Therapeutic mechanisms of ginseng in coronary heart disease.

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the most common clinical manifestation of cardiovascular disease. It is characterized by myocardial ischemia, which is caused by coronary atherosclerosis. CHD is a significant global health problem with increasing prevalence every year because of significant changes in the lifestyles and diets. Ginseng is a traditional Chinese medicinal herb that has been used in food preparations and traditional medicine for several centuries. Several studies have demonstrated that ginseng improved cardiac function by normalizing blood glucose levels and decreasing blood pressure, oxidative stress, platelet aggregation, and lipid dysregulation in vivo. This review describes the current understanding of the mechanisms by which ginseng alleviates CHD, and provides a reference for the clinical development and application of ginseng as an alternative therapy for CHD.

Prolonged maternal investment in northern bottlenose whales alters our understanding of beaked whale reproductive life history.

Nursing and weaning periods are poorly understood in cetaceans due to the difficulty of assessing underwater behaviour in the wild. However, the onset and completion of weaning are critical turning points for individual development and survival, with implications for a species' life history including reproductive potential. δ15N and δ13C deposited in odontocete teeth annuli provide a lifetime record of diet, offering an opportunity to investigate variation and trends in fundamental biology. While available reproductive parameters for beaked whales have largely been inferred from single records of stranded or hunted animals and extrapolated across species, here we examine the weaning strategy and nursing duration in northern bottlenose whales (Hyperoodon ampullatus) by measuring stable isotopes deposited in dentine growth layer groups (GLGs). Using a collection of H. ampullatus teeth taken from whales killed during the whaling era (N = 48) and from two stranded specimens, we compared ontogenetic variation of δ15N and δ13C found in annual GLGs across all individuals, by sex and by region. We detected age-based trends in both δ15N and δ13C that are consistent across regions and males and females, and indicate that nursing is prolonged and weaning does not conclude until whales are 3-4 years old, substantially later than previous estimates of 1 year. Incorporating a prolonged period of maternal care into H. ampullatus life history significantly reduces their reproductive potential, with broad implications for models of beaked whale life history, energetics and the species' recovery from whaling.

[Anti-inflammatory mechanism analysis of antirheumatic Chinese medicinal herb Aconiti Radix based on protein interaction network].

Inflammation is one of the important risk factors of rheumatic diseases. Aconiti Radix is widely used for the treatment of rheumatism, which has significant anti-inflammatory effects. However, its anti-inflammatory mechanism on molecular level is still not clear. The purpose of this study is to illuminate the anti-inflammatory mechanism of Aconiti Radix based on the protein interaction network (PIN) analysis on molecular network level. The main anti-inflammatory components (aconitine, hypaconitine and mesaconitine) were chosen in this study to obtain the targets of the components and protein-protein information though databases retrieval and construct the PIN of Aconiti Radix. By a graph theoretic clustering algorithm molecular complex detection(MCODE), 13 modules were identified and analyzed by gene ontology(GO) enrichment. The results showed that the anti-inflammatory mechanism of Aconiti Radix was mainly associated with prostanoid metabolic process and leukocyte chemotaxis mediated by chemokines. In this study, the anti-inflammatory mechanism of Aconiti Radix was elucidated systematically from molecular network level, which provided the scientific basis for the treatment of rheumatic diseases.