Effects of gender-affirming hormone therapy on body fat: a retrospective case‒control study in Chinese transwomen.

BACKGROUND: There is insufficient research on how gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) affects body fat modifications in transwomen from China. It is unclear whether hormone therapy affects the prevalence of obesity and blood lipid levels within this population. The current research aimed to assess how GAHT and treatment duration had an impact on the change in and redistribution of body fat in Chinese transwomen. METHODS: This study included 40 transwomen who had not received GAHT and 59 who had. Body fat, blood lipid, and blood glucose levels were measured. GAHT is mainly a pharmacologic (estrogen and anti-androgen) treatment. The study also stratified participants based on the duration of GAHT to assess its impact on body fat distribution. The duration of GAHT was within one year, one to two years, two to three years, or more than three years. RESULTS: After receiving GAHT, total body fat increased by 19.65%, and the percentage of body fat increased by 17.63%. The arm, corrected leg, and leg regions showed significant increases in fat content (+ 24.02%, + 50.69%, and + 41.47%, respectively) and percentage (+ 25.19%, + 34.90%, and + 30.39%, respectively). The total visceral fat content decreased (-37.49%). Based on the diagnostic standards for a body mass index ≥ 28 or total body fat percentage ≥ 25% or 30%, the chance of developing obesity did not change significantly. Blood glucose levels significantly increased (+ 12.31%). Total cholesterol levels (-10.45%) decreased significantly. Fat changes in those who received GAHT for one to two years were significantly different from those who did not receive GAHT. CONCLUSION: After receiving GAHT, total body fat and regional fat increased in Chinese transwomen, and the body fat distribution changed from masculine to feminine, especially during the first two years. However, neither the increase in total body fat percentage nor the decrease in visceral fat content didn't bring about significant changes in the incidence of obesity, nor did triglycerides or low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol.

A particle-filter framework for robust cryo-EM 3D reconstruction.

Single-particle electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) involves estimating a set of parameters for each particle image and reconstructing a 3D density map; robust algorithms with accurate parameter estimation are essential for high resolution and automation. We introduce a particle-filter algorithm for cryo-EM, which provides high-dimensional parameter estimation through a posterior probability density function (PDF) of the parameters given in the model and the experimental image. The framework uses a set of random support points to represent such a PDF and assigns weighting coefficients not only among the parameters of each particle but also among different particles. We implemented the algorithm in a new program named THUNDER, which features self-adaptive parameter adjustment, tolerance to bad particles, and per-particle defocus refinement. We tested the algorithm by using cryo-EM datasets for the cyclic-nucleotide-gated (CNG) channel, the proteasome, ß-galactosidase, and an influenza hemagglutinin (HA) trimer, and observed substantial improvement in resolution.

Degradation of organic dyes by Si/SiOx core-shell nanowires: Spontaneous generation of superoxides without light irradiation.

Recently, silicon nanowires (SiNWs) have been proven to be highly active in the photocatalysis of dye degradation. However, the unstable hydrogen-terminated surface and the need for constant light irradiation hinder their extensive use. In this work, a stable silica shell was intentionally formed on the surface of SiNWs to produce Si/SiOx core-shell silicon nanowires (S-SiNWs). Light-illuminated or not, S-SiNWs showed almost identical degradation ability for the degradation of indigo carmine (IC) in both conditions, which meant neither hydrogen termination nor light irradiation was a prerequisite for the degradation activity of S-SiNWs. UV/Vis spectroscopy and liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry showed that IC was converted into isatin sulfonic acid in this process. Quenching studies and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy revealed that this bleaching ability was highly dependent on superoxides. A possible mechanism was accordingly suggested. In addition, the recently discovered reductase-like activity of SiNWs can be explained by the superoxides generation.

Data-Driven Contextual Valence Shifter Quantification for Multi-Theme Sentiment Analysis.

Users often write reviews on different themes involving linguistic structures with complex sentiments. The sentiment polarity of a word can be different across themes. Moreover, contextual valence shifters may change sentiment polarity depending on the contexts that they appear in. Both challenges cannot be modeled effectively and explicitly in traditional sentiment analysis. Studying both phenomena requires multi-theme sentiment analysis at the word level, which is very interesting but significantly more challenging than overall polarity classification. To simultaneously resolve the multi-theme and sentiment shifting problems, we propose a data-driven framework to enable both capabilities: (1) polarity predictions of the same word in reviews of different themes, and (2) discovery and quantification of contextual valence shifters. The framework formulates multi-theme sentiment by factorizing the review sentiments with theme/word embeddings and then derives the shifter effect learning problem as a logistic regression. The improvement of sentiment polarity classification accuracy demonstrates not only the importance of multi-theme and sentiment shifting, but also effectiveness of our framework. Human evaluations and case studies further show the success of multi-theme word sentiment predictions and automatic effect quantification of contextual valence shifters.

Mining Multi-Aspect Reflection of News Events in Twitter: Discovery, Linking and Presentation.

A major event often has repercussions on both news media and microblogging sites such as Twitter. Reports from mainstream news agencies and discussions from Twitter complement each other to form a complete picture. An event can have multiple aspects (sub-events) describing it from multiple angles, each of which attracts opinions/comments posted on Twitter. Mining such reflections is interesting to both policy makers and ordinary people seeking information. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to mine multi-aspect reflections of news events in Twitter. We propose a novel and efficient dynamic hierarchical entity-aware event discovery model to learn news events and their multiple aspects. The aspects of an event are linked to their reflections in Twitter by a bootstrapped dataless classification scheme, which elegantly handles the challenges of selecting informative tweets under overwhelming noise and bridging the vocabularies of news and tweets. In addition, we demonstrate that our framework naturally generates an informative presentation of each event with entity graphs, time spans, news summaries and tweet highlights to facilitate user digestion.

Changes of inheritance mode and fitness in Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) along with its resistance evolution to Cry1Ac toxin.

The changes of inheritance mode and fitness of resistance in Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) along with its resistance evolution to Cry1Ac toxin were evaluated in the laboratory. The resistance levels reached 170.0-, 209.6- and 2893.3-fold, on selection of the field population in the 16th (BtR-F(16)), 34th (BtR-F(34)) and 87th (BtR-F(87)) generation with artificial diet containing Cry1Ac toxin, respectively. As the resistance levels increased, more larvae feeding on the Bt cotton expressing Cry1Ac toxin survived. Most larvae of BtR-F(87) could develop to the 5th instar and about 3% individuals reached the adult stage. The inheritance of Cry1Ac resistance trait at three resistant levels was autosomal and incompletely recessive, but the degree of dominance decreased as the resistance increased. The resistance was primarily monogenic in BtR-F(16) strain, but polygenic as resistance increased. The relative fitness of H. armigera, measured as a ratio of R(0) (the net replacement rate) of resistant strain divided by R(0) of the susceptible strain, decreased with an increase of the resistance levels, with ratios of 0.79, 0.64 and 0.59 in their respective BtR-F(16), BtR-F(34) and BtR-F(87) strains.