Herbal therapy for ameliorating nonalcoholic fatty liver disease via rebuilding the intestinal microecology.

The worldwide prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is increasing, and this metabolic disorder has been recognized as a severe threat to human health. A variety of chemical drugs have been approved for treating NAFLD, however, they always has serious side effects. Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) have been widely used for preventing and treating a range of metabolic diseases with satisfactory safety and effective performance in clinical treatment of NAFLD. Recent studies indicated that imbanlance of the intestinal microbiota was closely associated with the occurrence and development of NAFLD, thus, the intestinal microbiota has been recognized as a promising target for treatment of NAFLD. In recent decades, a variety of CHMs have been reported to effectively prevent or treat NAFLD by modulating intestinal microbiota to further interfer the gut-liver axis. In this review, recent advances in CHMs for the treatment of NAFLD via rebuilding the intestinal microecology were systematically reviewed. The key roles of CHMs in the regulation of gut microbiota and the gut-liver axis along with their mechanisms (such as modulating intestinal permeability, reducing the inflammatory response, protecting liver cells, improving lipid metabolism, and modulating nuclear receptors), were well summarized. All the knowledge and information presented here will be very helpful for researchers to better understand the applications and mechanisms of CHMs for treatment of NAFLD.

[A successfully treated case of colchicine poisoning with lethal dose].

At present, there is no specific antidote for colchicine intoxication, and 0.8 mg/kg is its lethal dose. The prognosis of colchicine intoxication patients is closely related to the dosage, but the individual difference is very great. A 38-year-old man with colchicine poisoning was admitted to the Seventh People's Hospital of Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, who had ingested 80 mg colchicine tablets (1.19 mg/kg) orally for 4 hours. He was immediately put on gastric lavage, enema, and catharsis. Continuous blood purification was performed for 34 hours and 22 minutes, with a combination of hemoperfusion (HP) and continuous veno-venous hemofiltration dialysis (CVVHDF). He also received a large dose of the glucocorticoid with 80 mg of methylprednisolone injected intravenously every 8 hours and organ function support. The patient was hospitalized for 2 weeks and discharged with improvement. The successful treatment of this case was reported for reference.

Class discrepancy-guided sub-band filter-based common spatial pattern for motor imagery classification.

BACKGROUND: Motor imagery classification, an important branch of brain-computer interface (BCI), recognizes the intention of subjects to control external auxiliary equipment. Therefore, EEG-based motor imagery classification has received increasing attention in the fields of neuroscience. The common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm has recently achieved great success in motor imagery classification. However, varying discriminative frequency bands and few-channel EEG limit the performance of CSP. NEW METHOD: A class discrepancy-guided sub-band filter-based CSP (CDFCSP) algorithm is proposed to automatically recognize and augment the discriminative frequency bands for CSP algorithms. Specifically, a priori knowledge and templates obtained from the training set were applied as the design guidelines of the class discrepancy-guided sub-band filter (CDF). Second, a filter bank CSP was used to extract features from EEG traces filtered by the CDF. Finally, the CSP features of multiple frequency bands were leveraged to train linear support vector machine classifier and generate prediction. RESULTS: BCI competition IV datasets 2a and 2b, which include EEGs from 18 subjects, were used to validate the performance improvement provided by the CDF. Student's t-tests of the CDFCSP versus the filter bank CSP without the CDF showed that the performance improvement was significant (i.e., p-values of 0.040 and 0.032 for the ratio and normalization mode CDFCSP, respectively). COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHOD(S): The experiments show that the proposed CDFCSP improves the CSP algorithm and outperforms the other state-of-the-art algorithms evaluated in this paper. CONCLUSIONS: The increased performance of the proposed CDFCSP algorithm can promote the application of BCI systems.