Cinnamon and Aspirin for Mild Ischemic Stroke or Transient Ischemic Attack: A Pilot Trial.

PURPOSE: Cinnamon can reduce levels of blood lipids, blood glucose, and inflammation, which are risk factors for ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack (TIA).The goal of this study was to observe the safety and efficacy of aspirin combined with cinnamon in the treatment of patients with mild stroke or TIA. METHODS: This pilot study included patients with mild stroke or TIA treated at Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital-Nanhai Hospital between January 2014 and December 2016. The primary end point was recurrent stroke (within 90 days after the first attack; intention-to-treat analysis). The secondary end points included biochemical indices, carotid color Doppler ultrasound, safety indices, and adverse reactions. FINDINGS: A total of 122 patients were included, including 62 in the aspirin-cinnamon group (41 men and 21 women; mean age, 62.0 [3.5] years) and 60 in the aspirin-placebo group (40 men and 20 women; mean age, 63.0 [3.2] years). The number of participants with recurrent stroke was two (3.2%) and nine (15.0%) in the aspirin-cinnamon group and the aspirin-placebo group, respectively (P = 0.002). Compared with aspirin-cinnamon, aspirin-placebo rates of unstable plaque and severe vascular stenosis were higher, whereas the rate of mild vascular stenosis with aspirin-cinnamon was higher than with aspirin-placebo (P < 0.05). One case of mild to moderate upper gastrointestinal bleeding in each group was observed. IMPLICATIONS: Among patients with TIA or mild ischemic stroke, the combination of cinnamon and aspirin could be superior to aspirin alone for reducing the risk of 90-day recurrent stroke.

Positive impact of chromophore flexibility on the efficiency of red thermally activated delayed fluorescence materials.

Rigid electron donors (D) and acceptors (A) have been widely used in recent years for the construction of D-A type thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) materials. However, the chromophore robustness does not always make a positive contribution to the high efficiency of TADF materials. Here, the comparison study of two D-A type red TADF compounds (PT-TPA and PT-Az) demonstrated, for the first time, the positive impact of chromophore flexibility on the efficiency of TADF materials. In PT-Az, the rotation of terminal phenyl groups is restrained by an ethylene linker, leading to its inferior photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY). In contrast, PT-TPA with free rotation of the phenyl groups showed a low reorganization energy and a large transition dipole moment for the S1→ S0 transition, which resulted in a high fluorescence radiative decay rate. As a result, the optimized devices based on PT-TPA gave a maximum external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 29.7% (632 nm) when doped in a single host and an EQE of 28.8% (648 nm) in an exciplex host. This study provided an insight into the impact of chromophore flexibility on the photophysical properties and device efficiency of TADF materials, and these results may provide valuable guidance for the molecular design of efficient emitters.

Updated version of an interim connection space LabPQR for spectral color reproduction: LabLab.

In this paper, we propose a new interim connection space (ICS) called LabLab, which is an updated version of LabPQR, to overcome the drawback that the last three dimensions of LabPQR have no definite colorimetric meanings. We extended and improved the method by which the first three dimensions of LabPQR are deduced to obtain an ICS consisting of two sets of CIELAB values under different illuminants, and the reconstructed spectra from LabLab were obtained by minimizing colorimetric errors by means of the computational formula of the CIE-XYZ tristimulus values combined with least-squares best fit. The improvement obtained from the proposed method was tested to compress and reconstruct the reflectance spectra of the 1950 Natural Color System color chips and more than 50,000 ISO SOCS color patches as well as six multispectral images acquired by multispectral image acquisition systems using 1600 glossy Munsell color chips as training samples. The performance was evaluated by the mean values of color differences between the original and reconstructed spectra under the CIE 1931 standard colorimetric observer and the CIE standard illuminants D50, D55, D65, D75, F2, F7, F11, and A as well as five multichip white LED light sources. The mean and maximum values of the root mean square errors between the original and reconstructed spectra were also calculated. The experimental results show that the proposed three LabLab interim connection spaces significantly outperform principal component analysis, LabPQR, XYZLMS, Fairman-Brill, and LabRGB in colorimetric reconstruction accuracy at the cost of slight reduction of spectral reconstruction accuracy and illuminant independence of color differences of the suggested LabLab interim connection spaces outperform other interim connection spaces. In addition, the presented LabLab interim connection spaces could be quite compatible with the extensively used colorimetric management system since each dimension has definite colorimetric meanings and is perceptually uniform.