Factors associated with the enrollment of commercial medical insurance in China: Results from China General Social Survey.

BACKGROUND: The Chinese government has been promoting commercial medical insurance (CMI) in recent decades as it plays an increasingly important role in addressing disease burden, health inequities, and other healthcare challenges. However, compared with developed countries, the CMI is still less fledged with low coverage. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the factors associated with enrollment in CMI, with regards to explicit characteristics (including sociodemographic characteristics and family economic status), latent characteristics (including social security status), and the global incentive compatibility index (including health status), to inform the design of CMI to improve its coverage in China. METHODS: Based on the principal-agent model, we summarized and classified the factors associated with the enrollment in CMI, and then analyzed the data generated from the Chinese General Social Survey in 2015,2018 and 2021 respectively. A comparison of factors regarding sociodemographic characteristics, family economic status, social security status, and health status was conducted between individuals enrolled and unenrolled in CMI using Mann-Whitney U test and Chi-square test. Binary logistic regression analysis was used to explore factors influencing the enrollment status of CMI. RESULTS: Of all individuals, the proportion of enrolled individuals shows an increasing trend year by year, with 8.7%,11.8% and 14.1% enrolled in CMI in 2015,2018 and 2021, respectively. The binary regression analysis further suggested that the factors associated with the enrollment in CMI were consistent in 2015,2018 and 2021.We found that individuals divorced, obese, who had a higher level of education, had non-agricultural household registration, perceived themselves as the upper social status, conducted daily exercise, had more family houses, had a car, had investment activities, or did not have basic health insurance were more likely to be enrolled in CMI. CONCLUSIONS: We identified multidimensional factors associated with the enrollment of CMI, which help inform the government and insurance industry to improve the coverage of CMI.

Fertility behaviors and mid-late-life health status in China: From a life-course perspective.

Despite extensive research on the impact of fertility behaviors on mid-late-life health, conclusions remain inconsistent, and understanding is limited regarding the role of fertility-correlated life events in this causality. This study uses the 2018 wave and life-history information of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) dataset to explore how the number of children born (NCB) and age at first birth (AFB) influence later-life health. It also examines the effects of early-life educational attainment and mid-late-life caregiving on later-life health from a life-course perspective. Health measures include the Health Deficit Index (HDI), Activities of Daily Living (ADL), and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Results from the instrumental variables (IV) approach indicate that higher NCB predicts worse health, while later AFB predicts better later-life health. These findings remain robust with different measures of fertility behaviors, and in models that control for cohort and community fixed-effects. However, introducing education variables could disrupt the causality between fertility behaviors and later-life health, but not with caregiving variables. This suggests a potential "horse race" effect between education and fertility behaviors, both of which significantly influence later-life health. Therefore, understanding this causality and formulating policy for an aging society from a life-course perspective is essential.

Health and wellbeing among the empty nest and non-empty nest elderly in China-Results from a national cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: The number of empty nest elderly in China has gradually increased in recent years. There is growing concern about the physical and mental health of this population as empty nest elderly are commonly at the risk of compromising health, home safety and quality of life. This study reported the health and well-being of empty nest elderly with regards to their health status, depression and satisfaction, lifestyle as compared to non-empty nest elderly in China. METHODS: Data was collected from the 2018 follow-up interviews of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey. We included 4,630 empty nest elderly and 6,188 non-empty nest elderly. Chi-square Test and Logistic Regression were used to compare the differences between these two groups. RESULTS: As compared to the non-empty nest elderly, there was higher proportion of empty nest elderly who suffered from dyslipidemia, diabetes, chronic lung diseases, heart attack (27.0% vs. 25.0%; 16.6% vs. 15.1%; 19.4% vs. 16.4%; 26.3% vs. 23.4%, P < 0.05). The empty nest elderly had higher proportion of participants who drank more than once a month (25.3% vs. 23.9%, P < 0.05), who felt satisfied with their marriage (71.6% vs. 66.2%, P < 0.001), who were satisfied with their children's relationship (85.2% vs. 83.2%, P < 0.001). However, these significances disappeared in the Logistic Regression analysis (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Our study showed that significant between-group difference was found between empty nest elderly and non-empty nest elderly in their health and wellbeing. However, disappearance of such difference in the multivariable analysis may indicate improved health and wellbeing among the empty nest elderly. Even though our study still suggested the importance of improving the health, lifestyles and family dynamics of the elderly and promoting the integration of health and social care for the elderly, especially among the empty nest elderly.

Ambition or comparison? Socioeconomic status and wellbeing differences between local and migrant workers.

