Synovial Macrophages: Past Life, Current Situation, and Application in Inflammatory Arthritis.

Inflammatory arthritis is an inflammatory disease that involves the joints and surrounding tissues. Synovial hyperplasia often presents when joints become inflamed due to immune cell infiltration. Synovial membrane is an important as well as a highly specific component of the joint, and its lesions can lead to degeneration of the joint surface, causing pain and joint disability or affecting the patients' quality of life in severe cases. Synovial macrophages (SMs) are one of the cellular components of the synovial membrane, which not only retain the function of macrophages to engulf foreign bodies in the joint cavity, but also interact with synovial fibroblasts (SFs), T cells, B cells, and other inflammatory cells to promote the production of a variety of pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, such as TNF-α, IL-1ß, IL-8, and IL-6, which are involved in the pathogenic process of inflammatory arthritis. SMs from different tissue sources have differently differentiated potentials and functional expressions. This article provides a summary on studies pertaining to SMs in inflammatory arthritis, and explores their role in its treatment, in order to highlight novel treatment modalities for the disease.

[Study advance of depressive animal models and its application in traditional Chinese medicines].

Depression is a kind of mental disease with main symptoms of low mood and lack of pleasure, which seriously endangers human health. An appropriate depressive animal model is of great significance for the study of depression and new antidepressant drugs, while the suitable selection and matching of experimental animals, modeling methods and evaluation indexes are critical to eva-luate the scientificity and effectiveness of the depressive animal model. The study advance of depressive animal models in the aspects of experimental animal selection, modeling principle and method, characteristics, evaluation indexes and their application in traditional Chinese medicine are summarized through the systematic review of relevant literatures in PubMed, CNKI and other databases. The depressive animal modeling methods utilized in recent studies include stress, glucocorticoid induction, reserpine induction, lipopolysaccharide induction, surgical modeling, gene knockout, joint application modeling methods. Stress method is better to simulate the depressive symptoms of clinical patients, whereas there are some deficiencies, such as long modeling time and large cost. The depressive animal models induced by glucocorticoid, reserpine and lipopolysaccharide have the advantages of short modeling time and good controllability, but with a poor reliability. The pathogenesis of surgical modeling is highly matched with that of clinical depressive patients, whereas it has the defect of long postoperative recovery period. Gene knockout models can be used to study the precise role of specific genes in depression. However, its applicability may be restricted in studies on depression. The joint application modeling method can improve its reliability and accuracy, and attracts more and more attention. This paper provides a reference for the selection of animal models in future studies of pathological mechanism of depression, and screening and evaluation of antidepressant drugs.