Visual impairment and blindness caused by retinal diseases: A nationwide register-based study.

Background: Retinal disorders cause substantial visual burden globally. Accurate estimates of the vision loss due to retinal diseases are pivotal to inform optimal eye health care planning and allocation of medical resources. The purpose of this study is to describe the proportion of visual impairment and blindness caused by major retinal diseases in China. Methods: A nationwide register-based study of vitreoretinal disease covering all 31 provinces (51 treating centres) of mainland China. A total of 28 320 adults diagnosed with retinal diseases were included. Participants underwent standardised ocular examinations, which included best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), dilated-fundus assessments, and optical coherence tomography. Visual impairment and blindness are defined using BCVA according to the World Health Organization (WHO) (visual impairment: <20/63-≥20/400; blindness: <20/400) and the United States (visual impairment: <20/40-≥20/200; blindness: <20/200) definitions. The risk factors of vision loss were explored by logistic regression analyses. Results: Based on the WHO definitions, the proportions for unilateral visual impairment and blindness were 46% and 18%, respectively, whereas those for bilateral visual impairment and blindness were 31% and 3.3%, respectively. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) accounts for the largest proportion of patients with visual impairment (unilateral visual impairment: 32%, bilateral visual impairment: 60%) and blindness (unilateral blindness: 35%; bilateral blindness: 64%). Other retinal diseases that contributed significantly to vision loss included age-related macular degeneration, myopic maculopathy, retinal vein occlusion, and rhegmatogenous retinal detachment and other macular diseases. Women (bilateral vision loss: P = 0.011), aged patients (unilateral vision loss: 45-64 years: P < 0.001, ≥65 years: P < 0.001; bilateral vision loss: 45-64 years: P = 0.003, ≥65 years: P < 0.001 (reference: 18-44 years)) and those from Midwest China (unilateral and bilateral vision loss: both P < 0.001) were more likely to suffer from vision loss. Conclusions: Retinal disorders cause substantial visual burden among patients with retinal diseases in China. DR, the predominant retinal disease, is accountable for the most prevalent visual disabilities. Better control of diabetes and scaled-up screenings are warranted to prevent DR. Specific attention should be paid to women, aged patients, and less developed regions.

Efficacy and safety of atropine at different concentrations in prevention of myopia progression in Asian children: a systematic review and Meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials.

AIM: To assess the efficacy versus the adverse effects of various concentrations of atropine in the prevention of myopia in Asian children. METHODS: Databases (PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library and Web of science) were comprehensively searched from inception to April 2022. Types of studies included were randomized clinical trials (RCTs). The published languages were limited to English. Two researchers assessed the quality of included studies independently using Cochrane risk of bias tool based on the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Funnel plots and Egger's test were used for detection of publication bias. Meta-analyses were conducted using STATA (version 15.0; StataCorp). RESULTS: A total of 15 RCTs involving 2268 patients were included in the study. In the atropine group, spherical equivalent progressed at a significantly lower rate [weighted mean difference (WMD)=0.39, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.23, 0.54] than in the control group. A WMD of 0.15 mm was associated with less axial elongation (95%CI -0.19, -0.10). Different doses showed statistically significant differences (P<0.05) and an improved effect could result from a higher concentration. Changes in photopic pupil size and mesopic pupil size in atropine group is 0.70 mm (95%CI: 0.33, 1.06) and 0.38 mm (95%CI: 0.22, 0.54) more than the control group. In the present Meta-analysis, no changes in accommodative amplitude (AA) were associated with atropine administration. Atropine administration increased the risk of adverse effects by 1.37 times. CONCLUSION: Concentrations of less than 1% atropine are able to effectively retard diopter and axis growth of myopia in Asian children in a dose-dependent manner. Meanwhile, it caused pupil enlargement, but induced no change in the AA within this range. Further study is required to determine the dosage needed to achieve maximum efficacy and minimal side effects.

A pilot clinical study of complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachment treatment via foldable capsular buckle scleral buckling.