Pursuing wellbeing is an essential part of human life and plays a determining role in public health and social sustainability. Prior research identified objective socioeconomic status (O-SES), such as real income and homeownership, as facilitators of human subjective wellbeing (SWB). However, not all humans with better SES reported high SWB. This paper expects that subjective socioeconomic status (S-SES) is the key path through which O-SES shapes SWB and that this indirect relationship varies by household registration status, length of residentship, and type of migrant status. Based on a national representative survey dataset-China General Social Survey 2010 (CGSS), the results of generalized structural equation modeling (GSEM) show that household income and homeownership as O-SES are positively related to SWB. Self-evaluated household SES as an important indicator of S-SES not only has a positive relationship with SWB but also significantly mediates the relationship between O-SES and SWB, especially for the new-local residents (NLRs), urban-to-urban migrants (UUMs) and rural-to-urban migrants (RUMs). This study has substantial implications for targeting the comparative psychology and sustainable productivity of Chinese migrants and the local labor force since it is currently facing a growing aging society.

How innovation funding leads enterprises to engage in research and development: Small and medium enterprises' perspective.

Technology-based small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the driving force behind China's economic and technological development. However, these enterprises often face challenges in financing their research and development (R&D) activities due to limited financing opportunities. Previous research has primarily focused on the resource attributes of government innovation subsidies, which serve as a crucial funding source for these SMEs. This paper aims to explore the impact of government innovation subsidies on firms from a novel perspective, considering the signaling characteristics of these subsidies. The theoretical foundation of this study lies in the asymmetric information theory and the signaling mechanism through which government subsidies send signals about enterprises. The study uses enterprise data from 2012 to 2019 to investigate the effect of government subsidies on the R&D investment of enterprises listed on the SMEs Board in Chinese stock market. The results reveal a significantly positive effect of government subsidies on the R&D investment of SME Board-listed enterprises and verify the mediating role of financing constraints in this effect. The extent to which government subsidies influence the R&D investment of SME Board-listed enterprises is associated with the enterprises' ownership characteristics, debt ratios, and times interest earned ratios. This study contributes to the literature on the SMEs Board market and may provide the Chinese government insights into developing industry policies that maximize the effectiveness of government subsidies.

Towards Natural Language Interfaces for Data Visualization: A Survey.

Utilizing Visualization-oriented Natural Language Interfaces (V-NLI) as a complementary input modality to direct manipulation for visual analytics can provide an engaging user experience. It enables users to focus on their tasks rather than having to worry about how to operate visualization tools on the interface. In the past two decades, leveraging advanced natural language processing technologies, numerous V-NLI systems have been developed in academic research and commercial software, especially in recent years. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive review of the existing V-NLIs. In order to classify each article, we develop categorical dimensions based on a classic information visualization pipeline with the extension of a V-NLI layer. The following seven stages are used: query interpretation, data transformation, visual mapping, view transformation, human interaction, dialogue management, and presentation. Finally, we also shed light on several promising directions for future work in the V-NLI community.

SAP deficiency aggravates periodontitis possibly via C5a-C5aR signaling-mediated defective macrophage phagocytosis of Porphyromonas gingivalis.

INTRODUCTION: Serum amyloid P component (SAP) regulates the innate immune system and microbial diseases. Periodontitis is an inflammatory oral disease developed by the host immune system's interaction with the dysbiotic oral microbiome, thereby SAP could play a role in periodontitis pathogenicity. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the role of SAP in oral microbiome modulation and peridontitis pathogenicity. METHODS: In this study, wildtype and SAP-knockout (KO) mice were used. Ligature-based periodontitis was developed in mice. Oral microbiome diversity was analyzed by 16 s rRNA sequencing. Macrophages and Porphyromonas gingivalis (P. gingivalis) co-culture system analyzed the effect of SAP in macrophage phagocytosis of P. gingivalis. RESULTS: The level of SAP was upregulated in the periodontitis-affected periodontium of humans and mice but not in the liver and blood circulation. Periodontal macrophages were the key source of upregulated SAP in periodontitis. SAP-KO aggravated periodontal inflammation, periodontitis, and a higher number of M1-type inflammatory macrophage infiltration in the periodontium. The oral microbiome of SAP-KO periodontitis mice was altered with a higher abundance of Porphyromonas at the genus level. SAP-KO macrophages showed compromised phagocytosis of P. gingivalis in the co-culture system. Co-culture of SAP-KO macrophages and P. gingivalis induced the C5a expression and exogenous SAP treatment nullified this effect. Exogenous recombinant SAP treatment did not affect P. gingivalis growth and opsonization. PMX205, an antagonist of C5a, treatment robustly enhanced P. gingivalis phagocytosis by SAP-KO macrophages, indicating the involvement of the C5a-C5aR signaling in the compromised P. gingivalis phagocytosis by SAP-KO macrophages. CONCLUSION: SAP deficiency aggravates periodontitis possibly via C5a-C5aR signaling-mediated defective macrophage phagocytosis of P. gingivalis. A higher abundance of P. gingivalis during SAP deficiency could promote M1 macrophage polarization and periodontitis. This finding suggests the possible protecting role of elevated levels of periodontal SAP against periodontitis progression.

