[Efficacy and safety of vitamin D as adjuvant therapy for childhood pneumonia: a Meta analysis].

OBJECTIVE: To study the efficacy and safety of vitamin D as an adjuvant therapy for childhood pneumonia through a systematic review. METHODS: Cochrane Library, PubMed, EMbase, CNKI, Wanfang Data, and Weipu Data were searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of vitamin D as the adjuvant therapy for childhood pneumonia published up to August 2019. Literature screening, quality assessment, and data extraction were performed based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Revman 5.3 was used to perform the Meta analysis of outcome indicators. RESULTS: A total of 7 RCTs with 1 527 children were included, with 762 children in the vitamin D adjuvant therapy group and 765 children in the control group. The results of the Meta analysis showed that vitamin D adjuvant therapy had no effect on recovery time (P=0.67), length of hospital stay (P=0.73), and time to relief of fever (P=0.43). Furthermore, it did not reduce the recurrence rate (P=0.14), rate of adverse events (P=0.20), and mortality rate (P=0.98) of childhood pneumonia. CONCLUSIONS: Current evidence shows that vitamin D adjuvant therapy has no marked efficacy in the treatment of childhood pneumonia.

Understanding the infrared and Raman spectra of ganoderic acid A: An experimental and DFT study.

Ganoderic Acids (GAs) are the major medicinal compounds in Ganoderma lucidum used as traditional Chinese medicine since ancient times. Ganoderic acid A (GAA) is the first discovered ganoderic acids reported in the literature, which is also one of most abundant triterpenoids of Ganoderma lucidum. Especially, GAA has been extensively investigated in recent decades for its positive medicinal activities. However, the vibrational properties of GAs have rarely been studied or reported. In this work, we focused on the typical GAA and studied the infrared (IR) and Raman spectra based on both experiments and DFT calculations. As such, we could not only achieve the assignments of the vibrational modes, but also from the IR and Raman spectra, we found that the spectral region from 1500 cm-1 to 1800 cm-1 is particularly useful for distinguishing different types of GAs. In addition, its dehydrogenated derivative ganoderenic acid A (GOA) was also studied, which could be identified due to its spectral feature of strong IR and Raman bands around 1620 cm-1. This work therefore may facilitate the application of IR and Raman spectroscopies in the inspection and quality control of Ganoderma lucidum.