Comparison of the two surgery methods combined with accelerated rehabilitation in the treatment of lateral compression type 1 pelvic fractures in the elderly.

BACKGROUND: Treating lateral compression type 1 (LC1) pelvic ring injuries in older patients is controversial. This study evaluated surgical treatments combined with ERAS for treating LC1 pelvic fractures in the elderly. METHODS: In this retrospective study, patients who underwent surgery with INFIX (supra-acetabular spinal pedicle screws, and a subcutaneous connecting rod; the experimental group) or superior pubic ramus cannulated screw (the control group) fixation of LC1 pelvic fracture from January 2019 to January 2022 were reviewed. Injury radiography and computed tomography were performed to determine the Young-Burgess classification. All patients performed standardized early rehabilitation exercises after surgery and were followed up for > 12 months. After surgery, the Matta score and the visual analog scale (VAS) were evaluated, and the postoperative weight-bearing time and the length of stay (LOS) were recorded. The Barthel index and the Majeed score were evaluated at 4 months after surgery and at the last follow-up. RESULTS: Fifty-three patients were included. Thirty-two patients included in the experimental group had a mean age of 75.0 ± 6.2 (range, 66-86) years, and the other 21 patients in the control group had a mean age of 74.6 ± 4.6 (range, 68-83) years. The mean follow-up time was 13.1 ± 1.6 (range, 12-18) months in the experimental group and 13.4 ± 1.3 (range, 12-16) months in the control group. There were no significant differences in follow-up time between the groups (P > 0.05). The mean VAS score, time to weight-bearing, and LOS were 2.0 ± 0.7 (range, 1-3), 1.1 ± 0.3 (range, 1-2) d, and 5.8 ± 0.9 (range, 4-7) d in the experimental group and 2.3 ± 1.2 (range, 1-5), 2.5 ± 1.6 (range, 1-7) d, and 6.1 ± 1.6 (range, 5-11) d in the control group, respectively. Between the two groups, there was a significant difference in the postoperative time to weight-bearing (P < 0.05), while there was no significant difference in the LOS (P > 0.05). No bedrest-related complications occurred in either group. The Matta score was 90.6% in the experimental group and 90.4% in the control group (P > 0.05). At the 4-months follow-up, the experimental group had a better Barthel index and Majeed score compared with the control group, which were 86.1 ± 6.2 (range, 70-95) vs. 81.2 ± 4.1 (range, 75-90) and 86.3 ± 3.3 (range, 78-91) vs. 80.3 ± 3.9 (range, 76-86), respectively. The experimental group had better early rehabilitation effect than the control group. There was no significant difference in Barthel index and Majeed score between the two groups at the last follow-up (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Both INFIX and intramedullary superior pubic ramus cannulated screws can successfully treat LC1 pelvic fractures and reduce bed rest complications among older patients.

Automatically showing microbial growth kinetics with a high-performance microbial growth analyzer.

It is difficult to show microbial growth kinetics online when they grow in complex matrices. We presented a novel strategy to address this challenge by developing a high-performance microbial growth analyzer (HPMGA), which employed a unique 32-channel capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detector as a sensing element and fixed with a CellStatz software. It was capable of online showing accurate and repeatable growth curves of well-dispersed and bad-dispersed microbes, whether they grew in homogeneous simple culture broth or heterogeneous complex matrices. Moreover, it could automatically report key growth kinetics parameters. In comparison to optical density (OD), plate counting and broth microdilution (BMD) methods, we demonstrated its practicability in five scenarios: 1) the illustration of the growth, growth rate, and acceleration curves of Escherichia coli (E. coli); 2) the antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of Oxacillin against Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus); 3) the determination of Ag nanoparticle toxicity on Providencia rettgeri (P. rettgeri); 4) the characterization of milk fermentation; and 5) the enumeration of viable pathogenic Vibrio in shrimp body. Results highlighted that the HPMGA method had the advantages of universality and effectivity. This technology would significantly facilitate the routine analysis of microbial growth in many fields (biology, medicine, clinic, life, food, environment, and ecology), paving an avenue for microbiologists to achieve research goals that have been inhibited for years due to a lack of practical analytical methods.

Analytical methods for assessing antimicrobial activity of nanomaterials in complex media: advances, challenges, and perspectives.