CB-Dock2: improved protein-ligand blind docking by integrating cavity detection, docking and homologous template fitting.

Protein-ligand blind docking is a powerful method for exploring the binding sites of receptors and the corresponding binding poses of ligands. It has seen wide applications in pharmaceutical and biological researches. Previously, we proposed a blind docking server, CB-Dock, which has been under heavy use (over 200 submissions per day) by researchers worldwide since 2019. Here, we substantially improved the docking method by combining CB-Dock with our template-based docking engine to enhance the accuracy in binding site identification and binding pose prediction. In the benchmark tests, it yielded the success rate of ∼85% for binding pose prediction (RMSD < 2.0 Å), which outperformed original CB-Dock and most popular blind docking tools. This updated docking server, named CB-Dock2, reconfigured the input and output web interfaces, together with a highly automatic docking pipeline, making it a particularly efficient and easy-to-use tool for the bioinformatics and cheminformatics communities. The web server is freely available at https://cadd.labshare.cn/cb-dock2/.

FitDock: protein-ligand docking by template fitting.

Protein-ligand docking is an essential method in computer-aided drug design and structural bioinformatics. It can be used to identify active compounds and reveal molecular mechanisms of biological processes. A successful docking usually requires thorough conformation sampling and scoring, which are computationally expensive and difficult. Recent studies demonstrated that it can be beneficial to docking with the guidance of existing similar co-crystal structures. In this work, we developed a protein-ligand docking method, named FitDock, which fits initial conformation to the given template using a hierarchical multi-feature alignment approach, subsequently explores the possible conformations and finally outputs refined docking poses. In our comprehensive benchmark tests, FitDock showed 40%-60% improvement in terms of docking success rate and an order of magnitude faster over popular docking methods, if template structures exist (> 0.5 ligand similarity). FitDock has been implemented in a user-friendly program, which could serve as a convenient tool for drug design and molecular mechanism exploration. It is now freely available for academic users at http://cao.labshare.cn/fitdock/.

DrugDevCovid19: An Atlas of Anti-COVID-19 Compounds Derived by Computer-Aided Drug Design.

Since the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, numerous compounds against COVID-19 have been derived by computer-aided drug design (CADD) studies. They are valuable resources for the development of COVID-19 therapeutics. In this work, we reviewed these studies and analyzed 779 compounds against 16 target proteins from 181 CADD publications. We performed unified docking simulations and neck-to-neck comparison with the solved co-crystal structures. We computed their chemical features and classified these compounds, aiming to provide insights for subsequent drug design. Through detailed analyses, we recommended a batch of compounds that are worth further study. Moreover, we organized all the abundant data and constructed a freely available database, DrugDevCovid19, to facilitate the development of COVID-19 therapeutics.

Curse or Blessing? Obesity and Income-Related Inequality in the Chinese Labor Force.

China owns a huge labor force of around half billion workers in 2018. However, little is known about the prevalence of obesity and the association between obesity and economic status in this special population. By employing the concentration index (CI) and decomposition analysis, this paper addresses this knowledge gap by using the most recent nationally representative dataset. In specific, this study examines the prevalence of obesity and the socioeconomic gradient in the probability of obesity among Chinese workers between 16 and 65. Our results show that the prevalence of obesity is completely different by using a different measure: the overall prevalence of being general obesity (measured by body mass index, BMI ≥ 28) varies by gender and residency from a minimum of 5.88% to a maximum of 9.46%, whereas abdominal obesity (measured by waist circumference, WCmale ≥ 85 cm & WCfemale ≥ 80 cm) prevalence presents a socking level from 64.53% to 67.69%. Moreover, the results show a pro-rich distribution of obesity (general and abdominal) among male workers (CIBMI = 0.112; CIWC = 0.057) and a pro-poor distribution among female workers (CIBMI = -0.141; CIWC = -0.166). We also find that the direction of the contribution of socioeconomic factors to income-related inequalities in obesity differs by gender. These results have substantial implications for the measurement of socioeconomic inequality in adiposity and for improving health-related policies targeting the Chinese labor force.

