CiteSpace knowledge map of gut microbiota research involving traditional Chinese medicine in recent twenty years / 中国中药杂志

We employed bibliometrics to comprehensively study the hotspots and frontiers of gut microbiota research involving traditional Chinese medicine(TCM), aiming to provide new ideas for the subsequent research in this field. The studies of gut microbiota with TCM published from January 1, 2002 to December 31, 2021 were retrieved from CNKI, Wanfang, VIP and Web of Science(WoS). After data screening and cleaning, CiteSpace 5.8.R3 was used to visualize and analyze the authors, journals, and keywords. A total of 1 119 Chinese articles and 815 English articles were included in the study. The period of 2019-2021 witnessed the surge in the number of articles published in this field, being the peak research period. TAN Zhou-jin and DUAN Jin-ao were the authors publishing the most articles in Chinese and English, respectively. The two authors ranked top in both Chinese and English articles, playing a central role in this research field. The top five Chinese and English journals in this field had a large influence in the international research field. High-frequency keywords and keyword clustering showed that the research hotspots in this field were concentrated in four areas: trial and clinical research on the regulation of gut microbiota in disease treatment by TCM, metabolic transformation of Chinese medicines by gut microbiota, and the effect of TCM added to feed on the gut microbiota and growth performance of animals. The study of gut microbiota structure in patients with different TCM syndromes, as well as that of TCM combined with probiotics/flora transplantation in the treatment of diseases, can provide new ideas for clinical diagnosis and traditional drug treatment of diseases and has great research space and research value in the future.

Pathological features and clinicopathological significance of TERT promoter mutation in breast fibroepithelial tumors without definite diagnosis / 中华病理学杂志

Objective: To investigate the pathological features and the clinicopathological significance of TERT detection in those tumors that were difficult to diagnosis. Methods: A total of 93 cases of fibroepithelial tumors without definite diagnosis were collected from the Affiliated Hospital of Qigndao University between 2013 and 2021. The clinical details such as patients' age and tumor size were collected. All slides were re-reviewed and the pathologic parameters, including stromal cellularity, stromal cell atypia, stromal cell mitoses, and stromal overgrowth were re-interpreted. Sanger sequencing was used to detect TERT promoter status, and immunohistochemistry was performed to detect TERT protein expression. The relationship between TERT promoter mutation as well as protein expression levels and the clinicopathological parameters were also analyzed. Results: The patients' ages ranged from 30 to 71 years (mean of 46 years); the tumor size ranged from 1.2 to 8.0 cm (mean 3.8 cm). These tumors showed the following morphologic features: leafy structures in the background of fibroadenoma, or moderately to severely abundant stromal cells. The interpretations of tumor border status were ambiguous in some cases. The incidence of TERT promoter mutation was high in patients of age≥50 years, tumor size≥4 cm, and stromal overgrowth at ×4 or ×10 objective, and these clinicopathologic features were in favor of diagnosis of phyllodes tumors. TERT protein expression levels was not associated with the above clinicopathologic parameters and its promoter mutation status. Conclusions: The diagnostic difficulty for the breast fibroepithelial tumors is due to the difficulty in recognition of the leafy structures or in those cases with abundant stromal cells. A comprehensive evaluation combined with morphologic characteristics and molecular parameters such as TERT promoter may be helpful for the correct diagnosis and better evaluating recurrence risk.

Tumor immune checkpoint therapy and the drug delivery strategies / 药学学报

Tumor immune checkpoint therapy is a clinical treatment strategy developed based on the new principle of the inhibition of negative immune regulation. In this article, the tumor immune checkpoint therapy and the drug delivery strategies were reviewed, mainly including immunity and tumor therapy, tumor immune checkpoint therapy and its mechanism of action, clinical application of tumor immune checkpoint therapy and therapeutic drugs, immune resistance of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1)/programmed cell death ligand 1 (PDL1) treatment and countermeasures, drug delivery strategies for tumor immune checkpoint therapeutic agents, etc. As a revolutionary new immunotherapy strategy, tumor immune checkpoint therapy has shown obvious superior therapeutic efficacy in a variety types of tumor. However, tumor immune checkpoint therapy is also faced with a big challenge, namely, immunotherapy resistance. With the discovery of new mechanism, the continuous development of new therapeutic drugs and delivery strategies, tumor immune checkpoint therapy is expected to further improve the clinical efficacy of tumor.

