Azadiradione exerts anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant effects, alleviates dopaminergic neurodegeneration and reduces α-synuclein levels in MPTP-induced mouse model of Parkinson’s disease

Purpose: To determine the effects of azadiradione (AZD), a tetracyclic triterpenoid, in 1-methyl-4- phenyl-1, 2, 3, 6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP)–induced experimental rodent model of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Methods: C57BL/6 mice were intraperitoneally injected MPTP at a dose of 20 mg/kg body weight in saline (4 times at 2-h intervals). Azadiradione (AZD) at doses of 12.5, 25 or 50 mg/kg were administered to separate groups of mice via oral gavage for 6 days prior to MPTP injection. Results: Azadiradione (AZD) reduced loss of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH)-positive neurons. TH-positive counts increased to 91.44 % on treatment with 50 mg/kg AZD. Significantly (p < 0.05) down-regulated α-synuclein levels were seen following MPTP induction and AZD administration. Expressions of Bax, Bcl-2 and cleaved-caspase-3 were significantly downregulated (p < 0.05). Treatment with AZD inhibited the translocation of Cyt-C to the mitochondria, thereby preventing activation of apoptotic cascade. Oxidative stress induced by MPTP was significantly reduced by AZD via up-regulation of glutathione levels and SOD1/HO-1 expression. Azadiradione, at a dose of 50 mg/kg, significantly (p < 0.05) reduced ROS levels from 210.6 19.23%, and also reduced the levels of inflammatory cytokines. Conclusion: These results indicate the anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidative and neuroprotective properties of AZD in mice. Thus, AZD is a potential candidate drug for the management of PD. However, further studies are required to ascertain this

Peripheral Sensitization

Peripheral sensitization indicates increased responsiveness and reduced threshold of nociceptive neurons in the periphery to the stimulation, which usually occurs after peripheral tissue injury and inflammation. As an integral part of pain, peripheral sensitization and its mechanisms have received much attention, and numerous types of neurotransmitters and chemicals related to peripheral sensitization were investigated. We developed an animal model of peripheral sensitization, and it provides evidence that some neurotransmitters, such as glutamate and substance P, release from adjacent peripheral nerves contributing to the peripheral sensitization of pathological pain. In this chapter, we reviewed the advances in peripheral sensitization, and it will provide a basis for new targets to attenuate pain of peripheral origin

Environmental Finance:An Interdisciplinary Review

Environmental finance has gained considerable attention globally as an emerging interdisciplinary research area. This study uses bibliometric analysis to systematically review major studies on environmental finance-related areas published since the 1970s. Through a bibliometric analysis of 892 environmental finance-related articles sourced from the Web of Science database, we identified the main research streams and illustrated the trending research themes of environmental finance. We find that publications related to environmental finance have increased exponentially over the past decade. Current research streams include corporate and social re- sponsibility (CSR), climate negotiations, natural gas price volatility, national policy, and cost comparisons. Further analysis of the recent five years of literature shows that emerging research topics include climate finance, sustainable finance, firm value, climate risk, and green bonds. Finally, we conclude with a future research agenda for environmental finance

Eliminating Domain Bias for Federated Learning in Representation Space

Recently, federated learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning abilities. However, under statistically heterogeneous scenarios, we observe that biased data domains on clients cause a representation bias phenomenon and further degenerate generic representations during local training, i.e., the representation degeneration phenomenon. To address these issues, we propose a general framework Domain Bias Eliminator (DBE) for FL. Our theoretical analysis reveals that DBE can promote bi-directional knowledge transfer between server and client, as it reduces the domain discrepancy between server and client in representation space. Besides, extensive experiments on four datasets show that DBE can greatly improve existing FL methods in both generalization and personalization abilities. The DBE-equipped FL method can outperform ten state-of-the-art personalized FL methods by a large margin. Our code is public at https://github.com/TsingZ0/DBE.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2023, 24 page

GPFL: Simultaneously Learning Global and Personalized Feature Information for Personalized Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is popular for its privacy-preserving and collaborative learning capabilities. Recently, personalized FL (pFL) has received attention for its ability to address statistical heterogeneity and achieve personalization in FL. However, from the perspective of feature extraction, most existing pFL methods only focus on extracting global or personalized feature information during local training, which fails to meet the collaborative learning and personalization goals of pFL. To address this, we propose a new pFL method, named GPFL, to simultaneously learn global and personalized feature information on each client. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets in three statistically heterogeneous settings and show the superiority of GPFL over ten state-of-the-art methods regarding effectiveness, scalability, fairness, stability, and privacy. Besides, GPFL mitigates overfitting and outperforms the baselines by up to 8.99% in accuracy.Comment: Accepted by ICCV202

Effects of triazolodiazepine on the production of interleukin-6 from murine spleen cells and rabbit synovial cells in vitro

Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is a multifunctional cytokine that regulates the immune response, acute phase anaphylactic reaction, and haematopoiesis. Lipopolysaccharide (6–24 μg/ml) significantly induced IL-6 release from murine spleen cells. In cultured rabbit synovial cells interleukin-1 (IL-1, 1–10 U/ml) induced IL-6 production in a concentration-dependent manner. Triazolodiazepine (Tri) is a hetrazepine platelet-activating factor antagonist. In this study we found that Tri (0.1–10 μmol/l) exerted strong inhibitory effects on LPS stimulated IL-6 production in murine spleen cells. Kinetic studies showed that the inhibition of IL-6 release was time-independent. In rabbit synovial cells Tri also reduced IL-6 release induced by IL-1 and tumour necrosis factor. Inhibition of cytokine production by Tri may partially explain its wide and strong anti-inflammatory effects