LigMate: A Multifeature Integration Algorithm for Ligand-Similarity-Based Virtual Screening.

Ligand-similarity-based virtual screening is one of the most applicable computer-aided drug design techniques. The current methodology relies heavily on several descriptors of molecular features, including atoms (zero-dimensional, 0D), the presence or absence of structural features (one-dimensional, 1D), topological descriptors (two-dimensional, 2D), geometry and volume (three-dimensional, 3D), or stereoelectronic and stereodynamic properties (four-dimensional, 4D). These descriptors have been frequently used in virtual screening; however, they are usually used independently without integration, which may hinder effective and precise virtual screening. In this study, we developed a multifeature integration algorithm named LigMate, which employs a Hungarian algorithm-based matching and a machine learning-based nonlinear combination of various descriptors, including the new relevant descriptors focusing on the maximum common substructures (maximum common substructure score, MCSS), the relative distance of atoms from the ligand mass center (intraligand distance score, ILDS), as well as the ring differences (ring score, RS). In the benchmark tests, LigMate achieved an overall enrichment factor of the first percent (EF1) of 36.14 and an area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.81 on the DUD-E data set, as well as an EF1 of 15.44 and an AUC of 0.69 on the maximum unbiased validation (MUV) data set, outperforming the control methods that are based on single descriptors. Thus, our study provides a new framework for multiple feature integration, which can benefit ligand-similarity-based virtual screening. LigMate is freely available for noncommercial users at http://cao.labshare.cn/ligmate/.

Exploring the Differential Effects of Online Reviews on Film's Box-Office Success: Source Identity and Brand Equity From an Integrated Perspective.

This study investigates the differential effects of online reviews on actual sales in cases where information regarding source identity and brand equity is accessible. The data were collected from an influential online film review platform in China. Two distinctive features of this study are: (1) source identity is expressed as "verified user" or "unverified user" according to posters' ticket payment status and (2) the interactive effect between source identity and brand equity on box-office success is examined. Using econometric estimations, the results reveal the following: (1) the positive effect of verified users' online review valences on the number of tickets purchased for films decreases in association with high brand strength; (2) the variance of verified users' online reviews positively affects the number of tickets purchased for films with high brand strength, but such an effect is negative with low brand strength; (3) the variance of unverified users' online reviews positively influences the number of tickets purchased for films with low brand strength, but it negatively influences the number of tickets purchased for films with high brand strength. Thus, these findings suggest that it is better for business leaders to understand not only why producers of online reviews are satisfied or dissatisfied, but also how consumers interpret and interact with different types of online reviews and which are important. This requires a smart and flexible collaboration among different business units within film company.

Examining income-related inequality in health literacy and health-information seeking among urban population in China.

BACKGROUND: Health literacy and health-information seeking behaviour (HISB) play vital roles in health outcome improvements. This study examines the extent of income-related inequality in health literacy and health-information seeking as well as the contributions of the main socioeconomic determinants in China. METHODS: We analysed representative data of participants aged over 18 years as well as older adults from the Guangzhou Community Health Survey. A concentration index (CI) was used to quantify the degree of income-related inequity in health literacy and health-information seeking. Probit regression models were employed to decompose the CI into the contributions to each factor. RESULTS: Results showed a significant pro-rich distribution of adequate health literacy (CI: 0.0602, P < 0.001; horizontal index [HI]: 0.0562, P < 0.001) and HISB from healthcare professionals (CI: 0.105, P < 0.001; HI: 0.0965, P < 0.001). The pro-rich distribution of health literacy was mainly attributable to education background (contribution: 54.76%), whereas income inequalities contributed most to the pro-rich distribution of health-information seeking among an urban population (contribution: 62.53%). CONCLUSION: Public interventions in China to reduce inequality in health literacy and HISBs among the urban population, coupled with easily accessible information sources on health, warrant further attention from policymakers.

MicroRNAs: potential biomarkers for disease diagnosis.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a group of endogenous noncoding small RNAs characterized by high conservation; furthermore, various studies have shown the capability of miRNAs to impact diseases. For example, a study shows that cell-free miRNAs are stable in bodily fluids, which gives circulating miRNAs the ability to be potential biomarkers for noninvasive diagnosis. Additionally, accumulating studies have supported that miRNAs can function as suppressor genes, again demonstrating their effect on disease. This review introduces this particular role of miRNAs as well as analyzes the prospect of miRNAs as biomarkers and the capacity for using miRNA-based resources to benefit mankind.