Using a smartphone-based self-management platform to study sex differences in Parkinson's disease: multicenter, cross-sectional pilot study.

BACKGROUND: Patient-reported outcome (PRO) is a distinct and indispensable dimension of clinical characteristics and recent advances have made remote PRO measurement possible. Sex difference in PRO of Parkinson's disease (PD) is hardly extensively researched. METHODS: A smartphone-based self-management platform, offering remote PRO measurement for PD patients, has been developed. A total of 1828 PD patients, including 1001 male patients and 827 female patients, were enrolled and completed their PRO submission through this platform. RESULTS: Sex differences in PROs have been identified. The female group had a significantly lower height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) than the male group (P < 0.001). For motor symptoms, a higher proportion of patients reporting dyskinesia was observed in the female group. For non-motor symptoms, there is a higher percentage (P < 0.001) as well as severity (P = 0.016) of depression in the female group. More male patients reported hyposmia, lisp, drooling, dysuria, frequent urination, hypersexuality, impotence, daytime sleepiness, and apathy than females (P < 0.05). In contrast, more female patients reported headache, palpation, body pain, anorexia, nausea, urinal incontinence, anxiety, insomnia (P < 0.05) than males. CONCLUSIONS: We provide evidence for sex differences in PD through the data collected from our platform. These results highlighted the importance of gender in clinical decision-making, and also support the feasibility of remote PRO measurement through a smartphone-based self-management platform in patients with PD.

The Carbonic Anhydrase ßCA1 Functions in PopW-Mediated Plant Defense Responses in Tomato.

ß-Carbonic anhydrase (ßCA) is very important for plant growth and development, but its function in immunity has also been examined. In this study, we found that the expression level of Solanum lycopersicum ßCA1 (SlßCA1) was significantly upregulated in plants treated with Xanthomonas euvesicatoria 85-10. The protein was localized in the nucleus, cell membrane and chloroplast. Using tomato plants silenced with SlßCA1, we demonstrated that SlßCA1 plays an active role in plant disease resistance. Moreover, we found that the elicitor PopW upregulated the expression of SlßCA1, while the microbe-associated molecular pattern response induced by PopW was inhibited in TRV-SlßCA1. The interaction between PopW and SlßCA1 was confirmed. Here, we found that SlßCA1 was positively regulated during PopW-induced resistance to Xanthomonas euvesicatoria 85-10. These data indicate the importance of SlßCA1 in plant basic immunity and its recognition by the Harpin protein PopW as a new target for elicitor recognition.

Color- and Dimension-Tunable Light-Harvesting Organic Charge-Transfer Alloys for Controllable Photon-Transport Photonics.

An electron donor/acceptor pair comprising perylene (Pe) and 9,10-dicyanoanthracene (DCA) was specifically designed to construct organic charge-transfer (CT) alloys via weak CT interaction through a solution co-assembly route. By adjusting the molar ratio between Pe and DCA, we achieve color- and dimension-tunable CT alloy assemblies involving one-dimensional (1D) (DCA)1-x (Pe)x (0 ≤ x ≤10 %) microribbons and two-dimensional (2D) (Pe)1-y (DCA)y (0 ≤ y ≤5 %) nanosheets as a consequence of energy transfer from DCA or α-Pe to Pe-DCA CT complex. Importantly, dimension-related optical waveguiding performances are also revealed: continuously adjustable optical loss in 1D (DCA)1-x (Pe)x microribbons and successive conversion from isotropic waveguide to anisotropic waveguide in 2D (Pe)1-y (DCA)y nanosheets. The present work provides a desired platform for in-depth investigation of light-harvesting organic CT alloy assemblies, which show promising applications in miniaturized optoelectronic devices.

Defect identification of bare printed circuit boards based on Bayesian fusion of multi-scale features.