Assessing the antimicrobial activity of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), especially in realistic scenarios, is of great significance for both basic research and applications. Multiple analytical methods are available for analysis via off-line or on-line measurements. Real-world samples are often complex with inorganic and organic components, which complicates the measurements of microbial viability and/or metabolic activity. This article highlights the recent advances achieved in analytical methods including typical applications and specifics regarding their accuracy, cost, efficiency, and user-friendliness. Methodological drawbacks, technique gaps, and future perspectives are also discussed. This review aims to help researchers select suitable methods for gaining insight into antimicrobial activities of targeted ENMs in artificial and natural complex matrices.

A novel scheme for essential protein discovery based on multi-source biological information.

Mining essential protein is crucial for discovering the process of cellular organization and viability. At present, there are many computational methods for essential proteins detecting. However, these existing methods only focus on the topological information of the networks and ignore the biological information of proteins, which lead to low accuracy of essential protein identification. Therefore, this paper presents a new essential proteins prediction strategy, called DEP-MSB which integrates a variety of biological information including gene expression profiles, GO annotations, and Domain interaction strength. In order to evaluate the performance of DEP-MSB, we conduct a series of experiments on the yeast PPI network and the experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm DEP-MSB is more superior to the other existing traditional methods and has obviously improvement in prediction accuracy.

The Differential Effects of Leukocyte-Containing and Pure Platelet-Rich Plasma on Nucleus Pulposus-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells: Implications for the Clinical Treatment of Intervertebral Disc Degeneration.

BACKGROUND: Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is a promising strategy for intervertebral disc degeneration. However, the potential harmful effects of leukocytes in PRP on nucleus pulposus-derived mesenchymal stem cells (NPMSCs) have seldom been studied. This study aimed at comparatively evaluating effects of pure platelet-rich plasma (P-PRP) and leukocyte-containing platelet-rich plasma (L-PRP) on rabbit NPMSCs in vitro. METHODS: NPMSCs isolated from rabbit NP tissues were treated with L-PRP or P-PRP in vitro, and then cell proliferation and expression of stem cell markers, proinflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IL-1ß), production of ECM (extracellular matrix-related protein), and NF-κB p65 protein were validated by CCK-8 assay, real-time polymerase chain reaction, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, immunofluorescence, and western blot respectively. RESULTS: NPMSCs differentiate into nucleus pulposus-like cells after treatment of PRPs (P-PRP and L-PRP), and NPMSCs exhibited maximum proliferation at a 10% PRP dose. L-PRP had observably higher concentration of leukocytes, TNF-α, and IL-1ß than P-PRP. Furthermore, compared to P-PRP, L-PRP induced the differentiated NPMSCs to upregulate the expression of TNF-α and IL-1ß, enhanced activation of the NF-κB pathway, increased the expression of MMP-1 and MMP-13, and produced less ECM in differentiated NPMSCs. CONCLUSIONS: Both P-PRP and L-PRP can induce the proliferation and NP-differentiation of NPMSCs. Compared to L-PRP, P-PRP can avoid the activation of the NF-κB pathway, thus reducing the inflammatory and catabolic responses.

Is exclusion of leukocytes from platelet-rich plasma (PRP) a better choice for early intervertebral disc regeneration?

BACKGROUND: Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is becoming a promising strategy to treat early intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD) in clinics. Pure PRP without leukocytes (P-PRP) may decrease the catabolic and inflammatory changes in the early degenerated intervertebral discs. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of P-PRP on nucleus pulposus-derived stem cells (NPSCs) isolated from early degenerated intervertebral discs in vitro. METHODS: NPSCs isolated from early degenerated discs of rabbits were treated with P-PRP or leukocyte-platelet-rich PRP (L-PRP) in vitro, followed by measuring cell proliferation, stem cell marker expression, inflammatory gene expression, and anabolic and catabolic protein expression by immunostaining, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, Western blot, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS: Cell proliferation was induced by P-PRP in a dose-dependent manner with maximum proliferation at 10% P-PRP dose. P-PRP induced differentiation of NPSCs into active nucleus pulposus cells. P-PRP mainly increased the expression of anabolic genes and relative proteins, aggrecan (AGC), collagen types II (Col II), while L-PRP predominantly increased the expression of catabolic and inflammatory genes, matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1), MMP-13, interleukin-1 beta (IL-1ß), IL-6, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), and protein production of IL-1ß and TNF-α. CONCLUSIONS: Leukocytes in PRP activate inflammatory and catabolic effects on NPSCs from early degenerated intervertebral discs. Hence, P-PRP may be a more suitable therapeutic strategy for early IDD.

A Network Hierarchy-Based method for functional module detection in protein-protein interaction networks.

