Serum leptin is associated with cardiometabolic risk and predicts metabolic syndrome in Taiwanese adults

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Leptin is associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD); however, few studies have assessed its relationship with metabolic syndrome, especially in an Asian population. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to assess leptin levels and evaluate its association with CVD and metabolic syndrome.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In 2009, 957 subjects, who underwent a routine physical examination and choose leptin examination, were selected to participate. Participants (269 females and 688 males) were stratified according to leptin level quartiles. Metabolic syndrome was defined by NCEP ATP III using waist circumference cutoffs modified for Asian populations, and CVD risk was determined using the Framingham Heart Study profile.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Leptin levels were correlated with CVD risk in men and women. With the exception of fasting plasma glucose, increased leptin levels were observed as factors associated with metabolic syndrome increased in both males and females. After adjusting for age, an association between leptin levels and metabolic syndrome was observed. After adjusting for age alone or with tobacco use, subjects in the highest leptin quartile had a higher risk of having metabolic syndrome than those in the lowest quartile (OR = 6.14 and 2.94 for men and women, respectively). After further adjustment for BMI, metabolic syndrome risk remained significantly increased with increasing leptin quartiles in men. Finally, increased leptin levels were a predictor of metabolic syndrome in men and women.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Serum leptin levels are correlated with CVD risk and metabolic syndrome. Analysis of leptin as part of routine physical examinations may prove beneficial for early diagnosis of metabolic syndrome.</p

Attention-based Learning for Sleep Apnea and Limb Movement Detection using Wi-Fi CSI Signals

Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) has become a promising solution for non-invasive breathing and body motion monitoring during sleep. Sleep disorders of apnea and periodic limb movement disorder (PLMD) are often unconscious and fatal. The existing researches detect abnormal sleep disorders in impractically controlled environments. Moreover, it leads to compelling challenges to classify complex macro- and micro-scales of sleep movements as well as entangled similar waveforms of cases of apnea and PLMD. In this paper, we propose the attention-based learning for sleep apnea and limb movement detection (ALESAL) system that can jointly detect sleep apnea and PLMD under different sleep postures across a variety of patients. ALESAL contains antenna-pair and time attention mechanisms for mitigating the impact of modest antenna pairs and emphasizing the duration of interest, respectively. Performance results show that our proposed ALESAL system can achieve a weighted F1-score of 84.33, outperforming the other existing non-attention based methods of support vector machine and deep multilayer perceptron

Low-Rate Overuse Flow Tracer (LOFT): An Efficient and Scalable Algorithm for Detecting Overuse Flows

Current probabilistic flow-size monitoring can only detect heavy hitters (e.g., flows utilizing 10 times their permitted bandwidth), but cannot detect smaller overuse (e.g., flows utilizing 50-100% more than their permitted bandwidth). Thus, these systems lack accuracy in the challenging environment of high-throughput packet processing, where fast-memory resources are scarce. Nevertheless, many applications rely on accurate flow-size estimation, e.g. for network monitoring, anomaly detection and Quality of Service. We design, analyze, implement, and evaluate LOFT, a new approach for efficiently detecting overuse flows that achieves dramatically better properties than prior work. LOFT can detect 1.5x overuse flows in one second, whereas prior approaches fail to detect 2x overuse flows within a timeout of 300 seconds. We demonstrate LOFT's suitability for high-speed packet processing with implementations in the DPDK framework and on an FPGA

Risk of liver dysfunction and non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases in people with hidradenitis suppurativa: A systematic review and meta-analysis of real-world evidences

BackgroundTo date, evidences with high evidence-level evaluating the association between liver diseases and hidradenitis suppurativa was lacking. Given that inconsistency exists in some of the previous observational studies, evaluating the prevalence of liver diseases in HS patients could potentially serve as a reference of future guidelines for HS comorbidity screening. The aim of the current study was to evaluate potential association between hidradenitis suppurativa and liver diseases and provide integrated evidences.MethodsA search in PubMed, Web of Science and Embase based on the syntaxes ‘‘hidradenitis suppurativa’’ or ‘‘acne inversa’’ with “comorbidities”, “liver diseases”, “fatty liver” or “hepatitis” was performed. Observational studies evaluating epidemiological association between hidradenitis suppurativa and the risk of all liver diseases, including specific diseases as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, hepatitis B, hepatitis C were targeted to be extracted in this systematic review and meta-analysis.ResultsWithin the initial 702 records, there were finally 8 real-world observational studies extracted. Results suggest that patients with HS are associated with all liver diseases (OR= 1.50; 95% CI, 1.27, 1.76), non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (OR= 1.78; 95% CI, 1.28, 2.48) and hepatitis B (OR=1.48; 95% CI, 1.12, 1.94), but not hepatitis C (OR= 1.27; 95% CI, 0.78, 2.07). HS patients were associated with significantly increased risk of liver diseases, especially the risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and hepatitis B.ConclusionsClinicians should be alert to the clinical relationship while caring people with hidradenitis suppurativa and the screening of liver function should be recommended to HS patients. Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, identifier CRD42022296034

