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, the Caribbean and Oceania, and collected high-quality pre- and post-bronchodilator spirometry from 28 828 participants. The follow-up study was conducted between 2019 and 2021, in 18 sites across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean. At baseline, there were in these sites 12 502 participants with high-quality spirometry. A total of 6452 were followed up, with 5936 completing the study core questionnaire. Of these, 4044 also provided high-quality pre- and post-bronchodilator spirometry. On both occasions, the core questionnaire covered information on respiratory symptoms, doctor diagnoses, health care use, medication use and ealth status, as well as potential risk factors. Information on occupation, environmental exposures and diet was also collected

A discussion on CBM development strategies in China: A case study of PetroChina Coalbed Methane Co., Ltd.

In recent years, the growth rate of coalbed methane (CBM) industry in China has slowed down. In order to promote its development, it is in urgent need to do the researches focusing on enhancing domestic CBM industry. In this paper, PetroChina Coalbed Methane Co. Ltd. was taken as an example. Its technical progress and achievements in the construction of CBM industrial base at the eastern margin of the Ordos Basin and the CBM exploration and development in Xinjiang since it was founded in 2008 were systematically studied and summarized. Then, the opportunities and challenges of domestic CBM industry in the process of its development were analyzed. Finally, five main study directions for accelerating the development of CBM industry were put forward. First, speed up the scale breakthrough of the strategic replacement of medium- and low-rank CBM resources in Xinjiang. Second, continuously research the technologies for increasing production and recovery factor of developed areas, so as to enhance the development benefits greatly. Third, strengthen the comprehensive development of deep CBM and coal measure gas, so as to improve the comprehensive utilization ratio of resources. Fourth, develop the intelligent information technology based on artificial intelligence and big data suitable for CBM fields, to improve the development level of CBM fields. Fifth, study the innovative management system of CBM benefit development, to provide a scientific institutional guarantee for the benefit development of CBM. It is concluded that the scale CBM development at the eastern margin of the Ordos Basin supplies the nation with precious clean energy and provides new ways and contributions for the safe production and energy saving & emission reduction of coal mines. In addition, it is recommended to continuously promote management innovation and technological innovation and speed up the construction of the third CBM industrial base in Xinjiang so as to accelerate the development of CBM industry in China. Keywords: China, Coalbed methane (CBM), Development strategy, Exploration and development, Technical progress, Eastern margin of the Ordos Basin, Xinjiang region, PetroChina Coalbed Methane Co. Ltd., Industrial bas

ST-TGR: Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning for Skeleton-Based Teaching Gesture Recognition

Teaching gesture recognition is a technique used to recognize the hand movements of teachers in classroom teaching scenarios. This technology is widely used in education, including for classroom teaching evaluation, enhancing online teaching, and assisting special education. However, current research on gesture recognition in teaching mainly focuses on detecting the static gestures of individual students and analyzing their classroom behavior. To analyze the teacher’s gestures and mitigate the difficulty of single-target dynamic gesture recognition in multi-person teaching scenarios, this paper proposes skeleton-based teaching gesture recognition (ST-TGR), which learns through spatio-temporal representation. This method mainly uses the human pose estimation technique RTMPose to extract the coordinates of the keypoints of the teacher’s skeleton and then inputs the recognized sequence of the teacher’s skeleton into the MoGRU action recognition network for classifying gesture actions. The MoGRU action recognition module mainly learns the spatio-temporal representation of target actions by stacking a multi-scale bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) and using improved attention mechanism modules. To validate the generalization of the action recognition network model, we conducted comparative experiments on datasets including NTU RGB+D 60, UT-Kinect Action3D, SBU Kinect Interaction, and Florence 3D. The results indicate that, compared with most existing baseline models, the model proposed in this article exhibits better performance in recognition accuracy and speed

Lonicera japonica Thunb extract ameliorates lipopolysaccharide-induced acute lung injury associated with luteolin-mediated suppression of NF-κB signaling pathway

