Global daily mask use estimation in the pandemic and its post environmental health risks: Analysis based on a validated dynamic mathematical model.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp increase in disposable surgical mask usage. Discarded masks can release microplastic and cause environmental pollution. Since masks have become a daily necessity for protection against virus infections, it is necessary to review the usage and disposal of masks during the pandemic for future management. In this study, we constructed a dynamic model by introducing related parameters to estimate daily mask usage in 214 countries from January 22, 2020 to July 31, 2022. And we validated the accuracy of our model by establishing a dataset based on published survey data. Our results show that the cumulative mask usage has reached 800 billion worldwide, and the microplastics released from discarded masks due to mismanagement account for 3.27% of global marine microplastic emissions in this period. Furthermore, we illustrated the response relationship between mask usage and the infection rates. We found a marginally significant negative correlation existing between the mean daily per capita mask usage and the rate of cumulative confirmed cases within the range of 25% to 50%. This indicates that if the rate reaches the specified threshold, the preventive effect of masks may become evident.

Probiotic Compounds Enhanced Recovery after Surgery for Patients with Distal Gastric Cancer: A Prospective, Controlled Clinical Trial.

BACKGROUND: Enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) for radical distal gastrectomy needs to be improved urgently. We investigated the effects of probiotic compounds (including Lactobacillus plantarum, L. rhamnosus, L. acidophilus, and Bifidobacterium animalis subsp.lactis) on enhance recovery after gastrectomy. METHODS: The patients in this prospective study were divided into probiotic group (PG group, n = 36) and placebo group (CG group, n = 38), taking corresponding capsule according to the protocol during the perioperative period. We compared the trends in perioperative hematologic findings and the postoperative outcomes. Patients' feces were collected for bacterial 16S rRNA sequencing. Patients were followed up at 1 month postoperatively. RESULTS: After the application of probiotics, the patients' postoperative inflammatory response level was reduced, and the trend of postoperative NLR decrease was significantly faster in the patients of the PG group than in the CG group (P = 0.047, partial η2 = 0.054). The trend of postoperative increase in serum albumin concentration in the patients of the PG group was significantly better than that in the CG group (P = 0.016, partial η2 = 0.078). In addition, patients in the PG group met discharge criteria earlier postoperatively and had fewer medical expenses. The quality of life of PG group was improved postoperatively. Postoperative inflammation-related markers, including the ratio of Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes, were increasing in untreated patients. In addition, the postoperative microbial diversity and abundance in the PG group remained stable. CONCLUSIONS: Probiotic compounds can reduce the inflammatory response after gastrectomy and enhance the recovery of the DGC patients by maintaining the stability of the gut microbiota.

Structure-aware contrastive hashing for unsupervised cross-modal retrieval.

Cross-modal hashing has attracted a lot of attention and achieved remarkable success in large-scale cross-media similarity retrieval applications because of its superior computational efficiency and low storage overhead. However, constructing similarity relationship among samples in cross-modal unsupervised hashing is challenging because of the lack of manual annotation. Most existing unsupervised methods directly use the representations extracted from the backbone of their respective modality to construct instance similarity matrices, leading to inaccurate similarity matrices and resulting in suboptimal hash codes. To address this issue, a novel unsupervised hashing model, named Structure-aware Contrastive Hashing for Unsupervised Cross-modal Retrieval (SACH), is proposed in this paper. Specifically, we concurrently employ both high-dimensional representations and discriminative representations learned by the network to construct a more informative semantic correlative matrix across modalities. Moreover, we design a multimodal structure-aware alignment network to minimize heterogeneous gap in the high-order semantic space of each modality, effectively reducing disparities within heterogeneous data sources and enhancing the consistency of semantic information across modalities. Extensive experimental results on two widely utilized datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed SACH method in cross-modal retrieval tasks over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Mechanism of miR-98-5p in gastric cancer cell proliferation, migration, and invasion through the USP44/CTCFL axis.