The aim of this article is to propose a defect identification method for bare printed circuit boards (PCB) based on multi-feature fusion. This article establishes a description method for various features of grayscale, texture, and deep semantics of bare PCB images. First, the multi-scale directional projection feature, the multi-scale grey scale co-occurrence matrix feature, and the multi-scale gradient directional information entropy feature of PCB were extracted to build the shallow features of defect images. Then, based on migration learning, the feature extraction network of the pre-trained Visual Geometry Group16 (VGG-16) convolutional neural network model was used to extract the deep semantic feature of the bare PCB images. A multi-feature fusion method based on principal component analysis and Bayesian theory was established. The shallow image feature was then fused with the deep semantic feature, which improved the ability of feature vectors to characterize defects. Finally, the feature vectors were input as feature sequences to support vector machines for training, which completed the classification and recognition of bare PCB defects. Experimental results show that the algorithm integrating deep features and multi-scale shallow features had a high recognition rate for bare PCB defects, with an accuracy rate of over 99%.

Triglycerides Mediate the Influence of Body Mass Index on Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in a Non-Obese Chinese Population with Normal Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Levels.

INTRODUCTION: Over 25% of the world's population has non-obese or lean non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and the prevalence is higher than average in Asia. The present study focused on the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and non-obese NAFLD in non-overweight people in China, particularly the influence of triglycerides (TG) in the pathogenesis of non-obese NAFLD. The findings suggest new treatments for NAFLD patients with normal BMI, as well as provide an early warning system for the understanding and prevention of NAFLD in non-obese patients. METHODS: This cross-sectional study enrolled 159,959 Chinese subjects with BMI <24 kg/m2 and normal levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-c). The average age was 40.21 ± 13.88 years, and males accounted for 45.7%. A total of 15,907 (9.94%) patients with NAFLD were diagnosed by ultrasonography. Biochemical indicators were measured using an automated analyzer (Abbott AxSYM). The BMI (kg/m2) was calculated from the weight (kg)/height in square meters (m2). The BMI quartile was used as the column-stratified variable to determine the baseline distribution, and logistic regression analysis was used to assess the relationship between NAFLD and its risk factors, with multiple logistic regression used to assess the relationships between BMI or TG and NAFLD and multivariate linear regression used to analyze the association between BMI and TG, while mediation analysis was used to assess the mediation effect of TG. RESULTS: After adjustment of all covariates, the odds ratios were 1.788 (95% CI: 1.749-1.829; p < 0.00001) and 1.491 (95% CI: 1.451-1.532; p < 0.00001) for the association between BMI and TG with NAFLD incidence. The multivariate linear regression coefficient of BMI and TG was ß = 0.027 (95% CI: 0.023-0.030; p < 0.00001). Mediation analysis showed that BMI contributed to 10.81% of lean NAFLD with a mediation effect of 2.98%. CONCLUSION: In a Chinese population with BMI <24 kg/m2 and normal LDL-c levels, BMI and TG were found to be independent predictors of NAFLD. The direct effect of BMI on non-obese NAFLD was 10.41%. The TG level was found to partially mediate the association.

Systemic immune inflammation index is a valuable marker for predicting hemodialysis patients with depression: a cross-sectional study.

Objective: Maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients suffer from enormous physical, mental stress and poor quality of life, so an increasing number of patients are in a long-term state of depression. A prominent feature of MHD patients is chronic persistent inflammation, which is also an important mechanism for the onset of depression. Therefore, finding economically convenient inflammatory markers to predict and diagnose the onset of depression in MHD patients is of great value. As a novel inflammatory marker, systemic immune inflammation index (SII) can more comprehensively reflect the inflammation and immunity level of patients. This study aims to explore the relationship between SII and depressive symptoms in MHD patients. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 206 MHD patients from three dialysis centers. Based on the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) scores, patients were divided into non-depression and depression groups. Inter group comparison and multivariate logistic regression analysis were performed to determine whether SII is an independent risk factor for depression in MHD patients. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to evaluate the predictive value of SII on depression symptoms in MHD patients. Results: According to the HADS scale score, 38.83% of the included patients were in a state of depression. After adjusting for all confounding factors, MHD patients with SII>963.93 had a 4.709 times higher risk of depression than those with SII ≤ 478.32 (OR=4.709, 95% CI 1.821-12.178, P<0.01). ROC analysis showed that SII>685.11 was the best cutoff value for MHD depression patients, and the area under the curve (AUC) was 0.681. Conclusions: High SII is an independent risk factor for depressed MHD patients and an ideal inflammatory marker for predicting and identifying depression in MHD patients as assessed by the HADS scale.

