Development and test of reliability and validity of the Visual Cognitive Ability Assessment Scale for Preschool Children / 中国儿童保健杂志

【Objective】 To develop the Visual Cognitive Ability Assessment Scale for Preschool Children and to evaluate its reliability and validity, in order to provide reference for clinical evaluation of visual cognitive ability of preschool children. 【Methods】 1) From November 2021 to February 2022, construct the dimension framework was constructed and the pool of scale items was compiled according to the theory. 2) In March to June 2022, items were screened preliminarily through group discussion and Delphi method. In August 2022, the entries was revised by a pre-survey in a small sample (n=50). 3) Parents of children aged 4 - 7 from 8 kindergartens in 4 main urban areas of Nanjing were investigated by stratified cluster random sampling method in September to December 2022. The valid sample of the first survey (n=344) was analyzed to conduct item analysis and re-test reliability analysis, the valid sample of the second survey (n=695) was tested for reliability and confirmatory factor analysis, then the scale was finally compiled and evaluated. 【Results】 1) The scale contained 19 items in 4 dimensions:visual memory, discerning vision, spatial vision and visual integration. All items passed the project analysis test. 2) The Cronbach′s α coefficient of each dimension ranged from 0.604 to 0.886, and the Cronbach′s α coefficient of the whole scale was 0.917. During the two surveys, the scores of each item were correlated, and the average retest reliability coefficient was 0.601 (P< 0.05). 3) Content validity index (S-CVI) at scale level was 0.91, and item level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.8 to 1.0. After several rounds of model modification, the confirmatory factor model fit well. 【Conclusion】 The reliability and validity of the Visual Cognitive Ability Assessment Scale for Preschool Children are acceptable and meet the requirements of the scale, which provides a practical tool for clinical screening of visual and cognitive disorders.

Toxic effects of sodium hypochlorite as disinfectants on human bronchial epithelial cells / 环境与职业医学

Background There are a variety of microorganisms in ambient air, and susceptible people can be infected once contact with pathogenic microorganisms in the environment. In order to avoid the spread of pathogenic bacteria, disinfection is the simplest and most effective way of killing pathogenic bacteria in the environment to block the contact between pathogenic bacteria and humans. Sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) is the most widely used disinfectant, but its safety in ambient air disinfection is not clear yet. Objective To establish a model of bronchial epithelial cell (BEAS-2B) injury induced by NaClO, and to explore the mechanism of the toxic effect of NaClO disinfectants on BEAS-2B. Methods Cells were treated with concentration gradients of 0, 25, 50,100, 200, and 400 μmol·L−1 of the diluted NaClO (100 mmol·L−1) standard solution, respectively, and cell activity was measured by cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) assay after 15 and 30 min. Cells treated with 0, 25, and 50 μmol·L−1 NaClO were selected to observe the cell morphology under an inverted microscope, apoptosis was determined by flow cytometry Annexin V FITC / PI double staining to determine the final experimental concentration. The morphology of organelles such as mitochondria was observed under a transmission electron microscope. Mitochondrial membrane potential of the cells was detected by JC-1 staining. Intracellular Ca2+ concentration was measured with a Fluo-4 AM fluorescent probe. Total cellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) was detected with a 2',7'-dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate (DCFH-DA) fluorescent probe, cell mitochondrial ROS with a dihydroethidium (DHE) fluorescent probe, and lipid peroxidation intermediate malondialdehyde (MDA) with a commercial kit. Results Compared with 0 μmol·L−1, NaClO treatment group, cell morphology did not change a lot after 25 μmol·L−1 NaClO treatment for 30 min, and the cells began to wrinkle and become round after 30 min treatment with 50 μmol·L−1 NaClO, showing about 70% of normal cell viability (P<0.01). So 30 min 50 μmol·L−1 NaClO treatment was selected for the subsequent experiment. The experimental results found that compared with the 0 μmol·L−1 NaClO treatment group, the number of apoptotic cells increased (P<0.05), the mitochondrial membrane potential decreased (P<0.01), the intracellular Ca2+ concentration increased (P<0.05), the cellular ROS level increased (P<0.05), the mitochondrial ROS level increased (P<0.01), and the MDA content increased (P<0.01) in the NaClO treatment group.. Conclusion The study has successfully established a model of BEAS-2B injury induced by NaClO, and found that NaClO can lead to cell damage by inducing apoptosis and oxidative stress in BEAS-2B cells. According to the results, there are two possible reasons. First, NaClO solves in water to form hypochlorous acid (HClO) which is oxidative and increases the intracellular ROS level after entering cells, leading to cellular oxidative stress. Second, HClO enters cells to directly attack the mitochondrial membrane, resulting in the imbalance of potential inside and outside the mitochondrial membrane, and apoptosis caused by Ca2+ efflux.