BACKGROUND: To evaluate the feasibility of and identify problems in treating complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachment using foldable capsular buckle scleral buckling. METHODS: This prospective clinical study enrolled five patients with complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachment treated with foldable capsular buckle scleral buckling at the 988th Hospital of People's Liberation Army Joint Logistic Force, China. During the 24-week follow-up period, the patients underwent measurements of their best-corrected visual acuity, slit-lamp examination, indirect ophthalmoscopy, and visual field testing. Additionally, B-ultrasound and fundus photography of the patients' retinal reattachments helped evaluate the treatment's post-surgery efficacy. We determined the safety of foldable capsular buckle scleral buckling based on infection, eye pain, diplopia, elevated intraocular pressure, and other postoperative severe complications. RESULTS: All five patients' complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachments were successfully treated and evaluated via B-ultrasound and fundus photography after surgery. Visual acuity was enhanced in four patients 24 weeks after surgery, while the remaining patients developed diplopia after surgery. No other complications were observed. CONCLUSION: This pilot study preliminarily determined that foldable capsular buckle scleral buckling is feasible for efficient and safe treatment of complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachment. These results support this surgery as a potential and novel alternative to current extraocular procedures for treating complex rhegmatogenous retinal detachment. TRIAL REGISTRATION: The prospective observational clinical study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board and Ethics Committee and registered at the clinical research center in the 988th Hospital of People's Liberation Army Joint Logistic Force, China (9,882,019,000).

Grapevine bZIP transcription factor bZIP45 regulates VvANN1 and confers drought tolerance in Arabidopsis.

Drought is a severe environmental condition that restricts the vegetative growth and reduces the yield of grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.). However, the mechanisms underlying grapevine response and adaptation to drought stress remain unclear. In the present study, we characterized an ANNEXIN gene, VvANN1, which plays a positive role in the drought stress response. The results indicated that VvANN1 was significantly induced by osmotic stress. Expression of VvANN1 in Arabidopsis thaliana enhanced osmotic and drought tolerance through modulating the level of MDA, H2O2, and O2 ·- at the seedling stage, implying that VvANN1 might be involved in the process of ROS homeostasis under drought or osmotic stress conditions. Moreover, we used yeast one-hybridization and chromatin immunoprecipitation assays to show that VvbZIP45 could regulate VvANN1 expression by directly binding to the promoter region of VvANN1 in response to drought stress. We also generated transgenic Arabidopsis that constitutively expressed the VvbZIP45 gene (35S::VvbZIP45) and further produced VvANN1Pro::GUS/35S::VvbZIP45 Arabidopsis plants via crossing. The genetic analysis results subsequently indicated that VvbZIP45 could enhance GUS expression in vivo under drought stress. Our findings suggest that VvbZIP45 may modulate VvANN1 expression in response to drought stress and reduce the impact of drought on fruit quality and yield.

H3K36 demethylase JMJ710 negatively regulates drought tolerance by suppressing MYB48-1 expression in rice.

The homeostasis of histone methylation is maintained by histone methyltransferases and demethylases, which are important for the regulation of gene expression. Here, we report a histone demethylase from rice (Oryza sativa), Jumonji C domain-containing protein (JMJ710), which belongs to the JMJD6 group and plays an important role in the response to drought stress. Overexpression of JMJ710 causes a drought-sensitive phenotype, while RNAi and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-knockout mutant lines show drought tolerance. In vitro and in vivo assays showed that JMJ710 is a histone demethylase. It targets to MYB TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR 48 (MYB48-1) chromatin, demethylates H3K36me2, and negatively regulates the expression of MYB48-1, a positive regulator of drought tolerance. Under drought stress, JMJ710 is downregulated and the expression of MYB48-1 increases, and the subsequent activation of its downstream drought-responsive genes leads to drought tolerance. This research reports a negative regulator of drought stress-responsive genes, JMJ710, that ensures that the drought tolerance mechanism is not mis-activated under normal conditions but allows quick activation upon drought stress.

A PILOT CLINICAL STUDY OF TREATING RHEGMATOGENOUS RETINAL DETACHMENT BY SILICONE RUBBER BALLOON SCLERAL BUCKLING.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the efficacy and primary safety of treating rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) using foldable capsular vitreous body scleral buckling. METHODS: Five patients with simple RRD were treated with foldable capsular vitreous body scleral buckling. B-ultrasound and fundus photography examining of retina reattachment were used to evaluate the postsurgery efficacy. The safety of the treatment was evaluated based on the occurrence of infection, eye pain, diplopia, elevated intraocular pressure, and other serious postoperative complications after surgery. The observation time after the operation was at least 12 weeks. RESULTS: The simple RRD of all five patients was successfully reattached before being evaluating by B-ultrasound and fundus photography after surgery. Visual acuity was enhanced in two patients who were macularly affected. One patient had temporary diplopia and eye movement limitation after surgery. No other complications were recorded. CONCLUSION: This pilot study determined that foldable capsular vitreous body scleral buckling can be efficacious and safe for simple RRD. The results indicate that this surgery may be a novel alternative to the current extraocular procedures for simple RRD.