Nervous Necrosis Virus Replicates Following the Embryo Development and Dual Infection with Iridovirus at Juvenile Stage in Grouper

Infection of virus (such as nodavirus and iridovirus) and bacteria (such as Vibrio anguillarum) in farmed grouper has been widely reported and caused large economic losses to Taiwanese fish aquaculture industry since 1979. The multiplex assay was used to detect dual viral infection and showed that only nervous necrosis virus (NNV) can be detected till the end of experiments (100% mortality) once it appeared. In addition, iridovirus can be detected in a certain period of rearing. The results of real-time PCR and in situ PCR indicated that NNV, in fact, was not on the surface of the eggs but present in the embryo, which can continue to replicate during the embryo development. The virus may be vertically transmitted by packing into eggs during egg development (formation) or delivering into eggs by sperm during fertilization. The ozone treatment of eggs may fail to remove the virus, so a new strategy to prevent NNV is needed

Anatomical Variations of Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve During Thyroid Surgery: How to Identify and Handle the Variations With Intraoperative Neuromonitoring

Recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) palsy is the most common and serious complication after thyroid surgery. Visual identification of the RLN during thyroid surgery has been shown to be associated with lower rates of palsy, and although it has been recommended as the gold standard for RLN treatment, it does not guarantee success against postoperative vocal cord paralysis. Anatomical variations of the RLN, such as extra-laryngeal branches, distorted RLN, intertwining between branches of the RLN and inferior thyroid artery, and non-recurrent laryngeal nerve, can be a potential cause of nerve injury due to visual misidentification. Therefore, intraoperative verification of functional and anatomical RLN integrity is a prerequisite for a safe thyroid operation. In this article, we review the literature and demonstrate how to identify and handle the anatomical variations of the RLN with the application of intraoperative neuromonitoring in the form of high resolution photography, which can be informative for thyroid surgeons. Anatomical variations of the RLN cannot be predicted preoperatively and might be associated with higher rates of RLN injury. The RLN injury caused by visual misidentification can be rare if the nerve is definitely identified early with intraoperative neuromonitoring

A Low Power Fully Integrated Analog Baseband Circuit with Variable Bandwidth for 802.11 a/b/g WLAN

Abstract: This paper presents experimental results of an analog baseband circuit with variable bandwidth for WLAN direct conversion receiver in UMC 0.18um CMOS process. A seventh order chebyshev lowpass filter with triple bandwidth is used in the analog baseband circuit. The bandwidth is selectable from 7.56MHz, 19.5MHz, or 26.5MHz. The circuit adopts the servo loop for dc offset cancellation. It also has a gain range from 20dB to 60 dB with 10 dB steps while only dissipating 22.248mW. In addition, an automatic frequency tuning loop (ATL) is reported to achieve the bandwidth accuracy of the filter

Gingyo-San Enhances Immunity and Potentiates Infectious Bursal Disease Vaccination

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of Gingyo-san (GGS), a traditional Chinese medical formula, on peripheral lymphocyte proliferation and serum antibody titers in chickens vaccinated against the infectious bursal disease (IBD) virus. Treatment groups were fed one of three doses of GGS in their diet (0.5%, 1.0% and 2.0%, w/w), and the IBD vaccine was administered at 1 and 3 weeks of age. At Weeks 8, 12 and 16, changes in serum IBD antibody titers were measured via the micro-method and T cell proliferation. In gene expression experiments, GGS-treated peripheral T lymphocytes were stimulated with concanavalin A (ConA) for 24 h. The mRNA expression of interleukin-2 (IL-2), interferon-γ (IFN-γ), interleukin-4 (IL-4) and interleukin-12 (IL-12) was determined using a semi-quantitative RT-PCR assay. The results showed that a low dose of GGS could significantly raise the antibody titers. Medium and high doses of GGS enhanced IL-2 and IFN-γ production. GGS altered the expression of IL-4 and IL-12 in T lymphocytes. CD4+ T lymphocyte development was also skewed towards the Th1 phenotype. GGS enhanced cell-mediated immunity and augmented the effects of IBD vaccination in strengthening subsequent anti-viral responses

The dimer interface of the SARS coronavirus nucleocapsid protein adapts a porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome virus-like structure

AbstractWe have employed NMR to investigate the structure of SARS coronavirus nucleocapsid protein dimer. We found that the secondary structure of the dimerization domain consists of five α helices and a β-hairpin. The dimer interface consists of a continuous four-stranded β-sheet superposed by two long α helices, reminiscent of that found in the nucleocapsid protein of porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome virus. Extensive hydrogen bond formation between the two hairpins and hydrophobic interactions between the β-sheet and the α helices render the interface highly stable. Sequence alignment suggests that other coronavirus may share the same structural topology