Objectives: Gastric cancer (GC) is the leading digestive malignancy with high incidence and mortality rate. microRNAs (miRs) play an important role in GC progresssion. This study aimed to investigate the effect of miR-98-5p on proliferation, migration, and invasion of GC cells. Methods: The expression levels of miR-98-5p, ubiquitin specific peptidase 44 (USP44), and CCCTCbinding factor-like (CTCFL) in GC tissues and cells were identified using reversetranscription quantitative polymerase chain reaction and Western blot assay. The relationship between miR-98-5p expression/USP44 and the clinicopathological features in GC patients was analyzed. GC cell proliferation, invasion, and migration were evaluated by cell counting kit-8 and clone formation assays and Transwell assays. The bindings of miR-98-5p to USP44 and USP44 to CTCFL were examined using dualluciferase assay and co-immunoprecipitation. GC cells were treated with MG132 and the ubiquitination level of CTCFL was examined using ubiquitination assay. Rescue experiments were performed to verify the roles of USP44 and CTCFL in GC cells. Results: miR-98-5p was downregulated in GC. miR-98-5p overexpression inhibited the proliferation, migration, and invasion of GC cells. miR-98-5p inhibited USP44 expression. USP44 bound to CTCFL and limited ubiquitination degradation of CTCFL. Overexpression of USP44 and CTCFL attenuated the inhibitory effects of miR-98-5p overexpression on GC cell progression. Conclusion: miR-98-5p overexpression limited USP44-mediated CTCFL deubiquitination, and suppressed CTCFL expression, mitigating GC cell proliferation, migration, and invasion.

A multi-constituent model for assessing the effect of impeller shroud on the thrombosis potential of a centrifugal blood pump.

Centrifugal blood pumps can be used for treating heart failure patients. However, pump thrombosis has remained one of the complications that trouble clinical treatment. This study analyzed the effect of impeller shroud on the thrombosis risk of the blood pump, and predicted areas prone to thrombosis. Multi-constituent transport equations were presented, considering mechanical activation and biochemical activation. It was found that activated platelets concentration can increase with shear stress and adenosine diphosphate(ADP) concentration increasing, and the highest risk of thrombosis inside the blood pump was under extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) mode. Under the same condition, ADP concentration and thrombosis index of semi-shroud impeller can increase by 7.3% and 7.2% compared to the closed-shroud impeller. The main reason for the increase in thrombosis risk was owing to elevated scalar shear stress and more coagulation promoting factor-ADP released. The regions with higher thrombosis potential were in the center hole, top and bottom clearance. As a novelty, the findings revealed that impeller shroud can influence mechanical and biochemical activation factors. It is useful for identifying potential risk regions of thrombus formation based on relative comparisons.

Development and external validation of a nomogram predicting overall survival for Gastric adenocarcinoma patients with radical gastrectomy.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to develop and externally validate a nomogram to accurately predict the overall survival (OS) of patients with gastric adenocarcinoma who underwent radical gastrectomy. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 3492 patients with gastric adenocarcinoma who underwent radical gastrectomy from 2012 to 2017 were included as the training cohort. Survival analysis was performed via Kaplan Meier method and log-rank test. Independent postoperative prognostic factors in patients with gastric adenocarcinoma were analyzed using univariate and multifactorial COX analysis methods. The prognosis nomogram was established in the training cohort and verified externally in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. RESULTS: According to the univariate and multifactorial COX analyses, metastatic lymph node ratio (MLNR) and five other independent prognostic factors (age at surgery, type of gastrectomy, tumor size, T stage, and pathological grade) were included in the prognostic nomogram. The nomogram had better prognostic predictive ability than the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) TNM staging in both the training (C-index: 0.736 VS. 0.668) and external validation cohort (C-index: 0.712 VS. 0.627). The calibration plots showed that the predicted survival rate was in good agreement with the actual survival rate. And the decision curve analysis (DCA) curves revealed that nomogram showed stronger ability in predicting 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year OS. CONCLUSION: This study estimated the excellent prognostic predictive power and clinical application potential of the MLNR-based nomogram, which may be used to facilitate postoperative clinical treatment decisions and potentially improve patient survival outcomes.

ST-SCGNN: A Spatio-Temporal Self-Constructing Graph Neural Network for Cross-Subject EEG-Based Emotion Recognition and Consciousness Detection.