Study on the effectiveness and safety of Foldable Capsular Vitreous Body implantation.

BACKGROUND: Foldable capsular vitreous body (FCVB) was designed to treat severe retinal detachment. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the implantation of foldable capsular vitreous body in 1-year follow-up. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was conducted for 20 patients with severe ocular trauma or silicone oil (SO) dependent eyes underwent vitrectomy and FCVB implantation in a 1-year follow-up. All treated eyes were peformed clinical examinations involved the visual acuity (VA) examination, Goldmann applanation tonometer, noncontact specular microscopy, fundus photography, B-Scan examination and optical coherence tomography (OCT). The groups were compared with t-test and the McNemar - Bowker test. RESULTS: In 1-year follow-up, 20 eyes were evaluated in the study. FCVB well supported the vitreous retina in all treated eyes, and 6 treated eyes achieved retinal reattachment 12 months after FCVB implantation. There were no significant differences in VA before and after FCVB implantation (P = 1.000). In addition, the postoperative IOP markedly elevated from the preoperative IOP of 12.90 ± 7.06 mmHg to 15.15 ± 3.36 mmHg (P = 0.000017). The intraocular pressure (IOP) of 10 eyes maintained at a normal level after surgeries. The other 10 eyes showed slightly lower IOP within the acceptable level. Though two patients developed keratopathy and ocular inflammation respectively, other treated eyes were symmetric with fellow eyes showing satisfactory appearance. Moreover, there was no SO emulsification or leakage happened in the observation. CONCLUSIONS: FCVB implantation was an effective and safe treatment in the eyes with severe retinal detachment.

Acetone Sensing Properties and Mechanism of Rh-Loaded WO3 Nanosheets.

WO3 nanosheets was prepared by an acidification method and the Rh catalyst was dispersed on the surface of the nanosheets with a wet impregnation method. The morphology of pristine WO3 and Rh modified WO3 nanosheets and their responses to acetone gas were studied. According to oxygen adsorption combined with TPR results, the sensing and sensitization mechanism of acetone were discussed. It was found that no visible changes in nanostructures or morphologies were observed in WO3 nanosheets with Rh, however, the sensor resistance and sensor response were greatly promoted. The basic sensitization mechanism could be caused by the electronic interaction between oxidized Rh and WO3 surface.

Batch process fault detection and identification based on discriminant global preserving kernel slow feature analysis.

As an attractive nonlinear dynamic data analysis tool, global preserving kernel slow feature analysis (GKSFA) has achieved great success in extracting the high nonlinearity and inherently time-varying dynamics of batch process. However, GKSFA is an unsupervised feature extraction method and lacks the ability to utilize batch process class label information, which may not offer the most effective means for dealing with batch process monitoring. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel batch process monitoring method based on the modified GKSFA, referred to as discriminant global preserving kernel slow feature analysis (DGKSFA), by closely integrating discriminant analysis and GKSFA. The proposed DGKSFA method can extract discriminant feature of batch process as well as preserve global and local geometrical structure information of observed data. For the purpose of fault detection, a monitoring statistic is constructed based on the distance between the optimal kernel feature vectors of test data and normal data. To tackle the challenging issue of nonlinear fault variable identification, a new nonlinear contribution plot method is also developed to help identifying the fault variable after a fault is detected, which is derived from the idea of variable pseudo-sample trajectory projection in DGKSFA nonlinear biplot. Simulation results conducted on a numerical nonlinear dynamic system and the benchmark fed-batch penicillin fermentation process demonstrate that the proposed process monitoring and fault diagnosis approach can effectively detect fault and distinguish fault variables from normal variables.

Nonlinear Process Fault Diagnosis Based on Serial Principal Component Analysis.

Many industrial processes contain both linear and nonlinear parts, and kernel principal component analysis (KPCA), widely used in nonlinear process monitoring, may not offer the most effective means for dealing with these nonlinear processes. This paper proposes a new hybrid linear-nonlinear statistical modeling approach for nonlinear process monitoring by closely integrating linear principal component analysis (PCA) and nonlinear KPCA using a serial model structure, which we refer to as serial PCA (SPCA). Specifically, PCA is first applied to extract PCs as linear features, and to decompose the data into the PC subspace and residual subspace (RS). Then, KPCA is performed in the RS to extract the nonlinear PCs as nonlinear features. Two monitoring statistics are constructed for fault detection, based on both the linear and nonlinear features extracted by the proposed SPCA. To effectively perform fault identification after a fault is detected, an SPCA similarity factor method is built for fault recognition, which fuses both the linear and nonlinear features. Unlike PCA and KPCA, the proposed method takes into account both linear and nonlinear PCs simultaneously, and therefore, it can better exploit the underlying process's structure to enhance fault diagnosis performance. Two case studies involving a simulated nonlinear process and the benchmark Tennessee Eastman process demonstrate that the proposed SPCA approach is more effective than the existing state-of-the-art approach based on KPCA alone, in terms of nonlinear process fault detection and identification.

