Role of traditional Chinese medicine in the regulation of inflammatory mediators in paediatric asthma

Abstract Background: In many nations, there has been an increase in the prevalence of allergic diseases, many of which lack therapies for recovery. In addition, there are concerns regarding the use of conventional medicine, particularly corticosteroids, in children. Accordingly, in the case of asthma, many chronic allergic patients are looking at complementary and alternative drugs to treat their condition. Objective: The study intended to observe the impact of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions children with asthma, with a specific focus on their impact on the molecular mechanism of asthma. Method: A total number of 167 children with symptom of asthma were included in the study and were randomly allocated to two groups – those who received traditional Chinese medicine (TCM, the TCM group, n = 90) and those who were given salbutamol plus montelukast (SM, the SM group, n = 77). Different TCM treatments were given to patients in the TCM group, while salbutamol and montelukast were given to the SM group. Theappropriate treatment was given to both groups for 12 weeks. The patient who are getting TCM treatment had 42 cases, and the SM group had 35 cases. Real-time quantitative fluorescent PCR detects interleukin 10 and interleukin 17 (IL-10 and IL17 respectively) and matrix metal-oproteinase 9 commonly known as MMP-9 expression levels including monocyte blood transforming growth factor 1 (MBTGF-β1). A diagnosis of IL-10 orIL-17 or, MMP-9 as well as MBTGF- β1 is monitored in peripheral blood which were treated before and after consecutively. Results: MBTGF-β1-RNA decreased among the SM group children after the treatment Whereas after treatment no major variances in MMP-9 among TCM and the SM children group were noted (0.05>0.05). The amount of IL-10 including IL-17 and MMP-9 expressively declined (p = 0.01, 0.04 and 0.03 respectively) in the TCM group. On the other hand, MMP-9 and MBTGF- β1 levels expressively declined in the SM group following therapy. The IL-10 as well as IL-17, and MBTGF-β1 and MMP-9 values in the two groups were not significantly different (> 0.05). The differences between IL-17 and c-ACT scores in the Chinese medicine group and SM group were adversely correlated. Conclusions: Traditional Chinese Medicine has controlling consequence on secretions of childhood asthma inflammatory mediators and help in asthma management immune mechanism. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2020; 34(4):262-266] Key words: Paediatric asthma, traditional Chinese medicine, children, Chinese herbal medicin

Characteristics of traditional Chinese medicine users and prescription analysis for pediatric atopic dermatitis

Abstract Background: Traditional Chinese medicine is commonly used to treat children with atopic dermatitis. This research study reviewed patients with atopic dermatitis, recorded in Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database, to investigate the characteristics and prescriptions of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) so as to propose the use of TCM for a broader societal application. Objective: The aim of this study is to determine the application mode of TCM in children with atopic dermatitis, specifically the combination of Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) used. Methods: The database reported atopic dermatitis-diagnosed children aged 5 to 12. TCM users documented data relate to age, diagnostic code, residence area and the use of corticosteroids. An analysis of the medications used for atopic dermatitis was achieved through a review of examining the association of various factors. Results: A total of 13,646 children with atopic dermatitis, and treated using TCM, were sampled from different area of Taiwan. The use of TCM is associated with use by women (male: OR 0.83), adolescence (OR: 10.0, 95% CI: 8.88-11.15) and allergic rhinitis (OR: 2.44; 95 % CI: 2.10-2.85). Fewer TCM users than non-users receive corticosteroid therapy (35.8% of all users receive TCM). Still, the percentage of TCM users who use long-lastingcorticosteroid therapy is greater than TCM non-users (10.6% of TCM users and 2.0% of TCM non-users). In total, 36,398 CHM prescriptions were used by 93.7% of Chinese medicine users. There was a total of 5.62 types CHM types used. Relationships between the Chinese herbal medicine forms network, where Xiao fengsan is the primary treatment for atopic dermatitis. Conclusions: The article describes features of children with atopic dermatitis who are treated with Chinese medicine. Xiao fengsan is the most common CHM used to treat atopic dermatitis in children. Further research on the safety and efficiency of this treatment is still required. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2020; 34(4):253-261] Key words: Traditional Chinese medicine, atopic dermatitis, paediatrics, Chinese herbal medicin

Semantic Interleaving Global Channel Attention for Multilabel Remote Sensing Image Classification

