乳歯列期における前歯部交叉咬合の処置法の検討および考察

The purpose of this study was to analyze the factors related to anterior crossbite in deciduous dentition and observe relapse after correction until the eruption of permanent anterior teeth. In this study, 50 Chinese children aged 4-6 years old with anterior crossbite of deciduous dentition were analyzed for the relevant factors and different correction methods. The occurrence of relapse was observed. The relapse rate of the hereditary group was the highest. The relapse rate of the group treated with an inclined lower anterior bite plate was lower than that of those treated with a removable appliance with a posterior bite plate and anterior lingual springs. Improper oral habits are a key problem in the anterior crossbite of deciduous dentition, and children with such oral habits-related anterior crossbite should be treated at their early age

Activation of JNK Signaling Mediates Connective Tissue Growth Factor Expression and Scar Formation in Corneal Wound Healing

Connective Tissue Growth Factor (CTGF) and Transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) are key growth factors in regulating corneal scarring. Although CTGF was induced by TGF-β1 and mediated many of fibroproliferative effects of TGF-β1, the signaling pathway for CTGF production in corneal scarring remains to be clarified. In the present study, we firstly investigated the effects of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) on CTGF expression induce by TGF-β1 in Telomerase-immortalized human cornea stroma fibroblasts (THSF). Then, we created penetrating corneal wound model and determined the effect of JNK in the pathogenesis of corneal scarring. TGF-β1 activated MAPK pathways in THSF cells. JNK inhibitor significantly inhibited CTGF, fibronectin and collagen I expression induced by TGF-β1 in THSF. In corneal wound healing, the JNK inhibitor significantly inhibited CTGF expression, markedly improved the architecture of corneal stroma and reduced corneal scar formation, but did not have a measurable impact on corneal wound healing in vivo. Our results indicate that JNK mediates the expression of CTGF and corneal scarring in corneal wound healing, and might be considered as specific targets of drug therapy for corneal scarring

Aberrant hippocampal subregion networks associated with the classifications of aMCI subjects: a longitudinal resting-state study

Background: Altered hippocampal structure and function is a valuable indicator of possible conversion from amnestic type mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, little is known about the disrupted functional connectivity of hippocampus subregional networks in aMCI subjects. Methodology/Principal Findings: aMCI group-1 (n = 26) and controls group-1 (n = 18) underwent baseline and after approximately 20 months follow up resting-state fMRI scans. Integrity of distributed functional connectivity networks incorporating six hippocampal subregions (i.e. cornu ammonis, dentate gyrus and subicular complex, bilaterally) was then explored over time and comparisons made between groups. The ability of these extent longitudinal changes to separate unrelated groups of 30 subjects (aMCI-converters, n = 6; aMCI group-2, n = 12; controls group-2, n = 12) were further assessed. Six longitudinal hippocampus subregional functional connectivity networks showed similar changes in aMCI subjects over time, which were mainly associated with medial frontal gyrus, lateral temporal cortex, insula, posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and cerebellum. However, the disconnection of hippocampal subregions and PCC may be a key factor of impaired episodic memory in aMCI, and the functional index of these longitudinal changes allowed well classifying independent samples of aMCI converters from non-converters (sensitivity was 83.3%, specificity was 83.3%) and controls (sensitivity was 83.3%, specificity was 91.7%). Conclusions/Significance: It demonstrated that the functional changes in resting-state hippocampus subregional networks could be an important and early indicator for dysfunction that may be particularly relevant to early stage changes and progression of aMCI subjects

Genetic Variants of PICALM rs541458 Modulate Brain Spontaneous Activity in Older Adults With Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment

