Screening for the optimal siRNA targeting a novel gene (HA117) and construction and evaluation of a derivative recombinant adenovirus

We found a novel gene named as HA117 in our previous research. At this study, we screened for an optimal siRNA targeting the novel gene HA117 using the pSOS-HUS method, verified the results of pSOS-HUS siRNA screening for optimal affinity for the target gene, and constructed and evaluated a recombinant adenovirus carrying the DNA template for transcription of the optimal HA117 siRNA. The pSOS-HUS vector method was successfully utilized as a rapid and effective screen for an optimal siRNA for a target gene. Among five pairs of DNA templates, siRNA transcribed from HAi5 gave the strongest interference with the novel gene HA117; a HAi5-carrying recombinant adenovirus (Ad-HAi5) was successfully constructed and evaluated, laying a foundation for the further study of HA117 gene function with RNAi technology

RNAi-based Gene Therapy for Blood Genetic Diseases

Therapies for blood genetic diseases can be divided into different categories, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy, gene therapy, and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Among these treatments, gene targeting is progressively becoming a therapeutic alternative that offers the possibility of a permanent cure for certain blood genetic diseases. In recent years, gene therapy has played a more important role in curing genetic blood disorders. RNA interference (RNAi) is one of the directions for gene therapy, which was intensively studied in the past decades for its potentials in the treatment of diseases. In order to provide useful references and prospective directions for further studies concerning RNAi-based gene therapy for blood genetic diseases, current RNAi-based gene therapies for several typical blood genetic diseases have been summarized and discussed in this chapter

The effects of cognitive behavioural therapy on depression and quality of life in patients with maintenance haemodialysis: a systematic review

Depression is highly prevalent among Haemodialysis (HD) patients and is known to results in a series of adverse outcomes and poor quality of life (QoL). Although cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has been shown to improve depressive symptoms and QoL in other chronic illness, there is uncertainty in terms of the effectiveness of CBT in HD patients with depression or depressive symptoms. All randomised controlled trials relevant to the topic were retrieved from the following databases: CINHAL, MEDLINE, PubMed, PsycINFO and CENTRAL. The grey literature, specific journals, reference lists of included studies and trials registers website were also searched. Data was extracted or calculated from included studies that had measured depression and quality of life using valid and reliable tools -this included mean differences or standardised mean differences and 95% confidence intervals. The Cochrane risk of bias tool was used to identify the methodological quality of the included studies. Six RCTs were included with varying methodological quality. Meta-analysis was undertaken for 3 studies that employed the CBT versus usual care. All studies showed that the depressive symptoms significantly improved after the CBT. Furthermore, CBT was more effective than usual care (MD = - 5.28, 95%CI - 7.9 to - 2.65, P = 0.37) and counselling (MD = - 2.39, 95%CI - 3.49 to - 1.29), while less effective than sertraline (MD = 2.2, 95%CI 0.43 to 3.97) in alleviating depressive symptoms. Additionally, the CBT seems to have a beneficial effect in improving QoL when compared with usual care, while no significant difference was found in QoL score when compared CBT with sertraline. CBT may improve depressive symptoms and QoL in HD patients with comorbid depressive symptoms. However, more rigorous studies are needed in this field due to the small quantity and varied methodological quality in the identified studies

Prevalence, associated factors and outcomes of pressure injuries in adult intensive care unit patients: the DecubICUs study

Funder: European Society of Intensive Care Medicine; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100013347Funder: Flemish Society for Critical Care NursesAbstract: Purpose: Intensive care unit (ICU) patients are particularly susceptible to developing pressure injuries. Epidemiologic data is however unavailable. We aimed to provide an international picture of the extent of pressure injuries and factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries in adult ICU patients. Methods: International 1-day point-prevalence study; follow-up for outcome assessment until hospital discharge (maximum 12 weeks). Factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injury and hospital mortality were assessed by generalised linear mixed-effects regression analysis. Results: Data from 13,254 patients in 1117 ICUs (90 countries) revealed 6747 pressure injuries; 3997 (59.2%) were ICU-acquired. Overall prevalence was 26.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] 25.9–27.3). ICU-acquired prevalence was 16.2% (95% CI 15.6–16.8). Sacrum (37%) and heels (19.5%) were most affected. Factors independently associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries were older age, male sex, being underweight, emergency surgery, higher Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, Braden score 3 days, comorbidities (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, immunodeficiency), organ support (renal replacement, mechanical ventilation on ICU admission), and being in a low or lower-middle income-economy. Gradually increasing associations with mortality were identified for increasing severity of pressure injury: stage I (odds ratio [OR] 1.5; 95% CI 1.2–1.8), stage II (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.4–1.9), and stage III or worse (OR 2.8; 95% CI 2.3–3.3). Conclusion: Pressure injuries are common in adult ICU patients. ICU-acquired pressure injuries are associated with mainly intrinsic factors and mortality. Optimal care standards, increased awareness, appropriate resource allocation, and further research into optimal prevention are pivotal to tackle this important patient safety threat

Correction to: Prevalence, associated factors and outcomes of pressure injuries in adult intensive care unit patients: the DecubICUs study

