Associations of trajectories in body roundness index with incident cardiovascular disease: a prospective cohort study in rural China

AimsThe body roundness index (BRI) has good predictive ability for both body fat and visceral adipose tissue. Longitudinal BRI trajectories can reveal the potential dynamic patterns of change over time. This prospective study assessed potential associations between BRI trajectories and incident cardiovascular disease (CVD) in rural regions of Northeast China.MethodsIn total, 13,209 participants (mean age: 49.0 ± 10.3 years, 6,856 [51.9%] male) were enrolled with three repeated times of BRI measurements at baseline (2004–2006), 2008, and 2010, and followed up until 2017 in this prospective study. Using latent mixture model, the BRI trajectories were determined based on the data from baseline, 2008 and 2010. Composite CVD events (myocardial infarction, stroke, and CVD death combined) was the primary endpoint. Cox proportional-hazards models were used to analyze the longitudinal associations between BRI trajectories and incident CVD.ResultsThree distinct BRI trajectories were identified: high-stable (n = 538), moderate-stable (n = 1,542), and low-stable (n = 11,129). In total, 1,382 CVD events were recorded during follow-up. After adjustment for confounders, the moderate-stable and high-stable BRI groups had a higher CVD risk than did the low-stable BRI group, and the HR (95%CI) were 1.346 (1.154, 1.571) and 1.751 (1.398, 2.194), respectively. Similar associations were observed between the trajectories of BRI and the risk of stroke and CVD death. The high-stable group was also significantly and independently associated with CVD, myocardial infarction, stroke, and CVD death in participants aged <50 years.ConclusionBRI trajectory was positively associated with incident CVD, providing a novel possibility for the primary prevention of CVD in rural regions of China

Learning to Infer User Hidden States for Online Sequential Advertising

To drive purchase in online advertising, it is of the advertiser's great interest to optimize the sequential advertising strategy whose performance and interpretability are both important. The lack of interpretability in existing deep reinforcement learning methods makes it not easy to understand, diagnose and further optimize the strategy. In this paper, we propose our Deep Intents Sequential Advertising (DISA) method to address these issues. The key part of interpretability is to understand a consumer's purchase intent which is, however, unobservable (called hidden states). In this paper, we model this intention as a latent variable and formulate the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) where the underlying intents are inferred based on the observable behaviors. Large-scale industrial offline and online experiments demonstrate our method's superior performance over several baselines. The inferred hidden states are analyzed, and the results prove the rationality of our inference.Comment: to be published in CIKM 202

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

The complete mitogenome of Microhyla fissipes (Anura: Microhylidae) and phylogenetic analysis using GenBank data mining

The complete mitogenome of Microhyla fissipes (16,723 bp) was obtained and analysed. It contains the set of 13 protein-coding genes, two rRNA genes, 22 tRNA genes, and one non-coding regions. Most of the genes in M. fissipes are located on the H-strand, except for the ND6 and eight tRNA genes which are located on the L-strand. The phylogenetic tree shows that M. fissipes is a sister to the clade composed of M. okinavensis and M. mixtura and places Glyphoglossus yunnanensis as the sister lineage to a clade of Microhyla. This new mitogenome of M. fissipes will provide basic data for further molecular evolution studies in this genus

The coinfection of ALVs causes severe pathogenicity in Three-Yellow chickens

Abstract The coinfection of ALVs (ALV-J plus ALV-A or/and ALV-B) has played an important role in the incidence of tumors recently found in China in local breeds of yellow chickens. The study aims to obtain a better knowledge of the function and relevance of ALV coinfection in the clinical disease of avian leukosis, as well as its unique effect on the pathogenicity in Three-yellow chickens. One-day-old Three-yellow chicks (one day old) were infected with ALV-A, ALV-B, and ALV-J mono-infections, as well as ALV-A + J, ALV-B + J, and ALV-A + B + J coinfections, via intraperitoneal injection, and the chicks were then grown in isolators until they were 15 weeks old. The parameters, including the suppression of body weight gain, immune organ weight, viremia, histopathological changes and tumor incidence, were observed and compared with those of the uninfected control birds. The results demonstrated that coinfection with ALVs could induce more serious suppression of body weight gain (P < 0.05), damage to immune organs (P < 0.05) and higher tumor incidences than monoinfection, with triple infection producing the highest pathogenicity. The emergence of visible tumors and viremia occurred faster in the coinfected birds than in the monoinfected birds. These findings demonstrated that ALV coinfection resulted in considerably severe pathogenic and immunosuppressive consequences