Analysis of clinical and psychological characteristics in 250 patients with fibromyalgia / 中华内科杂志

To analyze the clinical and psychological characteristics of fibromyalgia (FM), so as to further understand and improve the capability of identifying FM. The clinical data of 250 FM patients diagnosed in the outpatient clinic of the Department of Rheumatology, the First Medical Center, Chinese PLA General Hospital, from December 2019 to September 2021, were collected and analyzed. The patients aged 40 (31.0, 52.3) years, including 188 female patients (75.2%) and 62 male patients (24.8%). There was a statistically significant difference in age comparison between female [42.5 (33.0,54.0) years] and male patients [32.5 (27.8,43.5) years] ( P<0.001). The score of pain degree was 6 (4, 8), and [7 (5, 8)] of female patients was higher than [6 (4, 7)] of the male patients ( P=0.040). The widespread pain index (WPI) was 13 (10,15). The regions with high pain incidence were left shoulder girdle (87.2%, 218/250), right shoulder girdle (86.8%, 217/250), upper back (86.4%, 216/250), neck (79.6%, 199/250) and lower back (77.6%, 194/250) and etc. The incidence of chest pain in female patients (55.3%, 104/188) was lower than that in male patients (75.8%, 47/62) ( P=0.004). The symptom severity scale (SSS) score was 8 (7-10). 74.6% (185/248) suffered from anxiety and 77.5% (193/249) suffered from depression in 249 patients. Female patients were more common in FM patients than male patients, the median age of female patients was older than that of male patients, and the median score of pain severity of female patients was higher than male patients. Shoulders girdle, upper back, neck and lower back were the most frequently reported pain regions, and the incidence of chest pain in female patients was lower than that in male patients. The incidence of major non-painful symptoms was high and the proportion with anxiety or depression was high. The above clinical features are very helpful for early diagnosis of FM.

Analysis of donation related vasovagal reactions in Hefei / 中国输血杂志

【Objective】 To explore the influencing factors and characteristics of blood donation-related vasovagal reactions in whole blood donation in Hefei city, and to put forward specific prevention measures. 【Methods】 Whole blood donors with vasovagal reactions related to blood donation in Hefei area from January 2021 to December 2021 were selected as the study subjects, and the related factors such as gender, age, blood donation month, initial or multiple blood donation, blood donation volume, blood donation location, and organization type of blood donation were retrospectively analyzed. 【Results】 The incidence of blood donation-related vasovagal reactions was 10.46‰ in the whole blood donation in Hefei in 2021, among which 71.89% occurred during blood collection. There were statistically significant differences in blood donation-related vasovagal reactions by blood donation age, blood donation history, blood collection month, organization type of blood donation and blood donation volume(P0.05). After balancing the age factors, there was no statistically significant difference in the incidence of DRVR between donors aged 18~22 and 23~29 years by gender(P>0.05), while there were significant differences in blood donors aged 30~39, 40~49, and 50~60 years by gender(P<0.05). Among blood donors of different ages, there were statistically different incidences of DRVR among first-time and repeated donors (P<0.05). 【Conclusion】 In the process of whole blood donation, attention should be paid to blood donors first-time, young (18~30 years old) and student, which can help prevent the occurrence of blood donation-related vasovagal reactions and better retain blood donors.