In this paper, a novel spatio-temporal self-constructing graph neural network (ST-SCGNN) is proposed for cross-subject emotion recognition and consciousness detection. For spatio-temporal feature generation, activation and connection pattern features are first extracted and then combined to leverage their complementary emotion-related information. Next, a self-constructing graph neural network with a spatio-temporal model is presented. Specifically, the graph structure of the neural network is dynamically updated by the self-constructing module of the input signal. Experiments based on the SEED and SEED-IV datasets showed that the model achieved average accuracies of 85.90% and 76.37%, respectively. Both values exceed the state-of-the-art metrics with the same protocol. In clinical besides, patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) suffer severe brain injuries, and sufficient training data for EEG-based emotion recognition cannot be collected. Our proposed ST-SCGNN method for cross-subject emotion recognition was first attempted in training in ten healthy subjects and testing in eight patients with DOC. We found that two patients obtained accuracies significantly higher than chance level and showed similar neural patterns with healthy subjects. Covert consciousness and emotion-related abilities were thus demonstrated in these two patients. Our proposed ST-SCGNN for cross-subject emotion recognition could be a promising tool for consciousness detection in DOC patients.

Tangeretin attenuates acute lung injury in septic mice by inhibiting ROS-mediated NLRP3 inflammasome activation via regulating PLK1/AMPK/DRP1 signaling axis.

OBJECTIVE: NLRP3 inflammasome-mediated pyroptosis of macrophage acts essential roles in the progression of sepsis-induced acute lung injury (ALI). Tangeretin (TAN), enriched in citrus fruit peel, presents anti-oxidative and anti-inflammatory effects. Here, we aimed to explore the potentially protective effect of TAN on sepsis-induced ALI, and the underlying mechanism of TAN in regulating NLRP3 inflammasome. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The effect of TAN on sepsis-induced ALI and NLRP3 inflammasome-mediated pyroptosis of macrophage were examined in vivo and in vitro using a LPS-treated mice model and LPS-induced murine macrophages, respectively. The mechanism of TAN regulating the activation of NLRP3 inflammasome in sepsis-induced ALI was investigated with HE staining, Masson staining, immunofluorescent staining, ELISA, molecular docking, transmission electron microscope detection, qRT-PCR, and western blot. RESULTS: TAN could evidently attenuate sepsis-induced ALI in mice, evidenced by reducing pulmonary edema, pulmonary congestion and lung interstitial fibrosis, and inhibiting macrophage infiltration in the lung tissue. Besides, TAN significantly suppressed inflammatory cytokine IL-1ß and IL-18 expression in the serum or bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) samples of mice with LPS-induced ALI, and inhibited NLRP3 inflammasome-mediated pyroptosis of macrophages. Furthermore, we found TAN inhibited ROS production, preserved mitochondrial morphology, and alleviated excessive mitochondrial fission in LPS-induced ALI in mice. Through bioinformatic analysis and molecular docking, Polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1) was identified as a potential target of TAN for treating sepsis-induced ALI. Moreover, TAN significantly inhibited the reduction of PLK1 expression, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) phosphorylation, and Dynamin related protein 1 (Drp1) phosphorylation (S637) in LPS-induced ALI in mice. In addition, Volasertib, a specific inhibitor of PLK1, abolished the protective effects of TAN against NLRP3 inflammasome-mediated pyroptosis of macrophage and lung injury in the cell and mice septic models. CONCLUSION: TAN attenuates sepsis-induced ALI by inhibiting ROS-mediated NLRP3 inflammasome activation via regulating PLK1/AMPK/DRP1 signaling axis, and TAN is a potentially therapeutic candidate against ALI through inhibiting pyroptosis.

A glutathione-responsive PEGylated nanogel with doxorubicin-conjugation for cancer therapy.