Background: Phosphatidylinositol binding clathrin assembly protein (PICALM) rs541458 C allele has been identified and validated to be associated with a reduction of Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk. Nevertheless, the exact mechanisms through which the variant exert its disease-relevant association remain to be elucidated. This study is to determine whether PICALM rs541458 polymorphism modulates functional magnetic resonance imaging measured brain spontaneous activity in older adults with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI).Methods: Thirty five aMCI patients and twenty six healthy controls (HC) were enrolled in this study. Each individual was genotyped for rs541458 and scanned with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Each group was divided into two subgroups (C carriers and TT genotype). Brain activity was measured with amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF).Results: The aMCI patients showed decreased ALFF in left inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus and insula, while increased ALFF in right cuneus, calcarine, and bilateral posterior cingulate and precuneus. A significant interaction between diagnosis (aMCI vs. HC) and PICALM rs541458 genotype (C carriers vs. TT) on ALFF was observed mainly in the right frontal lobe, with aMCI C carriers and TT genotype in HC showing significantly lower ALFF than HC C carriers. While only negative correlation between ALFF and verbal fluency test was found in HC C carriers (r = −0.543, p = 0.030).Conclusions: This study provided preliminary evidences that PICALM rs541458 variations may modulate the spontaneous brain activity in aMCI patients

A brain CT-based approach for predicting and analyzing stroke-associated pneumonia from intracerebral hemorrhage

IntroductionStroke-associated pneumonia (SAP) is a common complication of stroke that can increase the mortality rate of patients and the burden on their families. In contrast to prior clinical scoring models that rely on baseline data, we propose constructing models based on brain CT scans due to their accessibility and clinical universality.MethodsOur study aims to explore the mechanism behind the distribution and lesion areas of intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) in relation to pneumonia, we utilized an MRI atlas that could present brain structures and a registration method in our program to extract features that may represent this relationship. We developed three machine learning models to predict the occurrence of SAP using these features. Ten-fold cross-validation was applied to evaluate the performance of models. Additionally, we constructed a probability map through statistical analysis that could display which brain regions are more frequently impacted by hematoma in patients with SAP based on four types of pneumonia.ResultsOur study included a cohort of 244 patients, and we extracted 35 features that captured the invasion of ICH to different brain regions for model development. We evaluated the performance of three machine learning models, namely, logistic regression, support vector machine, and random forest, in predicting SAP, and the AUCs for these models ranged from 0.77 to 0.82. The probability map revealed that the distribution of ICH varied between the left and right brain hemispheres in patients with moderate and severe SAP, and we identified several brain structures, including the left-choroid-plexus, right-choroid-plexus, right-hippocampus, and left-hippocampus, that were more closely related to SAP based on feature selection. Additionally, we observed that some statistical indicators of ICH volume, such as mean and maximum values, were proportional to the severity of SAP.DiscussionOur findings suggest that our method is effective in classifying the development of pneumonia based on brain CT scans. Furthermore, we identified distinct characteristics, such as volume and distribution, of ICH in four different types of SAP

Effects of dietary energy level on antioxidant capability, immune function and rectal microbiota in late gestation donkeys