Technology development and instrumentation of a high-throughput and automated microbial microdroplet culture system for microbial evolution and screening / 生物工程学报

Since microdroplets are able to be generated rapidly in large amount and each droplet can be well controlled as an independent micro-cultivator, droplet microfluidic technology can be potentially used in the culture of microorganisms, and provide the microbial culture with high throughput manner. But its application mostly stays in the laboratory-level building and using for scientific research, and the wide use of droplet microfluidics in microbial technology has been limited by the key problems that the operation for microdroplets needs high technical requirements with wide affecting factors and the difficulties in integration of automatic microdroplet instrumentation. In this study, by realizing and integrating the complicated operations of droplet generation, cultivation, detection, splitting, fusion and sorting, we design a miniaturized, fully automated and high-throughput microbial microdroplet culture system (MMC). The MMC can be widely used in microbial growth curve test, laboratory adaptive evolution, single factor and multi-level analysis of microbial culture, metabolite detection and so on, and provide a powerful instrument platform for customized microbial evolution and screening aiming at efficient strain engineering.

LIME: Low-Light Image Enhancement via Illumination Map Estimation.

When one captures images in low-light conditions, the images often suffer from low visibility. Besides degrading the visual aesthetics of images, this poor quality may also significantly degenerate the performance of many computer vision and multimedia algorithms that are primarily designed for high-quality inputs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective low-light image enhancement (LIME) method. More concretely, the illumination of each pixel is first estimated individually by finding the maximum value in R, G, and B channels. Furthermore, we refine the initial illumination map by imposing a structure prior on it, as the final illumination map. Having the well-constructed illumination map, the enhancement can be achieved accordingly. Experiments on a number of challenging low-light images are present to reveal the efficacy of our LIME and show its superiority over several state-of-the-arts in terms of enhancement quality and efficiency.

Image Deblurring via Enhanced Low-Rank Prior.

Low-rank matrix approximation has been successfully applied to numerous vision problems in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank prior for blind image deblurring. Our key observation is that directly applying a simple low-rank model to a blurry input image significantly reduces the blur even without using any kernel information, while preserving important edge information. The same model can be used to reduce blur in the gradient map of a blurry input. Based on these properties, we introduce an enhanced prior for image deblurring by combining the low rank prior of similar patches from both the blurry image and its gradient map. We employ a weighted nuclear norm minimization method to further enhance the effectiveness of low-rank prior for image deblurring, by retaining the dominant edges and eliminating fine texture and slight edges in intermediate images, allowing for better kernel estimation. In addition, we evaluate the proposed enhanced low-rank prior for both the uniform and the non-uniform deblurring. Quantitative and qualitative experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art deblurring methods.

Quality of life and mental health of pre-post household service workers who held a high school graduation certificate or above and had been engaged in different work / 中华健康管理学杂志

Objective To survey the quality of life and mental health status of pre-post household service workers who held a high school graduation certificate or above and had been engaged in different work.Methods A total of 254 household service workers completed Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90) and World Health Organization Quality of Life-Brief (WHOQL-BREF).Statistical analyses of variance and correlation were carried out to evaluate mental health status and quality of life of the participants.Results Abnormal score of SCL-90 was found in 8％ of household service workers who had graduated from high school.The psychological score of household service workers who had worked as workers(60.59± 2.18)was lower than those who had worked as service workers (66.23 ± 12.13) or peasants (65.40 ± 12.24) (P ＜0.05).Almost all factors of SCL-90 were negatively correlated with WHOQL-BREF (correlation coefficient -0.140 to-0.376).Conclusions Our data suggest that mental health status can be well in pre-post household service workers who held a high school graduation certificate or above.Special training should be given to the household service workers in accordance with their working experience.