The complexity, degradability, and stability of drug delivery systems are crucial factors for clinical application. Herein, a glutathione (GSH)-responsive polyethylene glycol (PEG)ylated nanogel conjugated with doxorubicin (Dox) was prepared based on a linker with disulfide bonds, PEG, and Dox using a one-pot method. FT-IR and UV-vis analyses confirmed that all raw materials were incorporated in the Dox-conjugated nanogel structure. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) results showed that the particle size of the Dox-conjugated nanogel was at the nanoscale and could be responsively disrupted in high GSH concentration. The in vitro accumulative Dox release rate from the nanogel reached 88% in PBS with 5 mg mL-1 GSH on day 4. Moreover, H22 cell viability and apoptosis experiments revealed that the nanogel effectively inhibited tumor cell growth. In vivo tracking and cell uptake experiments demonstrated that the nanogel accumulated and persisted in tumor tissues for 5 days and was distributed into cell nuclei at 6 h. Furthermore, H22-bearing mice experiments showed that the tumor size of the Dox-conjugated nanogel group was the smallest (287 mm3) compared to that of the free Dox (558 mm3) and 0.9% NaCl (2700 mm3) groups. Meanwhile, the body weight of mice as well as the H&E and TUNEL tissue section staining of organs and tumor tissues from the mice illustrated that the nanogel could significantly prevent side effects and induce tumor cell apoptosis. Taken together, compared with free Dox, the Dox-conjugated nanogel exhibited higher therapeutic efficacy and lower side effects in normal tissues, making it a potential novel nanomedicine for cancer.

Comparison of surgical and endovascular left subclavian artery revascularization during thoracic aortic endovascular repair: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objective: The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to incorporate data from the latest clinical studies and compare the safety and efficacy of surgical left subclavian artery (LSA) revascularization and endovascular LSA revascularization during thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR). Methods: This study was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and was registered with the PROSPERO database on 16 April 2023 (CRD42023414579). The Embase, MEDLINE (PubMed), and the Cochrane Library databases were searched from January 2000 to May 2023. Results: A total of 14 retrospective cohort studies with a total of 1,695 patients, were included for review. The peri-operative stroke rates of the surgical and endovascular LSA revascularization groups were 3.8% and 2.6%, respectively (P = 0.97). The peri-operative technical success rates for the surgical and endovascular LSA revascularization groups were 95.6% and 93.0%, respectively (P = 0.24). The peri-operative spinal cord ischemia rates were 1.6% (n = 18) and 1.9% (n = 7) in the surgical and endovascular LSA revascularization groups, respectively (P = 0.90). The peri-operative type Ⅰ endoleak rates for the surgical and endovascular LSA revascularization groups were 6.6% and 23.2%, respectively (P = 0.25). The subgroup analysis showed that the incidence of peri-operative type I endoleak in the parallel stent group was significantly higher than that in the surgical LSA revascularization group (P < 0.0001). The peri-operative left upper limb ischemia rates for the surgical and endovascular LSA revascularization groups were 1.2% and 0.6%, respectively (P = 0.96). The peri-operative mortality rates of the surgical and endovascular LSA revascularization groups were 2.0% and 2.0%, respectively (P = 0.88). Conclusion: There was no significant difference in the terms of short-term outcomes when comparing the two revascularization techniques. The quality of evidence assessed by GRADE scale was low to very-low. Surgical and endovascular LSA revascularization during TEVAR were both safe and effective. Compared with surgical LSA revascularization techniques, parallel stent revascularization of LSA significantly increased the rate of type I endoleak.

Age-related difference in acute type B aortic dissection.

OBJECTIVE: The objective is to compare the characteristics of clinical data, imaging data, and treatment methods of young and old patients with acute type B aortic dissection (ABAD). METHODS: ABAD patients admitted to the Department of Vascular Surgery of the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University from January 2012 to December 2018 were retrospectively reviewed. Patient demographics, such as gender, age, diabetes, hypertension, presenting symptoms, imaging characteristics, laboratory data on admission, hemodynamics on admission and in-hospital management, and mortality of different age groups were compared and analyzed. Categorical variables were compared using χ2 tests or Fisher's exact test. Continuous variables were compared using Student's t-test or Mann-Whitney U-test. RESULTS: A total of 141 ABAD patients were included in this study. Old ABAD patients were more likely to have a prior history of hypertension (88.6% vs 70.4%, p = 0.037) and atherosclerosis (29.8% vs 7.4%, p = 0.016). In the young group, Marfan syndrome was significantly higher (14.8% vs 0.9%; p = 0.005). Compared with the old group, the number of distal tears in the young group was significantly higher (62.3% vs 39.5%, p = 0.027). The proportion of patients with malperfusion of lower limbs in the young group was significantly higher than that in the old group (22.2% vs 6.1%, p = 0.026). There was no significant difference in the treatment methods and in-hospital mortality between the two groups. CONCLUSION: Compared with old ABAD patients, young ABAD patients had more distal tears and a higher proportion of lower limbs malperfusion.