Multi-Label Remote Sensing Image Classification (MLRSIC) has received increasing research interest. Taking the cooccurrence relationship of multiple labels as additional information helps to improve the performance of this task. Current methods focus on using it to constrain the final feature output of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). On the one hand, these methods do not make full use of label correlation to form feature representation. On the other hand, they increase the label noise sensitivity of the system, resulting in poor robustness. In this paper, a novel method called Semantic Interleaving Global Channel Attention (SIGNA) is proposed for MLRSIC. First, the label co-occurrence graph is obtained according to the statistical information of the data set. The label co-occurrence graph is used as the input of the Graph Neural Network (GNN) to generate optimal feature representations. Then, the semantic features and visual features are interleaved, to guide the feature expression of the image from the original feature space to the semantic feature space with embedded label relations. SIGNA triggers global attention of feature maps channels in a new semantic feature space to extract more important visual features. Multihead SIGNA based feature adaptive weighting networks are proposed to act on any layer of CNN in a plug-and-play manner. For remote sensing images, better classification performance can be achieved by inserting CNN into the shallow layer. We conduct extensive experimental comparisons on three data sets: UCM data set, AID data set, and DFC15 data set. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SIGNA achieves superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. It is worth mentioning that the codes of this paper will be open to the community for reproducibility research. Our codes are available at https://github.com/kyle-one/SIGNA.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

Yarrowia lipolytica: A versatile microbial workhorse for expanding nature’s biosynthetic capacity

Yarrowia lipolytica is an oleaginous yeast that have been substantially engineered for production of oleochemcials and drop-in transportation fuels. It has been considered as a ‘generally recognized as safe’ (GRAS) organism for the production of organic acids in the food and nutraceutical industry. The high precursor acetyl-CoA and malonyl-CoA flux along with the versatile carbon-utilization capability makes this yeast as a superior host to upgrade low-value carbons into high-value pharmaceuticals and plant natural products (PNPs). Bacteria system in general is less efficient to express the complex gene cluster of plant natural product pathway. Unlike bacteria, yeast has developed spatially separated organelles to partition specialized metabolic functions into distinct cellular compartments. In this talk, we will present strategies to harness the endogenous acetyl-CoA/malonyl-CoA/HMG-CoA metabolism toward engineering efficient yeast cell factories to produce complex oleochemicals, terpenes, polyketides and aromatic commodity chemicals. We identified pathway limitations and assessed genetic engineering strategies to elevate the level of acetyl-CoA, malonyl-CoA, HMG-CoA and NADPH. This work will provide a testbed for engineering Y. lipolytica and expanding nature’s biosynthetic capacity to produce complex fuels and chemicals from renewable feedstocks

EXISTENCE OF SOLUTIONS FOR A FOUR-POINT BOUNDARY VALUE PROBLEM OF A NONLINEAR FRACTIONAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION

Abstract. In this paper, we discuss a four-point boundary value problem for a nonlinear differential equation of fractional order. The differential operator is the Riemann-Liouville derivative and the inhomogeneous term depends on the fractional derivative of lower order. We obtain the existence of at least one solution for the problem by using the Schauder fixed-point theorem. Our analysis relies on the reduction of the problem considered to the equivalent Fredholm integral equation

A Unified BEV Model for Joint Learning of 3D Local Features and Overlap Estimation

Pairwise point cloud registration is a critical task for many applications, which heavily depends on finding correct correspondences from the two point clouds. However, the low overlap between input point clouds causes the registration to fail easily, leading to mistaken overlapping and mismatched correspondences, especially in scenes where non-overlapping regions contain similar structures. In this paper, we present a unified bird's-eye view (BEV) model for jointly learning of 3D local features and overlap estimation to fulfill pairwise registration and loop closure. Feature description is performed by a sparse UNet-like network based on BEV representation, and 3D keypoints are extracted by a detection head for 2D locations, and a regression head for heights. For overlap detection, a cross-attention module is applied for interacting contextual information of input point clouds, followed by a classification head to estimate the overlapping region. We evaluate our unified model extensively on the KITTI dataset and Apollo-SouthBay dataset. The experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods on overlap estimation, especially in scenes with small overlaps. It also achieves top registration performance on both datasets in terms of translation and rotation errors.Comment: 8 pages. Accepted by ICRA-202

Improved Stabilization Criteria for Neutral Time-Delay Systems

This paper addresses the stabilization conditions for neutral systems with mixed time delays. By constructing a novel class of Lyapunov functionals which contains an augmented Lyapunov functional, using a new class of improved Jensen's like inequalities, two improved delay-dependent stability criteria are firstly established. Next, state feedback controllers are designed according to the stability conditions in different cases. Finally, five numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the theoretical results