Far-infrared therapy promotes exercise capacity and glucose metabolism in mice by modulating microbiota homeostasis and activating AMPK.

The benefits of physical exercise on human health make it desirable to identify new approaches that would mimic or potentiate the effects of exercise to treat metabolic diseases. However, whether far-infrared (FIR) hyperthermia therapy could be used as exercise mimetic to realize wide-ranging metabolic regulation, and its underling mechanisms remain unclear. Here, a specific far-infrared (FIR) rays generated from graphene-based hyperthermia devices might promote exercise capacity and metabolisms. The material characterization showed that the graphene synthesized by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) was different from carbon fiber, with single-layer structure and high electrothermal transform efficiency. The emission spectra generated by graphene-FIR device would maximize matching those adsorbed by tissues. Graphene-FIR enhanced both core and epidermal temperatures, leading to increased blood flow in the femoral muscle and the abdominal region. The combination of microbiomic and metabolomic analysis revealed that graphene-FIR modulates the metabolism of the gut-muscle axis. This modulation was characterized by an increased abundance of short-chain fatty acids (SCFA)-producing bacteria and AMP, while lactic acid levels decreased. Furthermore, the principal routes involved in glucose metabolism, such as glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, were found to be altered. Graphene-FIR managed to stimulate AMPK activity by activating GPR43, thus enhancing muscle glucose uptake. Furthermore, a microbiota disorder model also demonstrated that the graphene-FIR effectively restore the exercise endurance with enhanced p-AMPK and GLUT4. Our results provided convincing evidence that graphene-based FIR therapy promoted exercise capacity and glucose metabolism via AMPK in gut-muscle axis. These novel findings regarding the therapeutic effects of graphene-FIR suggested its potential utility as a mimetic agent in clinical management of metabolic disorders.

Far-Infrared Therapy Based on Graphene Ameliorates High-Fat Diet-Induced Anxiety-Like Behavior in Obese Mice via Alleviating Intestinal Barrier Damage and Neuroinflammation.

The consumption of a high-fat diet (HFD) has been implicated in the etiology of obesity and various neuropsychiatric disturbances, including anxiety and depression. Compelling evidence suggests that far-infrared ray (FIR) possesses beneficial effects on emotional disorders. However, the efficacy of FIR therapy in addressing HFD-induced anxiety and the underlying mechanisms remain to be elucidated. Here, we postulate that FIR emitted from a graphene-based therapeutic device may mitigate HFD-induced anxiety behaviors. The graphene-FIR modify the gut microbiota in HFD-mice, particularly by an enriched abundance of beneficial bacteria Clostridiaceae and Erysipelotrichaceae, coupled with a diminution of harmful bacteria Lachnospiraceae, Anaerovoracaceae, Holdemania and Marvinbryantia. Graphene-FIR also improved intestinal barrier function, as evidenced by the augmented expression of the tight junction protein occludin and G protein-coupled receptor 43 (GPR43). In serum level, we observed the decreased free fatty acids (FFA), lipopolysaccharides (LPS), diamine oxidase (DAO) and D-lactate, and increased the glucagon-like peptide-2 (GLP-2) levels in graphene-FIR mice. Simultaneously, inflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-1ß, and TNF-α manifested a decrease subsequent to graphene-FIR treatment in both peripheral and central system. Notably, graphene-FIR inhibited over expression of astrocytes and microglia. We further noticed that the elevated the BDNF and decreased TLR4 and NF-κB expression in graphene-FIR group. Overall, our study reveals that graphene-FIR rescued HFD-induced anxiety via improving the intestine permeability and the integrity of blood-brain barrier, and reduced inflammatory response by down regulating TLR4/NF-κB inflammatory pathway.

Significance of Patient Participation in Nursing Care.

Patient participation, an international requirement according to the World Health Organization and other international bodies, is a must in nursing care. It involves patient engagement in making their own treatment decisions, participating in the development and evaluation of services and taking part in policy development. Patient participation on the individual, organizational and policy development levels has been discussed. Facilitators of and barriers to active patient participation, as well as ways to enhance it, were also included in this review. Poor communication, a paternalistic approach, time constraints, lack of encouragement and lack of information-sharing are some of the challenges associated with poor patient participation in nursing care. Facilitators of patient participation include empowering patients, involving them in making decisions and policy making, understanding their perspective about their role in their care and empowerment through leadership. Patient participation in nursing care has numerous benefits including effective healthcare services, improved patient safety, enhanced quality of care, fewer medication errors, more medication adherence and assessment of the care services received.

Comparing the perceptual contributions of cochlear-scaled entropy and speech level.

Cochlear-scaled entropy (CSE) has been suggested to be a reliable predictor of speech intelligibility. Previous studies showed that speech segments with high root-mean-square (RMS) levels (H-levels) contained primarily vowels, which carry important information for speech recognition. The present work compared the contributions of high-CSE (H-entropy) and H-level segments to speech intelligibility. The natural speech was edited to generate two types of noise-replaced stimuli, which preserved the same percentages of largest CSE segments and highest RMS-level segments, and played to normal-hearing listeners in a recognition experiment. Experimental results showed that the nature of the noise-replaced stimulus, H-entropy and H-level, made a small difference in intelligibility performance. CSEs and RMS levels showed a moderately high correlation (r = 0.79), suggesting that many speech segments may have both large CSEs and high RMS levels, which might account partially for the small intelligibility difference between the two types of stimuli. In addition, the vowel duration proportion differed between H-entropy and H-level segments of the same length, suggesting that vowels play different roles in contributing to the intelligibility of H-entropy and H-level stimuli.

[Cloning, antisense construction and tomato transformation of Lecop1like gene].

Here reported a 1060 bp cDNA cloning of LeCOP1LIKE gene by EST probing and RT-PCR method. In order to characterize function of this gene, a LeCOP1LIKE antisense expression vector was transformed into Micro-Tom via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation method and 10 independent transgenic lines were obtained. RT-PCR analysis showed that the expression of LeCOP1LIKE gene was evidently repressed in 4 lines of them. The transgenic plants were much shorter than their wild type control, their chlorophyll content was increased but the seed development was obviously suppressed. All these results suggested that the cloned LeCOP1LIKE gene was a negative regulator of photomorphogenesis in tomato.