IntroductionThis study investigated the effects of dietary energy level on the antioxidant capability, immune function, and rectal microbiota in donkey jennets during the last 60 days of gestation.MethodsFifteen pregnant DeZhou donkeys with age of 6.0 ± 0.1 years, body weight of 292 ± 33 kg, parity of 2.7 ± 0.1 parities and similar expected date of confinement (74 ± 4 days) were randomly allocated to three groups and feed three diets: high energy (10.92 MJ/kg, H), medium energy (10.49 MJ/kg, M), and low energy (9.94 MJ/kg, L).Results and DiscussionThe serum activity of catalase (CAT), total superoxide dismutase (T-SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px), and total antioxidant capacity (T-AOC) in group M was significantly higher, whereas the concentrations of malondialdehyde (MDA), interleukin 1 (IL-1), IL-2, and IL-6 were lower than those recorded for groups H and L (p ≤ 0.05). The dietary energy level significantly affected rectal microbial community structure in the jennet donkeys 35 days and 7 days before the parturition (p ≤ 0.05). The abundances of norank_f_norank_o_Coriobacteriales genus was significantly higher (p ≤ 0.05) in group H, and the abundances of norank_f_norank_o_Mollicutes_RF39 and the Candidatus_Saccharimonas were higher in group L (p ≤ 0.05). The abundance of Fibrobacter in group M was significantly increased (p ≤ 0.05). The abundance of norank_f_norank_o_Coriobacteriales was positively correlated with average daily gain (ADG) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) concentrations (p ≤ 0.05). The abundance of norank_f_norank_o_Mollicutes_RF39 was positively correlated with IL-2 and IL-6 concentrations. The abundance of Candidatus_Saccharimonas was positively correlated with CAT, T-SOD and GSH-Px activities (p ≤ 0.05). The abundance of Fibrobacter was positively correlated with CAT and T-SOD activities (p ≤ 0.05), but negatively correlated with IL-2 concentration (p ≤ 0.05). In conclusion, an appropriate dietary with an energy content of 10.49 MJ/kg for jennet donkeys during late gestation increased the prenatal antioxidant capacity, reduced inflammatory cytokines, and promoted fetal growth, and these changes were related to diet-induced changes in rectal microbiota compositions

Role of perioperative nutritional status and enteral nutrition in predicting and preventing post-operative complications in patients with Crohn’s disease

BackgroundPerioperative immune-nutritional status is correlated with post-operative outcomes. This study aimed to evaluate whether pre-operative nutritional status could predict post-operative complications in patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) and whether pre-operative enteral nutrition (EN) can prevent post-operative complications.MethodsThis retrospective cohort study analyzed the electronic health records of 173 patients diagnosed with CD in Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai, China, between August 2015 and May 2021: 122 patients had pre-operative nutritional support while 51 patients underwent surgery without pre-operative nutritional support. The pre-operative nutritional status, disease activity index, disease-related data, frequency of multiple surgery, operative data, and post-operative characters in each group were compared to determine whether the nutritional support and status could significantly affect post-operative outcome. One-to-one propensity score matching (PSM) was performed to limit demographic inequalities between the two groups.ResultsAfter PSM, no statistically significant differences were found in pre-operative patient basic characteristics between the two groups of 47 patients (98 patients in all) included in this study. Overall, 21 patients developed 26 post-operative complications. In terms of pre-operative nutritional status, the level of serum albumin (ALB), pre-albumin (pre-ALB), and hemoglobin (Hb) in the nutrition group were statistically higher than that in the control group. We also observed a statistically significant decrease in post-operative complications, need for emergency surgery, and staged operations, while the rate of laparoscopic surgery was higher in the nutrition group compared to the non-nutritional group. Post-operative complications were related to pre-operative nutritional condition, which indicated that EN may improve the nutritional status and reduced the rate of post-operative complications.ConclusionPre-operative nutritional status is correlated with post-operative outcomes while EN plays a positive role in preventing the post-operative complications. EN is useful for improving the pre-operative nutritional status and reducing the post-operative adverse events for CD patients undergoing surgery

Biomedical knowledge graph-enhanced prompt generation for large language models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been driving progress in AI at an unprecedented rate, yet still face challenges in knowledge-intensive domains like biomedicine. Solutions such as pre-training and domain-specific fine-tuning add substantial computational overhead, and the latter require domain-expertise. External knowledge infusion is task-specific and requires model training. Here, we introduce a task-agnostic Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) framework by leveraging the massive biomedical KG SPOKE with LLMs such as Llama-2-13b, GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4, to generate meaningful biomedical text rooted in established knowledge. KG-RAG consistently enhanced the performance of LLMs across various prompt types, including one-hop and two-hop prompts, drug repurposing queries, biomedical true/false questions, and multiple-choice questions (MCQ). Notably, KG-RAG provides a remarkable 71% boost in the performance of the Llama-2 model on the challenging MCQ dataset, demonstrating the framework's capacity to empower open-source models with fewer parameters for domain-specific questions. Furthermore, KG-RAG enhanced the performance of proprietary GPT models, such as GPT-3.5 which exhibited improvement over GPT-4 in context utilization on MCQ data. Our approach was also able to address drug repurposing questions, returning meaningful repurposing suggestions. In summary, the proposed framework combines explicit and implicit knowledge of KG and LLM, respectively, in an optimized fashion, thus enhancing the adaptability of general-purpose LLMs to tackle domain-specific questions in a unified framework.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, 1 supplementary fil

Tuber indicum and T. lijiangense colonization differentially regulates plant physiological responses and mycorrhizosphere bacterial community of Castanopsis rockii seedlings

Black truffles and white truffles are widely studied around the world, but their effects on plant growth and physiological responses, and on the mycorrhizosphere bacterial community of the host plant remain unclear. Here, mycorrhizal colonization of Castanopsis rockii by Tuber indicum (Chinese black truffle) and T. lijiangense (Chinese white truffle), respectively, was induced in a greenhouse study, and their effects on host growth, physiological responses and mycorrhizosphere bacterial communities were compared. The results show that colonization of both Tuber species significantly increased leaf photosynthetic rate, leaf P concentration and mycorrhizosphere acid phosphatase activity, as well as richness of mycorrhizosphere bacterial communities of C. rockii seedlings. However, T. indicum colonization on the one hand significantly decreased tartrate content, bacterial acid phosphatase, phoC gene abundance in the mycorrhizosphere, and peroxidase (POD) activity of ectomycorrhizal root tips, but on the other hand increased mycorrhizosphere pH and superoxide dismutase (SOD) of ectomycorrhizal root tips, compared to T. lijiangense colonization. Moreover, principal coordinate and β-diversity analyses show significant differences in mycorrhizosphere bacterial community composition between T. indicum and T. lijiangese colonized C. rockii seedlings. Finally, the relative abundance of the bacterium Agromyces cerinus significantly correlated to mycorrhizosphere acid phosphatase activity and leaf P concentration, suggesting that this bacterium might play an important role in P mobilization and acquisition. Overall, these results suggest that T. indicum and T. lijiangense differently regulate their host plant’s physiological responses and mycorrhizosphere bacterial community

CT-based radiomics for predicting radio-chemotherapy response and overall survival in nonsurgical esophageal carcinoma

BackgroundTo predict treatment response and 2 years overall survival (OS) of radio-chemotherapy in patients with esophageal cancer (EC) by radiomics based on the computed tomography (CT) images.MethodsThis study retrospectively collected 171 nonsurgical EC patients treated with radio-chemotherapy from Jan 2010 to Jan 2019. 80 patients were randomly divided into training (n=64) and validation (n=16) cohorts to predict the radiochemotherapy response. The models predicting treatment response were established by Lasso and logistic regression. A total of 156 patients were allocated into the training cohort (n=110), validation cohort (n=23) and test set (n=23) to predict 2-year OS. The Lasso Cox model and Cox proportional hazards model established the models predicting 2-year OS.ResultsTo predict the radiochemotherapy response, WFK as a radiomics feature, and clinical stages and clinical M stages (cM) as clinical features were selected to construct the clinical-radiomics model, achieving 0.78 and 0.75 AUC (area under the curve) in the training and validation sets, respectively. Furthermore, radiomics features called WFI and WGI combined with clinical features (smoking index, pathological types, cM) were the optimal predictors to predict 2-year OS. The AUC values of the clinical-radiomics model were 0.71 and 0.70 in the training set and validation set, respectively.ConclusionsThis study demonstrated that planning CT-based radiomics showed the predictability of the radiochemotherapy response and 2-year OS in nonsurgical esophageal carcinoma. The predictive results prior to treatment have the potential to assist physicians in choosing the optimal therapeutic strategy to prolong overall survival