Covalent Peptide LSD1 Inhibitor Specifically Recognizes Cys360 in the Enzyme-Active Region.

Lysine-specific demethylase 1 (LSD1) is a promising therapeutic target, especially in cancer treatment. Despite several LSD1 inhibitors being discovered for the cofactor pocket, none are FDA-approved. We aimed to develop stabilized peptides for irreversible LSD1 binding, focusing on unique cysteine residue Cys360 in LSD1 and SNAIL1. We created LSD1 C360-targeting peptides, like cyclic peptide S9-CMC1, using our Cysteine-Methionine cyclization strategy. S9-CMC1 effectively inhibited LSD1 at the protein level, as confirmed by MS analysis showing covalent bonding to Cys360. In cells, S9-CMC1 inhibited LSD1 activity, increasing H3K4me1 and H3K4me2 levels, leading to G1 cell cycle arrest and apoptosis and inhibiting cell proliferation. Remarkably, S9-CMC1 showed therapeutic potential in A549 xenograft animal models, regulating LSD1 activity and significantly inhibiting tumor growth with minimal organ damage. These findings suggest LSD1 C360 as a promising site for covalent LSD1 inhibitors' development.

Numerical investigation on the effect of impeller axial position on hemodynamics of an extracorporeal centrifugal blood pump.

Extracorporeal centrifugal blood pumps are used to treat cardiogenic shock. Owing to the imbalanced excitation or initial assembly configurations, the variation in the impeller axial position has the potential to affect the blood pump performance. This study compared the hydrodynamics and hemolysis outcomes at different impeller axial positions via numerical simulations. The result shows that pressure difference of the blood pump decreased with increasing impeller axial position, with decreasing by 4.5% at a flow rate of 2 L/min. Under axial impeller motion close to the top pump casing, average wall shear stress and scalar shear stress reached their maximum values (64.2 and 29.1 Pa, respectively). The residence time in the impeller center hole and bottom clearance were extended to 0.5 s by increasing impeller axial position. Compared to the baseline blood pump, hemolysis index increased by 12.3% and 24.3% when impeller axial position is 2.5 and 4.0 mm, respectively. As a novelty, the findings reveal that the impeller axial position adversely affects hemolysis performance when the impeller is close to the pump casing. Therefore, in the development process of centrifugal blood pumps, the optimal axial position of the impeller must be defined to ensure hemodynamic performance.

Combining temporal and spatial attention for seizure prediction.

Purpose: Approximately 1% of the world population is currently suffering from epilepsy. Successful seizure prediction is necessary for those patients. Influenced by neurons in their own and surrounding locations, the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals collected by scalp electrodes carry information of spatiotemporal interactions. Therefore, it is a great challenge to exploit the spatiotemporal information of EEG signals fully. Methods: In this paper, a new seizure prediction model called Gatformer is proposed by fusing the graph attention network (GAT) and the Transformer. The temporal and spatial attention are combined to extract EEG information from the perspective of spatiotemporal interactions. The model aims to explore the temporal dependence of single-channel EEG signals and the spatial correlations among multi-channel EEG signals. It can automatically identify the most noteworthy interaction in brain regions and achieve accurate seizure prediction. Results: Compared with the baseline models, the performance of our model is significantly improved. The false prediction rate (FPR) on the private dataset is 0.0064/h. The average accuracy, specificity and sensitivity are 98.25%, 99.36% and 97.65%. Conclusion: The proposed model is comparable to the state of the arts. Experiments on different datasets show that it has good robustness and generalization performance. The high sensitivity and low FPR prove that this model has great potential to realize clinical assistance for diagnosis and treatment.

