A combined role of calcium channel blockers and angiotensin receptor blockers in stroke prevention

Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. The importance of lowering blood pressure for reducing the risk of stroke is well established. However, not all the benefits of antihypertensive treatments in stroke can be accounted for by reductions in BP and there may be differences between antihypertensive classes as to which provides optimal protection. Dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers, such as amlodipine, and angiotensin receptor blockers, such as valsartan, represent the two antihypertensive drug classes with the strongest supportive data for the prevention of stroke. Therefore, when combination therapy is required, a combination of these two antihypertensive classes represents a logical approach

Gastritis Treated by Chinese Medicine

Chronic gastritis is one of the common diseases of the digestive system characterized by many uncomfortable clinical symptoms, and the patient with chronic gastritis has a lower quality of life. Chinese medicine is a branch of medicine in the world, and it has special theory; different methods have been used to treat gastritis for more than 1000 years. We aimed to introduce the special theory and the different methods of Chinese medicine and about its syndrome classification, syndrome differentiation and treatment, diagnosis and treatment process, and criterion of therapeutic effect of chronic gastritis. The mechanism of Chinese medicine on chronic gastritis needs further research

A New Method for Fast Computation of Moments Based on 8-neighbor Chain CodeApplied to 2-D Objects Recognition

2D moment invariants have been successfully applied in pattern recognition tasks. The main difficulty of using moment invariants is the computational burden. To improve the algorithm of moments computation through an iterative method, an approach for fast computation of moments based on the 8-neighbor chain code is proposed in this paper. Then artificial neural networks are applied for 2D shape recognition with moment invariants. Compared with the method of polygonal approximation, this approach shows higher accuracy in shape representation and faster recognition speed in experiment

Blood urea nitrogen in the prediction of in-hospital mortality of patients with acute aortic dissection

Background: Blood urea nitrogen (BUN) has been shown to be associated with adverse cardiovascular disease outcomes. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the prognostic role of BUN in patients with acute aortic dissection (AAD). Hypothesis: BUN has correlation with in-hospital mortality of patients with AAD. Methods: Patients admitted to the emergency room within the first 24 h of onset of AAD were included in the study. BUN levels were measured on admission and the endpoints were mortality during hospi­talization after receiving surgical or endovascular repair. Results: A total of 192 patients with AAD were enrolled. During hospitalization, 19 patients died and 173 patients survived. Increased levels of BUN (8.9 [7.0–9.7] vs. 6.0 [5.1–7.2] mmol/L, p < 0.001) were found in non-survivors compared with those survived. Using multivariable logistic analysis, BUN was an independent predictor of in-hospital mortality in patients with AAD (OR 1.415, 95% CI 1.016–1.971, p = 0.040). Furthermore, using receiver operating characteristic analysis, the optimal cutoff value for BUN was 6.95 mmol/L. Under this value, the area under the curve was 0.785 (95% CI 0.662–0.909, p < 0.001) and the sensitivity and specificity to predict in-hospital mortality was 78.9%, and 72.2%, respectively. Conclusions: Admission BUN levels were an independent predictor for in hospital mortality in pa­tients with AAD

Anisotropic Pauli spin-blockade effect and spin-orbit interaction field in an InAs nanowire double quantum dot

We report on experimental detection of the spin-orbit interaction field in an InAs nanowire double quantum dot device. In the spin blockade regime, leakage current through the double quantum dot is measured and is used to extract the effects of spin-orbit interaction and hyperfine interaction on spin state mixing. At finite magnetic fields, the leakage current arising from the hyperfine interaction is suppressed and the spin-orbit interaction dominates spin state mixing. We observe dependence of the leakage current on the applied magnetic field direction and determine the direction of the spin-orbit interaction field. We show that the spin-orbit field lies in a direction perpendicular to the nanowire axis but with a pronounced off-substrate-plane angle. It is for the first time that such an off-substrate-plane spin-orbit field in an InAs nanowire has been detected. The results are expected to have an important implication in employing InAs nanowires to construct spin-orbit qubits and topological quantum devices.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Supporting Informatio

Weighted Change-Point Method for Detecting Differential Gene Expression in Breast Cancer Microarray Data

In previous work, we proposed a method for detecting differential gene expression based on change-point of expression profile. This non-parametric change-point method gave promising result in both simulation study and public dataset experiment. However, the performance is still limited by the less sensitiveness to the right bound and the statistical significance of the statistics has not been fully explored. To overcome the insensitiveness to the right bound we modified the original method by adding a weight function to the Dn statistic. Simulation study showed that the weighted change-point statistics method is significantly better than the original NPCPS in terms of ROC, false positive rate, as well as change-point estimate. The mean absolute error of the estimated change-point by weighted change-point method was 0.03, reduced by more than 50% comparing with the original 0.06, and the mean FPR was reduced by more than 55%. Experiment on microarray Dataset I resulted in 3974 differentially expressed genes out of total 5293 genes; experiment on microarray Dataset II resulted in 9983 differentially expressed genes among total 12576 genes. In summary, the method proposed here is an effective modification to the previous method especially when only a small subset of cancer samples has DGE

Confirming the 115.5-day periodicity in the X-ray light curve of ULX NGC 5408 X-1

The Swift/XRT light curve of the ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) source NGC 5408 X-1 was re-analyzed with two new numerical approaches, Weighted Wavelet $Z$-transform (WWZ) and CLEANest, that are different from previous studies. Both techniques detected a prominent periodicity with a time scale of $115.5\pm1.5$ days, in excellent agreement with the detection of the same periodicity first reported by Strohmayer (2009). Monte Carlo simulation was employed to test the statisiticak confidence of the 115.5-day periodicity, yielding a statistical significance of $> 99.98$ (or $>3.8\sigma$). The robust detection of the 115.5-day quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs), if it is due to the orbital motion of the binary, would infer a mass of a few thousand $M_\odot$ for the central black hole, implying an intermediate-mass black hole in NGC 5408 X-1.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA