953 research outputs found
Differential hepatic features presenting in Wilson disease-associated cirrhosis and hepatitis B-associated cirrhosis
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved. BACKGROUND Cirrhosis is a chronic late stage liver disease associated with hepatitis viruses, alcoholism, and metabolic disorders, such as Wilson disease (WD). There are no clear markers or clinical features that define cirrhosis originating from these disparate origins. We hypothesized that cirrhosis is not one disease and cirrhosis of different etiology may have differential clinical hepatic features. AIM To delineate the liver features between WD-associated cirrhosis and hepatitis Bassociated cirrhosis in the Chinese population. METHODS In this observational study, we reviewed the medical data of consecutive inpatients who had WD-associated cirrhosis or hepatitis B-associated cirrhosis from January 2010 to August 2018, and excluded patients who had carcinoma, severe heart or pulmonary diseases, or other liver diseases. According to the etiology of cirrhosis, patients were divided into two groups: WD-associated cirrhosis group (60 patients) and hepatitis B-associated cirrhosis group (56 patients). The liver fibrosis degree, liver function indices, and portal hypertension features of these patients were compared between the two groups. RESULTS No inter-group differences were observed in the diagnostic liver fibrosis markers, however, clinical features clearly defined the origin of cirrhosis. WD-associated cirrhosis patients (16-29 years) had lower levels of alanine transaminase, aspartate transaminase, and bilirubin, lower prothrombin time, lower incidence of hepatic encephalopathy, and lower portal vein diameter (P < 0.05), compared to cirrhosis resulting from hepatitis B in older patients (45-62 years). Importantly, they had decreased risks of progression from Child-Pugh grade A to B (odds ratio = 0.046, 95% confidence interval: 0.006-0.387, P = 0.005) and of ascites (odds ratio = 0.08, 95% confidence interval: 0.01-0.48, P = 0.005). Conversely, WDassociated cirrhosis patients had a higher risk of splenomegaly (odds ratio = 4.15, 95% confidence interval: 1.38-12.45, P = 0.011). CONCLUSION WD-associated cirrhosis presents a higher risk of splenomegaly associated with leukopenia and thrombocytopenia, although revealing milder liver dysfunction and portal hypertension symptoms, which recommends WD patients to be monitored for associated complications
New Terms for the Compact Form of Electroweak Chiral Lagrangian
The compact form of the electroweak chiral Lagrangian is a reformulation of
its original form and is expressed in terms of chiral rotated electroweak gauge
fields, which is crucial for relating the information of underlying theories to
the coefficients of the low-energy effective Lagrangian. However the compact
form obtained in previous works is not complete. In this letter we add several
new chiral invariant terms to it and discuss the contributions of these terms
to the original electroweak chiral Lagrangian.Comment: 3 pages, references adde
Food waste based biochars for ammonia nitrogen removal from aqueous solutions
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Biochar derived from waste has been increasingly considered as a potential green adsorbent due to its significant ability and affordable production costs. This study prepared and evaluated 7 types of food waste-based biochars (FWBBs) (including meat and bone, starchy staples, leafy stemmed vegetables, nut husks, fruit pericarp, bean dreg and tea leaves). The impacts of raw materials, pyrolysis temperatures (300, 400, 500, 600 and 700 °C), and residence time (2 h and 4 h) on the removal of ammonia nitrogen at different ammonia nitrogen concentrations (5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 150 mg/L) were investigated. The batch equilibrium and kinetic experiments confirmed that a FWBB dosage of 3 g/L at 25 °C could remove up to 92.67% ammonia nitrogen. The Langmuir isotherm model had the best fit to equilibrium experimental data with a maximum adsorption capacity of 7.174 mg/g at 25 °C. The pseudo-second order kinetic model well describes the ammonia nitrogen adsorption
Selective carbon sources and salinities enhance enzymes and extracellular polymeric substances extrusion of Chlorella sp. for potential co-metabolism.
This study investigated the extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) and enzyme extrusion of Chlorella sp. using seven carbon sources and two salinities for potential pollutant co-metabolism. Results indicated that the levels of biomass, EPS and enzymes of microalgae cultured with glucose and saccharose outcompeted other carbon sources. For pigment production, glycine received the highest chlorophyll and carotene, up to 10 mg/L. The EPS reached 30 mg/L, having doubled the amount of protein than carbohydrate. For superoxide dismutase and peroxidase enzymes, the highest concentrations were beyond 60 U/ml and 6 nmol/d.ml, respectively. This amount could be potentially used for degrading 40% ciprofloxacin of concentration 2000 ”g/L. When increasing salinity from 0.1% to 3.5%, the concentrations of pigment, EPS and enzymes rose 3 to 30 times. These results highlighted that certain carbon sources and salinities could induce Chlorella sp. to produce EPS and enzymes for pollutant co-metabolism and also for revenue-raising potential
Rabies screen reveals GPe control of cocaine-triggered plasticity.
