Effect of Nuangong zhitong decoction on primary dysmenorrhea in mice

Purpose: To investigate the therapeutic effect of Nuangong Zhitong decoction (NZD) on primary dysmenorrhea (PD) in mice, and its mechanism of action. Methods: Dysmenorrhea was established in female PD mice by intraperitoneal injection of oxytocin following estradiol benzoate pretreatment. The effects of NZD and its active principles (cinnamic aldehyde and cinnamic acid) on PD were determined using body twist method. Serum levels of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and prostaglandin F2 alpha (PGF2α) in mice were measured using ELISA. Results: The results showed that NZD dose-dependently reduced oxytocin-induced writhing responses (p < 0.05). Moreover, cinnamic aldehyde and cinnamic acid reduced oxytocin-induced writhing responses in a concentration-dependent manner, with maximal inhibitions of 65.01 and 70.67 %, respectively, and also decreased serum levels of PGE2 and PGF2α in PD mice (p < 0.05). Conclusion: These results indicate that NZD mitigates oxytocin-induced uterine tetanic contraction in mice. Thus, NZD has a potential for development into an anti-dysmenorrheal drug for use in humans

Characterization of Laser-Resistant Port Wine Stain Blood Vessels Using In Vivo Reflectance Confocal Microscopy.

Background and objectivesPort wine stain (PWS) is a congenital vascular malformation of the human skin. Laser is the treatment of choice for PWS. Laser-resistant PWS is one crucial factor accounting for inadequate treatment outcome, which needs to be fully characterized. This study aims to quantitatively characterize the morphology of laser-resistant PWS blood vessels in the upper papillary dermis using in vivo reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM).Study design/materials and methodsA total of 42 PWS subjects receiving laser treatment from August 2016 through July 2018 were enrolled into this study. Thirty-three subjects had facial PWS; nine had extremity PWS. All subject's PWS received multiplex 585/1,064 nm laser treatment. RCM images were taken before and after treatment. The density, diameter, blood flow, and depth of PWS blood vessels were analyzed.ResultsWe found 44.4% PWS on the extremities (four out of nine subjects) were laser-resistant, which was significantly higher (P < 0.001) when compared with those PWS on the face (15.2%, 5 out of 33 subjects). The laser-resistant facial PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow (1.35 ± 0.26 U vs. 0.89 ± 0.22 U, P < 0.001), larger blood vessel diameters (109.60 ± 18.24 µm vs. 84.36 ± 24.04 µm, P = 0.033) and were located deeper in the skin (106.01 ± 13.87 µm vs. 87.82 ± 12.57 µm, P < 0.001) in the skin when compared with laser-responsive PWS on the face. The average PWS blood vessel density (17.01 ± 4.63/mm2 vs. 16.61 ± 4.44/mm2 , P = 0.857) was not correlated to the laser resistance.ConclusionsLaser-resistant PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow, larger diameters, and were located deeper in the skin. RCM can be a valuable tool for a prognostic evaluation on laser-resistant lesions before treatment, thereby providing guidance for tailored laser treatment protocols, which may improve the therapeutic outcome. The limitations for this study include relative small sample size and acquisitions of different blood vessels before and after 2 months of treatment. Lasers Surg. Med. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Pseudodeterministic lagorithms and the structure of probabilistic time

We connect the study of pseudodeterministic algorithms to two major open problems about the structural complexity of BPTIME: proving hierarchy theorems and showing the existence of complete problems. Our main contributions can be summarised as follows. A new pseudorandom generator and its consequences. We build on techniques developed to prove hierarchy theorems for probabilistic time with advice (Fortnow and Santhanam, FOCS 2004) to construct the first unconditional pseudorandom generator of polynomial stretch computable in pseudodeterministic polynomial time (with one bit of advice) that is secure infinitely often against polynomial-time computations. As an application of this construction, we obtain new results about the complexity of generating and representing prime numbers. For instance, we show unconditionally for each ε > 0 that infinitely many primes pn have a succinct representation in the following sense: there is a fixed probabilistic polynomial time algorithm that generates pn with high probability from its succinct representation of size O(|pn|ε). This offers an exponential improvement over the running time of previous results, and shows that infinitely many primes have succinct and efficient representations. Structural results for probabilistic time from pseudodeterministic algorithms. Oliveira and Santhanam (STOC 2017) established unconditionally that there is a pseudodeterministic algorithm for the Circuit Acceptance Probability Problem (CAPP) that runs in sub-exponential time and is correct with high probability over any samplable distribution on circuits on infinitely many input lengths. We show that improving this running time or obtaining a result that holds for every large input length would imply new time hierarchy theorems for probabilistic time. In addition, we prove that a worst-case polynomial-time pseudodeterministic algorithm for CAPP would imply that BPP has complete problems. Equivalence between pseudodeterministic constructions and hierarchies. We establish an equivalence between a certain explicit pseudodeterministic construction problem and the existence of strong hierarchy theorems for probabilistic time. More precisely, we show that pseudodeterministically constructing in exponential time strings of large rKt complexity (Oliveira, ICALP 2019) is possible if and only if for every constructive function T(n) ≤ exp(o(exp(n))) we have BPTIME[poly(T)] ⊈ i.o.BPTIME[T]/logT. More generally, these results suggest new approaches for designing pseudodeterministic algorithms for search problems and for unveiling the structure of probabilistic time

Systematic analysis of strange single heavy baryons Ξc\Xi_{c} and Ξb\Xi_{b}

Motivated by the experimental progress in the study of heavy baryons, we investigate the mass spectra of strange single heavy baryons in the $\lambda$-mode, where the relativistic quark model and the infinitesimally shifted Gaussian basis function method are employed. It is shown that the experimental data can be well reproduced by the predicted masses. The root mean square radii and radial probability density distributions of the wave functions are analyzed in detail. Meanwhile, the mass spectra allow us to successfully construct the Regge trajectories in the $(J,M^{2})$ plane. We also preliminarily assign quantum numbers to the recently observed baryons, including $\Xi_{c}(3055)$, $\Xi_{c}(3080)$, $\Xi_{c}(2930)$, $\Xi_{c}(2923)$, $\Xi_{c}(2939)$, $\Xi_{c}(2965)$, $\Xi_{c}(2970)$, $\Xi_{c}(3123)$, $\Xi_{b}(6100)$, $\Xi_{b}(6227)$, $\Xi_{b}(6327)$ and $\Xi_{b}(6333)$. At last, the spectral structure of the strange single heavy baryons is shown. Accordingly, we predict several new baryons that might be observed in forthcoming experiments.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures, 8 table