Characterization of the Complete Mitochondrial Genome of Fischoederius elongatus Derived from Cows in Shanghai, China

A study was conducted to reveal the characterization of the complete mitochondrial genome of Fischoederius elongatus derived from cows in Shanghai, China. Results indicated that the complete mt genome of F. elongatus was 14,288 bp and contained 12 protein-coding genes (cox1-3, nad1-6, nad4L, atp6, and cytb), 22 transfer RNA genes, and two ribosomal RNA genes (l-rRNA and s-rRNA). The overall A + T content of the mt genome was 63.83%, and the nucleotide composition was A (19.83%), C (9.75%), G (26.43%), and T (44.00%). A total of 3284 amino acids were encoded by current F. elongatus isolate mt genome, TTT (Phe) (9.84%) and TTG (Leu) (7.73%) codon were the most frequent amino acids, whereas the ACC (Thr) (0.06%), GCC (Ala) (0.09%), CTC (Leu) (0.09%), and AAC (Asn) (0.09%) codon were the least frequent ones. At the third codon position of F. elongatus mt protein genes, T (50.82%) was observed most frequently and C (5.85%) was the least one. The current results can contribute to epidemiology diagnosis, molecular identification, taxonomy, genetic, and drug development researches about this parasite species in cattle

Additional waves in the graphene layered medium

We investigate the features of additional waves that arise in the graphene layered medium, within the framework of nonlocal effective medium model. The additional wave is manifest on the biquadratic dispersion relation of the medium and represents as a distinctive nonlocal character at long wavelength. In particular, the reflection and transmission coefficients for the nonlocal medium are underdetermined by Maxwell's boundary conditions. An additional boundary condition based on modal expansions is proposed to derive the generalized Fresnel equations, based on which the additional wave in the graphene layered medium is determined. The additional wave tends to be significant near the effective plasma frequency, near which the graphene plasmons are excited inside the medium. (C) 2014 Optical Society of Americ

PPARG Drives Molecular Networks as an Inhibitor for the Pathologic Development and Progression of Lung Adenocarcinoma

Previous studies showed that low PPARG expression was associated with poor prognosis of lung adenocarcinoma (LA) with limited mechanisms identified. We first conducted a large-scale literature-based data mining to identify potential molecular pathways where PPARG could exert influence on the pathological development of LA. Then a mega-analysis using 13 independent LA expression datasets and a Pathway Enrichment Analysis (PEA) was conducted to study the gene expression levels and the functionalities of PPARG and the PPARG-driven triggers within the molecular pathways. Finally, a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was established to reveal the functional connection between PPARG and its driven molecules. We identified 25 PPARG-driven molecule triggers forming multiple LA-regulatory pathways. Mega-analysis using 13 LA datasets supported these pathways and confirmed the downregulation of PPARG in the case of LA (p=1.07e−05). Results from the PEA and PPI analysis suggested that PPARG might inhibit the development of LA through the regulation of tumor cell proliferation and transmission-related molecules, including an LA tumor cell suppressor MIR145. Our results suggested that increased expression of PPARG could drive multiple molecular triggers against the pathologic development and prognosis of LA, indicating PPARG as a valuable therapeutic target for LA treatment

An eco-friendly approach to purify natural magnesite and to densify sintered magnesia

High-grade raw magnesite ore for DBM97 production became rare in China after a mining frenzy for over 30 years. However, the demand for high-purity sintered magnesia grows in high-temperature industries that accompany volatile components. The developed process starts from the flotation of low-grade natural magnesite, executes the flash calcination in a suspension calciner, and ultimately accomplishes sintering in an extraordinary high-temperature shaft kiln. But it is hard to densify such magnesia. In this work, a novel eco-friendly approach is studied in a pilot plant with a capacity of 40 t/d input, to calcine natural magnesite grading as low as 40 % MgO, to carry out three levels of watering treatments removing Si-, Fe- and Ca-components and hydrating MgO (gaining >90 % Mg(OH)2), to calcine magnesium hydroxide for active MgO in the suspension calciner, and finally to burn high purity magnesia to high densification. The MgO hydration process is highlighted with the pivotal parameters of hydrating duration and temperature, which is believed to be an eco-friendly beneficiation. The calcined caustic magnesia obtained has a high activity of 3.4 g/cm3 reached in industrial potential of dead burnt magnesia with the purity of > 97.5 % MgO