Risk factors for cow's milk protein allergy in infants: a multicenter survey / 中国当代儿科杂志

OBJECTIVE@#To investigate the risk factors for cow's milk protein allergy (CMPA) among infants through a multicenter clinical study.@*METHODS@#A total of 1 829 infants, aged 1-12 months, who attended the outpatient service of the pediatric department in six hospitals in Shenzhen, China from June 2016 to May 2017 were enrolled as subjects. A questionnaire survey was performed to screen out suspected cases of CMPA. Food avoidance and oral food challenge tests were used to make a confirmed diagnosis of CMPA CMPA. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to investigate the risk factors for CMPA.@*RESULTS@#Among the 1 829 infants, 82 (4.48%) were diagnosed with CMPA. The multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that maternal food allergy (OR=4.91, 95%CI: 2.24-10.76, P6 months (OR=0.38, 95%CI: 0.17-0.86, P<0.05) were protective factors.@*CONCLUSIONS@#The introduction of complementary food at an age of <4 months, maternal food allergy, and antibiotic exposure during pregnancy are risk factors for CMPA in infants.

Serum adiponectin levels in children with Kawasaki disease / 中国当代儿科杂志

<p><b>OBJECTIVE</b>To explore the change in serum adiponectin levels and its significance in children with Kawasaki disease (KD).</p><p><b>METHODS</b>Forty-five KD patients were enrolled in this study, including 18 with coronary artery lesions (CAL group) and 27 without coronary artery lesions (NCAL group). Twenty healthy children were recruited to the control group. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used to measure serum adiponectin levels, and an automatic biochemical analyzer was used to measure the levels of triglyceride (TG), total cholesterol (TC), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C).</p><p><b>RESULTS</b>The serum adiponectin levels in the CAL and NCAL groups were significantly lower than in the control group during the acute phase, subacute phase, and recovery phase (P<0.01), with lower levels observed during the acute phase and subacute phase (P<0.01). Compared with the NCAL group, the CAL group had significantly higher serum levels of adiponectin during the acute phase and recovery phase (P<0.05). The levels of TC, HDL, and LDL in the NCAL and CAL groups were significantly lower than in the control group (P<0.05). The levels of serum adiponectin in KD patients were positively correlated with the levels of TC, TG, and C-reactive protein and the occurrence of CAL (r=0.31, 0.30, 0.34, and 0.35, respectively; P<0.05).</p><p><b>CONCLUSIONS</b>Children with KD have metabolic disorders of blood lipids and reduced serum adiponectin levels. Reduced serum adiponectin levels may be the result of systemic inflammation, while increased adiponectin levels may be closely associated with the occurrence of CAL.</p>

Systems biology and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) modernizatin / 中国中药杂志

Systems biology is a new field in biology that aims at system-level understanding of biological systems. Based on the remarkable progress from molecular biology, systems biology focuses its research on investigating the biological systems to form their entirety. Considering the trend of TCM modernization and the coherence on the point of holism between systems biology and TCM, a comprehensive way for the research of TCM modernization was referred, which involves a new concept, componentomics.