Monitoring Nonlinear and Non-Gaussian Processes Using Gaussian Mixture Model-Based Weighted Kernel Independent Component Analysis.

A kernel independent component analysis (KICA) is widely regarded as an effective approach for nonlinear and non-Gaussian process monitoring. However, the KICA-based monitoring methods treat every KIC equally and cannot highlight the useful KICs associated with fault information. Consequently, fault information may not be explored effectively, which may result in degraded fault detection performance. To overcome this problem, we propose a new nonlinear and non-Gaussian process monitoring method using Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based weighted KICA (WKICA). In particular, in WKICA, GMM is first adopted to estimate the probabilities of the KICs extracted by KICA. The significant KICs embodying the dominant process variation are then discriminated based on the estimated probabilities and assigned with larger weights to capture the significant information during online fault detection. A nonlinear contribution plots method is also developed based on the idea of a sensitivity analysis to help identifying the fault variables after a fault is detected. Simulation studies conducted on a simple four-variable nonlinear system and the Tennessee Eastman benchmark process demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the conventional KICA-based method.

Apoptosis of rabbit retinal cell after eyeball rupture.

OBJECTIVE: To establish rabbit eyeball rupture model by air gun in order to observe and analyze the early injury condition and reasons of retinal cell after eyeball rupture. METHODS: Forty eight healthy rabbits were randomly divided into control group and 1, 3, 6, 12 and 24 h after injury groups. After anesthesia, the rabbit eyeball rupture model was established by air gun. Then the early pathological changes of rabbit retina were observed, and apoptotic index (AI), oncosis index (OI), the relationship between the expression amounts of apoptosis-related genes and AI were analyzed. RESULTS: Obvious pathological lesion appeared in retina 6 h after injury. Irreversible damage occurred 12-24 h after injury. The results of AI and OI indicated that the OI peak appeared 6 h after injury and then gradually declined, while the AI increased with the prolongation of time, and the AI was higher than OI in 12 h after injury. Immunohistochemical results indicated that there was no obvious bcl-2 protein expression change. Compared with the control group and the 3, 6, 12 and 24 h after the injury groups, the expressions of p53 and Caspase-3 were significantly improved and peaked at 12 h (P<0.01). Positive correlation existed among p53, Caspase-3 expression amount and cell apoptosis amount. CONCLUSIONS: Apoptosis and oncosis of visual cells are the main reasons of retinal cell injury. p53 and Caspase-3 are the important factors in promoting the retinal cell apoptosis after eyeball rupture.

Impact of Lycium Barbarum Polysaccharide and Danshensu on vascular endothelial growth factor in the process of retinal neovascularization of rabbit.

AIM: To discuss the impact of Lycium Barbarum Polysaccharide (LBP) and Danshensu purified from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) on vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) of rabbits with retinal neovascularization. METHODS: Forty rabbits were divided into normal control group, model control group, LBP group and Danshensu group. Animals in the normal control group were fed in the normal oxygen environment. Animals in the other three groups were put into the environment with 70% oxygen for 5 days in order to build the model of oxygen-induced vascular proliferation retinopathy. And then different TCM extract was injected into the abdominal cavities of these annimals. After 7 days, the VEGF content of in the serum of rabbit was measured by double antibody sandwich method. RESULTS: DATA ANALYSIS INDICATED THAT VEGF CONTENT WAS AS FOLLOWS: Danshensu group was lower than model control group (12.92±3.84ng/L vs 19.32±4.15ng/L, P<0.05); LBP group and normal control group were lower than model control group (12.92±3.84ng/L, 9.26±1.61ng/L vs 19.32±4.15ng/L, P<0.01); total blood viscosity, plasma viscosity, cholesterol content, fibrinogen content and triacylglycerol content after peritoneal injection of LBP and Danshensu were obviously lower than before injection. CONCLUSION: TCM extract-LBP and Danshensu can prominently reduce the content of VEGF in the process of vascular proliferative retinopathy of rabbit; can prevent the occurrence of retinal microvascular disease by improving partial oxygen-deficient environment or affecting all kinds of new growth factor.