Chinese medicine as complementary therapy for female infertility / 中国结合医学杂志

Chinese medicine (CM) has been used in clinical treatment for thousands of years in China, Japan, Korea, and other countries. CM is at present attracting many attentions around the world for reproductive health care and disease prevention, including treatment of female infertility. This review focuses on the CM treatment for female infertility patients, and supplies a summary on the efficacy, safety, and mechanism of some Chinese herbal medicines, herbal medicine-derived active compounds, and acupuncture. A large number of researches have reported that CM could alleviate or even cure female infertility by regulating hormone, improving reproductive outcome of in vivo fertilization, affecting embryonic implantation, curing polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, relieving mental stress, and regulating immune system. Meanwhile, a few studies claimed that there was little adverse reaction of CM in randomized controlled trials. However, up to present there is a lack of adequate evidences with molecular mechanistic researches and randomized controlled trials to prove the CM as an effective and safe treatment for infertility. Thus, utility of CM as a complementary medicine will be a feasible method to improve the outcome of female infertility treatment.

Expression and significance of KL-6 mucin in the tissue and serum of hepatoma / 中华消化外科杂志

Objective To detect the expression of KL-6 mucin in the tissue and serum of hepatoma in different hepatoma patients,and to investigate the value of KL-6 mucin as a tumor marker in the diagnosis of hepatoma.Methods The expression of KL-6 mucin in the hepatoma tissues of 81 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC),21 patients with cholangiocarcinoma(CC),12 patients with combined hepatocellular and cholangiocarcinoma(HCC-CC)and 56 patients with metastatic liver cancer(MLC)was detected by immunohistochemical analysis.The expression of KL-6 mucin in the serums of 34 HCC patients,8 CC patients,30 MLC patients and 19 healthy individuals was detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay,and all the data were analyzed by t test.Results Expression of KL-6 mucin was detected in the cholangiocarcinoma tissues in all CCand HCC-CC patients.In several hepatoma cells and partial hepatoma tissues of patients with MLC,the expression of KL-6 mucin was detected.No expression of KL-6 mucin was detected in the hepatocellular carcinoma tissuesand non-cancerous tissues of patients with HCC or HCC-CC.The serum levels of KL-6 mucin expression in CC patients were signifcantly higher than those in healthy individuals,HCC and MLC patients(t=5.58,5.34,4.00.P＜0.01).The difference of the serum levels of KL-6 mucin expression between MLC patients and healthy individuals had statistical significance(t=2.77,P＜0.01).However,no significant difference in serum levels of KL-6 mucin expression was found between HCC patients and healthy individuals and between HCC patients and MLC patients(t=2.03,1.89,P＞0.05).Conclusion The expression of KL-6 inucin in CC patients is significantly higher than in patients with other types of hepatoma in both tissue and serum levels.Thus,KL-6 may be a usetul new tmnor marker for distinguishing CC from other types of hepatoma.