Characteristic dysbiosis of gut microbiota of Chinese patients with diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome by an insight into the pan-microbiome / 中华医学杂志(英文版)

BACKGROUND@#Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is reported associated with the alteration of gut microbial composition termed as dysbiosis. However, the pathogenic mechanism of IBS remains unclear, while the studies of Chinese individuals are scarce. This study aimed to understand the concept of dysbiosis among patients with Chinese diarrhea-predominant IBS (IBS-D), as a degree of variance between the gut microbiomes of IBS-D population and that of a healthy population.@*METHODS@#The patients with IBS-D were recruited (assessed according to the Rome III criteria, by IBS symptom severity score) from the Outpatient Department of Gastroenterology of Peking University Third Hospital, and volunteers as healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled, during 2013. The 16S rRNA sequences were extracted from fecal samples. Ribosomal database project resources, basic local alignment search tool, and SparCC software were used to obtain the phylotype composition of samples and the internal interactions of the microbial community. Herein, the non-parametric test, Wilcoxon rank-sum test was carried out to find the statistical significance between HC and IBS-D groups. All the P values were adjusted to q values to decrease the error rate.@*RESULTS@#The study characterized the gut microbiomes of Chinese patients with IBS-D, and demonstrated that the dysbiosis could be characterized as directed alteration of the microbiome composition leading to greater disparity between relative abundance of two phyla, Bacteroidetes (Z = 4.77, q = 1.59 × 10) and Firmicutes (Z = -3.87, q = 5.83 × 10). Moreover, it indicated that the IBS symptom features were associated with the dysbiosis of whole gut microbiome, instead of one or several certain genera even they were dominating. Two genera, Bacteroides and Lachnospiracea incertae sedis, were identified as the core genera, meanwhile, the non-core genera contribute to a larger pan-microbiome of the gut microbiome. Furthermore, the dysbiosis in patients with IBS-D was associated with a reduction of network complexity of the interacted microbial community (HC vs. IBS-D: 639 vs. 154). The disordered metabolic functions of patients with IBS-D were identified as the potential influence of gut microbiome on the host (significant difference with q < 0.01 between HC and IBS-D).@*CONCLUSIONS@#This study supported the view of the potential influence of gut microbiome on the symptom of Chinese patients with IBS-D, and further characterized dysbiosis in Chinese patients with IBS-D, thus provided more pathological evidences for IBS-D with the further understanding of dysbiosis.

Expressions of HPV16/18 E6 protein and its clinical, predictive value of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia / 上海交通大学学报（医学版）

Objective·To investigate the clinical significance and predictive value of human papillomavirus (HPV) 16/18 E6 protein in the different cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. Methods·The expression of HPV16/18 E6 in 10 normal cervical tissues, 33 cervical intraepithelial neoplasiaⅠ (CINⅠ ), 31 CINⅡ- Ⅲ, 30 cervical cancers was detected by immunohistochemistry, explored the expression difference and the relationship with the clinicopathological characteristics of cervical cancer and the prognosis of different CIN. Results·The positive expression rates of HPV16/18 E6 in normal cervical tissues, CINⅠ , CINⅡ - Ⅲ and cervical cancer group were up-regulated (χ2=19.82, P=0.000). HPV16/18 E6 increased positive expression rates in the low grade and the big size tumors of cervical cancer tissues were detected (P=0.033, P=0.011). There were positive correlations between the overexpression and the pathological grade, tumor size, poor prognosis of cervical cancers respectively (r=0.456, P=0.011; r=0.578, P=0.000; r=0.645, P=0.000).The sensitivity,specificity,and diagnostic accuracy rates of HPV16/18 E6 positive expression to the progression of CINⅠ,CINⅡ-Ⅲand cervical cancer were respectively 100.00%, 62.50%, 43.75%; 96.77%, 91.30%, 92.86%; 96.97%, 83.87%, 66.67%. Conclusion·HPV16/18 E6 overexpression plays an important role in the generation, development and the poor prognosis of cervical cancer. HPV16/18 E6 has a good predictive value for the prognosis and hierarchical management of cervical diseases.

Modified super-long hormone replacement protocol improves pregnancy outcome of previously failed implantation patients undergoing frozen-thawed embryo transfer / 第二军医大学学报

Objective To explore the influence of modified super-long hormone replacement protocol on pregnancy outcome of previous embryo implantation failure patients who underwent frozen-thawed embryo transfer (FET). Methods A total of 669 women who underwent FET with a failed history of in vitro fertilization/intracytoplasmic sperm injection-embryo transfer (IVF/ICSI-ET) were enrolled in Changhai Hospital of Second Military Medical University from Jan. 2015 to Jan. 2017. Based on different endometrial preparation protocols for FET, the patients were assigned to receive either modified super-long hormone replacement protocol (Modified super-long group, n=184) or conventional hormone replacement protocol (Conventional group, n=485).The pregnancy outcomes were retrospectively analyzed in the two groups. Results Patients in the two groups had similar baseline characteristics, including age, body mass index, duration of infertility, number of transferred embryo, endometrial thickness on transformation day and transplantation day (P>0.05). The good-quality embryo transfer rate in the Modified super-long group was significantly lower than that in the Conventional group (50.9% vs 64.8%, P0.05); however, in the blastocyst transfer cycles, although the good-quality embryo transfer rate had no significant difference between the two groups (45.5% vs 52.7%, P>0.05), the embryo implantation rate and clinical pregnancy rate in the Modified super-long group were significantly higher than those in the Conventional group (39.6% vs 27.2% and 56.9% vs 40.2%, respectively; both P<0.05). Conclusion The modified super-long hormone replacement protocol can improve the embryo implantation rate and clinical pregnancy rate of the patients undergoing FET with a history of embryo implantation failure, and is worthy of clinical popularization.