Advances in microneedle-based therapy for bone disorders.

Bone-related disorders treatment is a serious public health concern, imposing a significant social and economic burden on patients and healthcare systems. Although conventional drug delivery systems have made advances in bone diseases prevention and management, the limited delivery efficiency and convoluted focal environment lead to inadequate drug absorption and lack of specificity to achieve the intended therapeutic impact. Microneedle-based therapy represents an extraordinarily safe and well-tolerable therapeutic approach for treating bone disorders, providing improved efficacy by breaking down the barriers and delivery of therapeutic components to the target sites with programable release profiles in a less invasive manner. Over the past decades, numerous significant achievements in the development of various types of drug-carried microneedles have been made to address the obstacles encountered in the bone-treating procedure, enabling the microneedle-based therapy to take an important step in practical applications. In this light, this review summarizes these remarkable researches in terms of microneedles types and drug delivery strategies, with the goal of demonstrating the benefits of exploiting microneedle-based therapy as a novel strategy for treating bone-related disorders. The remaining challenges and future perspectives are also discussed in the hope of inspiring more efficient and intelligent bone treatment strategies.

Event-Triggered Finite-Time Consensus of Second-Order Leader-Follower Multiagent Systems With Uncertain Disturbances.

In this article, for second-order multiagent systems with uncertain disturbances, the finite-time leader-follower consensus problem has been investigated. First, by considering that the leader's states are only available to part of the followers, a distributed estimator is constructed to estimate the state tracking errors between the leader and each follower. Then, an estimator-based control scheme is proposed under the event-triggered strategy to achieve finite-time leader-follower consensus. Besides, the event-triggered intervals are with a positive lower bound such that the Zeno behavior can be avoided. Note that the system is discontinuous under the event-triggered mechanism; thus, a nonsmooth analysis is performed. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results.

[Efficacy of acupuncture combined with hydro-acupuncture for transverse processes syndrome of the third lumbar vertebra].

OBJECTIVE: To observe the clinical efficacy differences between acupuncture combined with hydro-acupuncture and acupuncture alone for transverse processes syndrome of the third lumbar vertebra. METHODS: One hundred patients were randomly divided into an observation group and a control group, 50 cases in each one. The patients in the control group were treated with regular acupuncture at Weizhong (BL 40), ashi points, Jiaji (L2～L4) and Shenshu (BL 23); the acupuncture was given once a day, six treatments per week for consecutive 2 weeks. Based on the acupuncture treatment in the control group, in the observation group the No.5 injection needle was applied to relieve the tenderness points on the transverse process and articular process of the third lumbar vertebra, followed by hydro-acupuncture with Danshen injection (1 mL per point, 7 days per injection for 2 weeks). The visual analogue scale (VAS), Japanese Orthopaedic Association (JOA) scale and Oswestry disability index (ODI) were observed before treatment, after treatment and during six-month follow-up visit in the two groups. In addition, the clinical efficacy was compared between the two groups. RESULTS: Forty-eight patients completed treatment and 2 patients dropped off in the observation group, while 47 patients completed treatment and 3 patients dropped off in the control group. The total effective rate was 91.7% (44/48) in the observation group, which was significantly superior to 76.6% (36/47) in the control group (P<0.05). Compared before treatment, the VAS and ODI in the two groups were reduced after treatment and during six-month follow-up visit, while the JOA was increased (all P<0.05); the VAS and ODI in the observation group was lower than that in the control group, while JOA in the observation group was higher than that in the control group (all P<0.05). CONCLUSION: Acupuncture combined with hydro-acupuncture are effective for transverse processes syndrome of the third lumbar vertebra, and could significantly improve lumbar function and relieve the pain symptoms, which is superior to regular acupuncture.