A Taxonomic Study of Candolleomyces Specimens from China Revealed Seven New Species.

Based on phylogenetic analysis, Candolleomyces (Psathyrellaceae, Agaricales) was established with Psathyrella candolleana as the type species. The basidiomes range from small to large and are typically terrestrial, lignicolous, and rarely fimicolous. We analysed the Candolleomyces species collected during five years in China, and based on morphological and molecular data (nrITS, nrLSU, and tef-1α), we propose seven new Candolleomyces species viz. C. brevisporus, C. gyirongicus, C. lignicola, C. luridus, C. shennongdingicus, C. shennongjianus, and C. sichuanicus. Full descriptions, colour photographs, illustrations, phylogenetic analyses results, and comparisons with related Candolleomyces species of the new taxa are provided. This study enriches the species diversity of Candolleomyces in China.

Research on the control strategy of LCL grid-connected inverters based on improved auto disturbance rejection.

The grid-connected inverter is the key to ensure stable, reliable, safe, and efficient operation of the power generation system; the quality of the grid-connected output current waveform directly affects the performance of the entire power generation system. To improve the anti-interference performance and reduce the output current harmonic content of the grid-connected inverter, an improved control strategy that combined repetitive control (RC) and auto disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is designed in this paper. Firstly, decoupled the ADRC to realize the individual adaptation between tracking performance parameters and anti-interference performance parameters of the controller, through which the difficulty of adjusting parameters is reduced. Secondly, the control approach is devised by adding RC to ADRC. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in this paper, detailed experimental studies are conducted using proportional integral control, traditional ADRC, and the proposed method under normal power grids, weak power grids, and periodic disturbances. And dynamic performance simulation experiment is done to verify the dynamic performance of the self-disturbance rejection controller before and after the addition of RC links. The results indicated the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. Finally, after simulation, the steady state and dynamic performance are conducted on a hardware testing platform. The impacts of the obtained results indicate the effectiveness and feasibility of the control algorithm proposed, the ability to suppress intermediate frequency disturbances is improved, the bandwidth of the auto disturbance rejection controller is expanded, and the harmonic content of the output current is depressed.

Macrofungal Diversity and Distribution Patterns in the Primary Forests of the Shaluli Mountains.

The Shaluli Mountains are located in the southeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau at an elevation of 2500-5000 m. They are characterized by a typical vertical distribution of climate and vegetation and are considered a global biodiversity hotspot. We selected ten vegetation types at different elevation gradients representing distinct forests in the Shaluli Mountains to assess the macrofungal diversity, including subalpine shrub, Pinus spp., Populus spp., Pinus spp. and Quercus spp., Quercus spp., Abies spp., Picea spp. and Abies spp., Picea spp., Juniperus spp., and alpine meadow. In total, 1654 macrofungal specimens were collected. All specimens were distinguished by morphology and DNA barcoding, resulting in the identification of 766 species belonging to 177 genera in two phyla, eight classes, 22 orders, and 72 families. Macrofungal species composition varied widely among vegetation types, but ectomycorrhizal fungi were predominant. In this study, the analysis of observed species richness, the Chao1 diversity index, the invsimpson diversity index, and the Shannon diversity index revealed that the vegetation types with higher macrofungal alpha diversity in the Shaluli Mountains were composed of Abies, Picea, and Quercus. The vegetation types with lower macrofungal alpha diversity were subalpine shrub, Pinus spp., Juniperus spp., and alpine meadow. The results of curve-fitting regression analysis showed that macrofungal diversity in the Shaluli Mountains was closely related to elevation, with a trend of increasing and then decreasing with rising elevation. This distribution of diversity is consistent with the hump-shaped pattern. Constrained principal coordinate analysis based on Bray-Curtis distances indicated that macrofungal community composition was similar among vegetation types at similar elevations, while vegetation types with large differences in elevation differed significantly in macrofungal community composition. This suggests that large changes in elevation increase macrofungal community turnover. This study is the first investigation of the distribution pattern of macrofungal diversity under different vegetation types in high-altitude areas, providing a scientific basis for the conservation of macrofungal resources.