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake

Prevalence, associated factors and outcomes of pressure injuries in adult intensive care unit patients: the DecubICUs study

Funder: European Society of Intensive Care Medicine; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100013347Funder: Flemish Society for Critical Care NursesAbstract: Purpose: Intensive care unit (ICU) patients are particularly susceptible to developing pressure injuries. Epidemiologic data is however unavailable. We aimed to provide an international picture of the extent of pressure injuries and factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries in adult ICU patients. Methods: International 1-day point-prevalence study; follow-up for outcome assessment until hospital discharge (maximum 12 weeks). Factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injury and hospital mortality were assessed by generalised linear mixed-effects regression analysis. Results: Data from 13,254 patients in 1117 ICUs (90 countries) revealed 6747 pressure injuries; 3997 (59.2%) were ICU-acquired. Overall prevalence was 26.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] 25.9–27.3). ICU-acquired prevalence was 16.2% (95% CI 15.6–16.8). Sacrum (37%) and heels (19.5%) were most affected. Factors independently associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries were older age, male sex, being underweight, emergency surgery, higher Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, Braden score 3 days, comorbidities (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, immunodeficiency), organ support (renal replacement, mechanical ventilation on ICU admission), and being in a low or lower-middle income-economy. Gradually increasing associations with mortality were identified for increasing severity of pressure injury: stage I (odds ratio [OR] 1.5; 95% CI 1.2–1.8), stage II (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.4–1.9), and stage III or worse (OR 2.8; 95% CI 2.3–3.3). Conclusion: Pressure injuries are common in adult ICU patients. ICU-acquired pressure injuries are associated with mainly intrinsic factors and mortality. Optimal care standards, increased awareness, appropriate resource allocation, and further research into optimal prevention are pivotal to tackle this important patient safety threat

New Development in ERP Studies of Emotion

ERP technique helps much in emotion studies. These studies usually recruited healthy people or individuals with mood disorders as research subjects. The variety of the ERP components,such as the P1, N1, and P300, elicited by visual and/or auditory stimuli were observed. This article reviewed and discussed some questions of ERP studies of emotion, such as the relationship between emotion and attention, memory and decision-making, and the lateralization of emotion, and so on. Research results suggest that emotion can enhance attention and novel emotional stimuli can be detected more easily. In normal subjects, emotional words can arouse stronger old-new effects than neutral words. Depressive patients cannot present the same effects as the normal ones, but their recognizing achievements can be improved by emotional words. When studying the influence of emotion upon decision-making, researchers observed changes of medial frontal negativity (MFN). The lateralization of brain functions also exists in emotional activities

Properties of Luffa Fiber Reinforced PHBV Biodegradable Composites

In this study, composites of poly (hydroxybutyrate-co-valerate) (PHBV) with untreated luffa fibers (ULF) and NaOH-H2O2 treated luffa fibers (TLF) were prepared by hot press forming. The properties of luffa fibers (LFs) and composites were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and other analysis methods. Results showed that pre-treatment effectively removed pectin, hemicellulose, and lignin, thus reducing the moisture absorptivity of LFs. The flexural strength of TLF/PHBV was higher than that of ULF/PHBV. With 60% LF content, the flexural strengths of ULF/PHBV and TLF/PHBV reached 75.23 MPa and 90.73 MPa, respectively, 219.7% and 285.6% more than that of pure PHBV. Water absorptivities of composites increased with increase in LF content. Water absorptivity of TLF/PHBV was lower than that of ULF/PHBV. The flexural strengths of composites decreased after immersion in water at room temperature. Meanwhile, flexural strength of TLF/PHBV was lower than that of ULF/PHBV. Pretreatment of LFs effectively improved the bonding between fibers and PHBV, resulting in enhanced and thus improved the moisture resistance of composites

A General Spline-Based Method for Centerline Extraction from Different Segmented Road Maps in Remote Sensing Imagery

Road centerline extraction is the foundation for integrating the segmented road map from a remote sensing image into a geographic information system (GIS) database. Considering that existing approaches tend to have a decline in performance for centerline and junction extraction when segmented road structures are irregular, this paper proposes a novel method which models the road network as a sequence of connected spline curves. Based on this motivation, the ratio of cross operators is firstly proposed to detect direction and width features of roads. Then, road pixels are divided into different clusters by local features using three perceptual grouping principles (i.e., direction grouping, proximity grouping, and continuity grouping). After applying a polynomial curve fitting on each cluster using pixel coordinates as observation data, the internal control points are determined according to the adjacency relation between clusters. Finally, road centerlines are generated based on spline fitting with constraints. We test our approach on segmented road maps which were obtained previously by machine recognition, or manual extraction from real optical (WorldView-2) and synthetic aperture radar (TerraSAR-X, Radarsat-2) images. Depending on the accuracy of the input segmented road maps, experimental results from our test data show that both the completeness and correctness of extracted centerlines are over 84% and 68% for optical and radar images, respectively. Furthermore, experiments also demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method, in contrast to existing methods for gaining smooth centerlines and precise junctions