Identification of neural circuit changes that contribute to behavioural plasticity has routinely been conducted on candidate circuits that were preselected on the basis of previous results. Here we present an unbiased method for identifying experience-triggered circuit-level changes in neuronal ensembles in mice. Using rabies virus monosynaptic tracing, we mapped cocaine-induced global changes in inputs onto neurons in the ventral tegmental area. Cocaine increased rabies-labelled inputs from the globus pallidus externus (GPe), a basal ganglia nucleus not previously known to participate in behavioural plasticity triggered by drugs of abuse. We demonstrated that cocaine increased GPe neuron activity, which accounted for the increase in GPe labelling. Inhibition of GPe activity revealed that it contributes to two forms of cocaine-triggered behavioural plasticity, at least in part by disinhibiting dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area. These results suggest that rabies-based unbiased screening of changes in input populations can identify previously unappreciated circuit elements that critically support behavioural adaptations
Feature Selection via Chaotic Antlion Optimization
Selecting a subset of relevant properties from a large set of features that describe a dataset is a challenging machine learning task. In biology, for instance, the advances in the available technologies enable the generation of a very large number of biomarkers that describe the data. Choosing the more informative markers along with performing a high-accuracy classification over the data can be a daunting task, particularly if the data are high dimensional. An often adopted approach is to formulate the feature selection problem as a biobjective optimization problem, with the aim of maximizing the performance of the data analysis model (the
quality of the data training fitting) while minimizing the number of features used.This work was partially supported by the IPROCOM Marie Curie initial training network, funded
through the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unionâs Seventh Framework
Programme FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grants agreement No. 316555, and by the Romanian
National Authority for Scientific Research, CNDIUEFISCDI, project number PN-II-PT-PCCA-2011-3.2-
0917. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or
preparation of the manuscript
Silicon-hydroxyapatite bioactive coatings (Si-HA) from diatomaceous earth and silica. Study of adhesion and proliferation of osteoblast-like cells
The aim of this study consisted on investigating
the influence of silicon substituted hydroxyapatite (SiâHA)
coatings over the human osteoblast-like cell line (SaOS-2)
behaviour. Diatomaceous earth and silica, together with
commercial hydroxyapatite were respectively the silicon
and HA sources used to produce the SiâHA coatings. HA
coatings with 0 wt% of silicon were used as control of the
experiment. Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) was the selected
technique to deposit the coatings. The SiâHA thin films
were characterized by Fourier Transformed Infrared
Spectroscopy (FTIR) demonstrating the efficient transfer of
Si to the HA structure. The in vitro cell culture was
established to assess the cell attachment, proliferation and
osteoblastic activity respectively by, Scanning Electron
Microscopy (SEM), DNA and alkaline phosphatase (ALP)
quantification. The SEM analysis demonstrated a similar
adhesion behaviour of the cells on the tested materials and
the maintenance of the typical osteoblastic morphology
along the time of culture. The SiâHA coatings did not
evidence any type of cytotoxic behaviour when compared
with HA coatings. Moreover, both the proliferation rate
and osteoblastic activity results showed a slightly better
performance on the SiâHA coatings from diatoms than on
the SiâHA from silica.This work was supported by the UE-Interreg IIIA (SP1.P151/03) Proteus project and Xunta de Galicia ( Projects: 2006/12 and PGIDITO5PXIC30301PN)
Observation of CR Anisotropy with ARGO-YBJ
The measurement of the anisotropies of cosmic ray arrival direction provides
important informations on the propagation mechanisms and on the identification
of their sources. In this paper we report the observation of anisotropy regions
at different angular scales. In particular, the observation of a possible
anisotropy on scales between 10 and 30
suggests the presence of unknown features of the magnetic fields the charged
cosmic rays propagate through, as well as potential contributions of nearby
sources to the total flux of cosmic rays. Evidence of new weaker few-degree
excesses throughout the sky region R.A. is
reported for the first time.Comment: Talk given at 12th TAUP Conference 2011, 5-9 September 2011, Munich,
German
Periodic and subharmonic solutions for a 2nth-order difference equationcontaining both advance and retardation with Ï-Laplacian
Long-term sediment decline causes ongoing shrinkage of the Mekong megadelta, Vietnam
Since the 1990s the Mekong River delta has suffered a large decline in sediment supply causing coastal erosion, following catchment disturbance through hydropower dam construction and sand extraction. However, our new geological reconstruction of 2500-years of delta shoreline changes show that serious coastal erosion actually started much earlier. Data shows the sandy coast bounding river mouths accreted consistently at a rate of +2 to +4 km2/year. In contrast, we identified a variable accretion rate of the muddy deltaic protrusion at Camau; it wasâ<â+1 km2/year before 1400 years ago but increased drastically around 600 years ago, forming the entire Camau Peninsula. This high level of mud supply had sharply declined by the early 20th century after a vast canal network was built on the delta. Since then the Peninsula has been eroding, promoted by the conjunction of mud sequestration in the delta plain driven by expansion of rice cultivation, and hysteresis of long-term muddy sedimentation that left the protrusion exposed to wave erosion. Natural mitigation would require substantial increases in sediment supply well above the pre-1990s levels
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