Experimental Investigation of Solar-Driven Hollow Fiber Membrane Liquid Dehumidification System.

The hollow fiber membrane modules act as dehumidifiers and regenerators to avoid gas-liquid entrainment problems in direct-contact dehumidification systems. A solar-driven hollow fiber membrane dehumidification experimental rig was designed to investigate its performance from July to September in Guilin, China. The dehumidification, regeneration, and cooling performance of the system between 8:30 and 17:30 are analyzed. The energy utilization of the solar collector and system is investigated. The results show that solar radiation has a significant influence on the system. The hourly regeneration of the system has the same trend as the temperature of solar hot water, which ranges from 0.13 g/s to 0.36 g/s. The regeneration capacity of the dehumidification system is always larger than the dehumidification capacity after 10:30, which increases the solution concentration and the dehumidification performance. Further, it ensures stable system operation when the solar radiation is lower (15:30-17:50). In addition, the hourly dehumidification capacity and efficiency of the system ranges from 0.15 g/s to 0.23 g/s and 52.4 to 71.3%, respectively, with good dehumidification performance. The COP of the system and solar collector have the same trend, in which their maximum values are 0.874 and 0.634, respectively, with high energy utilization efficiency. The solar-driven hollow fiber membrane liquid dehumidification system performs better in regions with larger solar radiation.

Short- and Long-Term Outcomes of the Minimal Proximal Resection Margin in Total Gastrectomy for Siewert II Adenocarcinoma of the Esophagogastric Junction.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the feasibility of the minimal proximal resection margin (PRM) in total gastrectomy (TG) for Siewert II adenocarcinoma of the esophagogastric junction (AEG). METHODS: This study finally included 178 Siewert II advanced AEG patients who underwent TG from January 2017 to September 2020. According to the PRM length, patients were divided into 20-25 mm group and 30-35 mm group. Intraoperative, short-, and long-term postoperative outcomes were compared between two groups. RESULTS: The PRM of the 20-25 mm group had significantly less operation time compared with the PRM of the 30-35 mm group (P < .001), but the amount of blood loss, management of the diaphragmatic crura, and the incidence of positive resection margin were not significantly different between two groups (P > .05). In short-term postoperative outcomes, first gas-passing time, gastric-tube removal time, start time of diet, hospitalization, postoperative complications, and body weight loss were similar between two groups (P > .05). During the follow-up, the 3-year overall survival rates and the recurrence rates were not significantly different between the PRM of 20-25 mm and 30-35 mm groups (81.2% vs 83.5%, P = .695; 18.8% vs 15.5%, P = .812, respectively). CONCLUSION: With less operation time and more preserved esophagus, the minimal PRM length of 20-25 mm could be an appropriate option in TG for patients with Siewert II advanced AEG.

A Spatiotemporal Graph Attention Network Based on Synchronization for Epileptic Seizure Prediction.

Accurate early prediction of epileptic seizures can provide timely treatment for patients. Previous studies have mainly focused on a single temporal or spatial dimension, making it difficult to take both relationships into account. Therefore, the effective properties of electroencephalograms (EEGs) may not be fully evaluated. To solve this problem, we propose a spatiotemporal graph attention network (STGAT) based on synchronization. The spatial and functional connectivity information between EEG channels was extracted by using the phase locking values (PLVs) first, which allowed multichannel EEG signals to be modeled as graph signals. Afterward, the STGAT model was used to dynamically learn the temporal correlation properties of EEG sequences and explore the spatial topological structure information of multiple channels. Experimental results demonstrated that the STGAT model was able to obtain spatiotemporal correlations and achieve good results on two benchmark datasets. The accuracy, specificity and sensitivity were 98.74%, 99.21% and 98.87%, respectively, on the CHB-MIT dataset. Moreover, all evaluation indices of the private dataset had reached more than 98.8%, with the area under the curve (AUC) reaching 99.96%. The proposed method is superior or comparable to the state-of-the-art models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our end-to-end automatic seizure prediction model can be extended to design clinical assistant decision systems.