In the post-genomic era, one of the important tasks is to identify protein complexes and functional modules from high-throughput protein-protein interaction data, so that we can systematically analyze and understand the molecular functions and biological processes of cells. Although a lot of functional module detection studies have been proposed, how to design correctly and efficiently functional modules detection algorithms is still a challenging and important scientific problem in computational biology. In this paper, we present a novel Network Hierarchy-Based method to detect functional modules in PPI networks (named NHB-FMD). NHB-FMD first constructs the hierarchy tree corresponding to the PPI network and then encodes the tree such that genetic algorithm is employed to obtain the hierarchy tree with Maximum Likelihood. After that functional module partitioning is performed based on it and the best partitioning is selected as the result. Experimental results in the real PPI networks have shown that the proposed algorithm not only significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods but also can detect protein modules more effectively and accurately.

Intervertebral disc regeneration using platelet­rich plasma­containing bone marrow­derived mesenchymal stem cells: A preliminary investigation.

Platelet­rich plasma (PRP) is a promising strategy for intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD). However, the short half­life of growth factors released from PRP cannot continuously stimulate the degenerated discs. Thus, the present study hypothesized that the combined use of PRP and bone marrow­derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) may repair the early degenerated discs in the long term for their synergistic reparative effect. In the present study, following the induction of early IDD by annular puncture in rabbits, PRP was prepared and mixed with BMSCs (PRP­BMSC group) for injection into the early degenerated discs. As controls, phosphate­buffered saline (PBS; PBS group) and PRP (PRP group) were similarly injected. Rabbits without any intervention served as a control group. At 8 weeks following treatment, histological changes of the injected discs were assessed. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to detect the T2­weighted signal intensity of the targeted discs at weeks 1, 2 and 8 following treatment. Annular puncture resulted in disc narrowing and decreased T2­weighted signal intensity. At weeks 1 and 3, MRI examinations showed regenerative changes in the PRP­BMSC group and PRP group, whereas the PBS group exhibited a continuous degenerative process of the discs. At 8 weeks post­injection, the PRP­BMSCs induced a statistically significant restoration of discs, as shown by MRI (PRP­BMSCs, vs.PRP and PBS; P<0.05), which was also confirmed by histological evaluations. Thus, compared with PRP, the administration of PRP­containing BMSCs resulted in a superior regenerative effect on the early degenerated discs, which may be a promising therapeutic strategy for the restoration of early degenerated discs.

[Experiment of bone morphogenetic protein 2 induced chondrogenic differentiation of human Achilles tendon-derived stem cells in vitro].

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effects of bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP-2) on the chondrogenic differentiation of human Achilles tendon-derived stem cells (hATDSCs) in vitro. METHODS: Achilles tendon was harvested from a voluntary donor with acute Achilles tendon rupture. And nucleated cells were obtained by digesting with collagenase and were cultured to the 3rd passage. The flow cytometry was used to measure the immunophenotyping; and Oil red O staining, alizarin red staining, and Safranin O/fast green staining were used to identify the adipogenic differentiation, osteogenic differentiation, and chondrogenic differentiation, respectively. The hATDSCs pellet was cultured in complete culture medium with (experimental group) or without recombinant human BMP-2 (rhBMP-2) (control grup) for 3 weeks. Chondrogenic differentiation of hATDSCs was evaluated by HE staining, Safranin O/fast green staining, and immunohistochemical staining for collagen type II; and the mRNA expressions of SOX9, collagen type II, and Aggrecan were detected by real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR. RESULTS: Primary hATDSCs cultured in vitro showed clonal growth; after cell passage, homogeneous spindle fibroblast-like cells were seen. The cells were positive for CD44, CD90, and CD105, while negative for CD34, CD45, and CD146. The results were positive for Oil red O staining at 3 weeks after adipogenic differentiation, for alizarin red staining at 4 weeks after osteogenic differentiation, and for Safranin O/fast green staining at 3 weeks after chondrogenic differentiation. After hATDSCs were induced with rhBMP-2 for 3 weeks, pellets formed in the experimental group, and the size of pellets was significantly larger than that in the control group; the results of HE staining, Safranin O/fast green staining, and immunohistochemical staining for collagen type II were all positive. The results of real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR showed that the mRNA expressions of SOX9, collagen type II, and Aggrecan in the experimental group were significantly higher than those in the control group (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: BMP-2 can promote proteoglycan deposition and induce chondrogenic differentiation of hATDSCs in vitro. The effect of BMP-2 on hATDSCs might provide a possible explanation for histopathological changes of tendinopathy.