Abstract Objective Lonicera japonica Thunb (LJT) is a commonly used herbal soup to treat inflammation-related diseases. However, the effect of LJT on ALI is unknown. The present study was aimed at investigating the protective effects of LJT extract (LTE) and its active ingredient luteolin (Lut) on lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated ALI and investigate its potential mechanism. Materials and methods The effects of LTE and Lut were explored in an ALI mouse model induced by intraperitoneal injection of lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Besides, the LPS-induced inflammation model in BEAS-2B cells was used to clarify the underlying mechanisms. The ALI pathological changes in lung tissues were tested through Haematoxylin and eosin (HE) staining. The apoptosis of cells in lung tissue and the cell model in vitro was evaluated by TUNEL assays, respectively. Meanwhile, the viability of cells in vitro was evaluated by Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assay. The levels/concentrations of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-6 (IL-6), IL-1β and IL-10 in BALF were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Besides, through quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and Western blotting, the expression of the above-mentioned inflammatory factors and key factors in the NF-κB signaling pathway was examined. The distribution of inflammatory factors in tissue was observed through immunohistochemistry (IHC) assays . Results In relative to LPS-stimulated group, the in vivo study showed that LTE and different concentrations of Lut dramatically alleviated LPS-evoked lung pathological injury and lung edema based on the changes in total protein levels and lung wet/dry (W/D) ratio in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) from ALI mice. LTE and different concentrations of Lut also suppressed the inflammatory response, as reflected by the variations of neutrophil accumulation and the production of proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines in the lung tissues and BALF of ALI mice. The in vitro research also demonstrated that LTE and Lut visibly facilitated cell viability and restrained the apoptosis of BEAS-2B cells stimulated by LPS. Lut hindered LPS-inducible activation of NF-κB pathway in BEAS-2B cells. Conclusion The present study proved that LTE might suppress LPS-induced acute injury and inflammation in mice and BEAS-2B cells through the Lut-caused suppression of NF-κB signal path (Figure 1)

Binder-free Co3O4@NiCoAl-layered double hydroxide core-shell hybrid architectural nanowire arrays with enhanced electrochemical performance

Herein, binder-free Co3O4@NiCoAl-layered double hydroxide (Co3O4@LDH) core-shell hybrid architectural nanowire arrays were prepared via a two-step hydrothermal synthesis route. LDH nanosheets possessing a large electroactive surface area uniformly dispersed on the surface of Co3O4 nanowires were successfully fabricated allowing for fast electron transport that enhances the electrochemical performance of LDH nanosheets. Co3O4@LDH nanowire arrays of 2 to 1.5 molar ratio (Co3O4:LDH) exhibit high specific capacitance (1104 Fg-1 at 1 Ag-1), adequate rate capability and cycling stability (87.3% after 5000 cycles), attributed to the synergistic effect between the robust Co3O4 nanowire arrays and LDH nanosheets

Largely Improving the Robustness and Lifetime of Triboelectric Nanogenerators through Automatic Transition between Contact and Noncontact Working States

Although a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has been developed to be an efficient approach to harvest mechanical energy, its robustness and lifetime are still to be improved through an effective and widely applicable way. Here, we show a rational designing methodology for achieving a significant improvement of the long-term stability of TENGs through automatic transition between contact and noncontact working states. This is realized by structurally creating two opposite forces in the moving part of the TENG, in which the pulling-away force is controlled by external mechanical motions. In this way, TENGs can work in the noncontact state with minimum surface wear and also transit into contact state intermittently to maintain high triboelectric charge density. A wind-driven disk-based TENG and a rotary barrel-based TENG that can realize automatic state transition under different wind speeds and rotation speeds, respectively, have been demonstrated as two examples, in which their robustness has been largely improved through this automatic transition. This methodology will further expand the practical application of TENGs for long-time usage and for harvesting mechanical energies with fluctuating intensities