Clostridium butyricum potentially improves inflammation and immunity through alteration of the microbiota and metabolism of gastric cancer patients after gastrectomy.

Background: Gastrectomy is the most effective treatment to improve the clinical survival rate of patients with gastric cancer. However, the pathophysiological changes caused by gastrectomy have seriously affected the postoperative recovery. Methods: In the present trial, Ataining (containing C. butyricum, CGMCC0313.1) was applied in patients after gastrectomy to investigate the effect of C. butyricum on the early postoperative recovery by monitoring the inflammatory immune response with blood indicators, detecting the gut microbiota with high-throughput sequencing, and analyzing the short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) with targeted metabolomics. This study is registered with the number ChiCTR2000040915. Results: Our outcomes revealed that C. butyricum had significantly reduced the number of Leucocyte (P < 0.001), the percentage of Neutrophil (P < 0.001), the expression of IL-1ß (P < 0.01), IL-6 (P < 0.05), and TNF-α (P < 0.01), while markedly enhanced the immunity indexes (immunoglobulin and lymphocyte) (P < 0.05) and nutrition indexes (albumin and total protein) (P < 0.05). In addition, the use of the C. butyricum greatly enriched the relative abundance of beneficial bacteria Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium and Gemmiger, while the abundance of pathogenic Streptococcus, Desulfovibrio and Actinomyces were markedly decreased at genus level. We also observed significant up-regulation of SCFAs, including acetic acid, propionic acid, butyric acid and isobutyric acid, after C. butyricum administration in patients receiving gastrectomy. Conclusion: Therefore, evidence supported that oral administration of C. butyricum after gastrectomy can reduce early postoperative inflammation, enhance immune ability, restore intestinal microbiota eubiosis, increase intestinal SCFAs, reduce the occurrence of postoperative complications, and ultimately promote the early recovery of the patient. Clinical trial registration: http://www.chictr.org.cn/, identifier (ChiCTR2000040915).

The Direct and Structure Effect of Income on Nutrition Demand of Chinese Rural Residents.

Although a significant body of literature has analyzed the effect of income-mediated policies on nutrition, research on how income affect nutrition consumption is scant. This paper contributes to the literature by decomposing the overall income effect on rural residents' calorie intake into the direct income effect and the structure effect by building a simple theoretical model and conducting related empirical research with an instrumental variable (IV) approach. Using nationally representative data from China, we find that the structure effect of income, represented by fat share growth induced by income, occupies a considerable proportion (38.03%) of overall income effect. Additionally, we provide evidence of an asymmetric distributional effect of income on calorie intake. In particular, the structure effect of income substantially accounts for a larger proportion in the higher quantiles of the calorie intake distribution. Our findings help better evaluate the effectiveness of the income-mediated policies from quantity and structure perspectives in a comprehensive framework.

Improved classification performance of EEG-fNIRS multimodal brain-computer interface based on multi-domain features and multi-level progressive learning.

Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have potentially complementary characteristics that reflect the electrical and hemodynamic characteristics of neural responses, so EEG-fNIRS-based hybrid brain-computer interface (BCI) is the research hotspots in recent years. However, current studies lack a comprehensive systematic approach to properly fuse EEG and fNIRS data and exploit their complementary potential, which is critical for improving BCI performance. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel multimodal fusion framework based on multi-level progressive learning with multi-domain features. The framework consists of a multi-domain feature extraction process for EEG and fNIRS, a feature selection process based on atomic search optimization, and a multi-domain feature fusion process based on multi-level progressive machine learning. The proposed method was validated on EEG-fNIRS-based motor imagery (MI) and mental arithmetic (MA) tasks involving 29 subjects, and the experimental results show that multi-domain features provide better classification performance than single-domain features, and multi-modality provides better classification performance than single-modality. Furthermore, the experimental results and comparison with other methods demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in EEG and fNIRS information fusion, it can achieve an average classification accuracy of 96.74% in the MI task and 98.42% in the MA task. Our proposed method may provide a general framework for future fusion processing of multimodal brain signals based on EEG-fNIRS.