Comparison of the predictive value of Padua and the IMPEDE assessment scores for venous thromboembolism in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma: A single institution experience / 中华血液学杂志

Objective: To compare the predictive efficacy of the two thrombosis risk assessment scores (Padua and IMPEDE scores) in venous thromboembolism (VTE) within 6 months in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (NDMM) in China. Methods: This study reviewed the clinical data of 421 patients with NDMM hospitalized in Beijing Jishuitan Hospital from April 2014 to February 2022. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and Youden index of the two scores were calculated to quantify the thrombus risk assessment of VTE by the Padua and IMPEDE scores. The receiver operating characteristics curves of the two evaluation scores were drawn. Results: The incidence of VTE was 14.73%. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and Youden index of the Padua score were 100%, 0%, 14.7%, and 0% and that of the IMPEDE score was 79%, 44%, 49.2%, and 23%, respectively. The areas under the curve of Padua and IMPEDE risk assessment scores were 0.591 and 0.722, respectively. Conclusion: IMPEDE score is suitable for predicting VTE within 6 months in patients with NDMM.

Simultaneous determination of apparent amylose, amylose and amylopectin content and classification of waxy rice using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).

Rice starch properties of apparent amylose content (AAC), amylose content (AC), and amylopectin content (AP) are considered as the most important factors influencing grain quality as they are highly correlated with eating quality. This report is the first effort of predicting AC and AP values in rice flours, and recognizing waxy rice from non-waxy rice using NIRS technique. Calibration models generated by different mathematical, preprocessing treatments and combinations of wavelengths and signals were compared and optimized. The model established by modified partial least squares (MPLS) with "2, 8, 8, 2"/ Inverse MSC and ∼138 wavelengths signals yielded high RSQ of 0.977, 0.928, and 0.912 for AAC, AC and AP, respectively, as simultaneous measurement. MPLS-DA (discriminant analysis) could classify waxy and non-waxy rice with 100% accuracy. This high-throughput technology is valuable for breeding programs, and for the purposes of quality control in the food industry.

Machine Learning Analysis Reveals Abnormal Static and Dynamic Low-Frequency Oscillations Indicative of Long-Term Menstrual Pain in Primary Dysmenorrhea Patients.

BACKGROUND: Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that patients with primary dysmenorrhea (PD) exhibited dysfunctional resting-state brain activity. However, alterations of dynamic brain activity in PD patients have not been fully characterized. PURPOSE: Our study aimed to assess the effect of long-term menstrual pain on changes in static and dynamic neural activity in PD patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Twenty-eight PD patients and 28 healthy controls (HCs) underwent resting-state magnetic resonance imaging scans. The amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF) and dynamic ALFF was used as classification features in a machine learning approach involving a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. RESULTS: Compared with the HC group, PD patients showed significantly increased ALFF values in the right cerebellum_crus2, right rectus, left supplementary motor area, right superior frontal gyrus, right supplementary motor area, and left superior frontal medial gyrus. Additionally, PD patients showed significantly decreased ALFF values in the right middle temporal gyrus and left thalamus. PD patients also showed significantly increased dALFF values in the right fusiform, Vermis_10, right middle temporal gyrus, right putamen, right insula, left thalamus, right precentral gyrus, and right postcentral gyrus. Based on ALFF and dALFF values, the SVM classifier achieved respective overall accuracies of 96.36% and 85.45% and respective areas under the curve of 1.0 and 0.95. CONCLUSION: PD patients demonstrated abnormal static and dynamic brain activities that involved the default mode network, sensorimotor network, and pain-related subcortical nuclei. Moreover, ALFF and dALFF may offer sensitive biomarkers for distinguishing patients with PD from HCs.

[Clinical observation of selective posterior rhizotomy for improving spasticity and gross movement in patients with cerebral palsy].

OBJECTIVE: To explore the effect of selective lumbosacral posterior rhizotomy(SPR) on lower limb spasticity and gross motor function in patients with cerebral palsy. METHODS: From January 2018 to October 2018, 47 patients with cerebral palsy were treated with rehabilitation alone and SPR combined with rehabilitation. According to whether SPR was performed, the patients were divided into group A and group B. Group A was treated with rehabilitation combined with SPR at lumbosacral level, and group B was treated with rehabilitation alone. There were 23 cases in group A, including 15 males and 8 females, with an average age of (7.30±3.25) years old; 24 cases in group B, 13 males and 11 females, with an average age of (7.00±3.09) years old. Forty-seven patients were assessed with modified Ashworth(MAS) and Gross Motor Function Scale(GMFM-88 items) before and after treatment. The changes of MAS and GMFM-88 scores before and after treatment were compared to evaluate the degree of spasm and the improvement of gross motor function in the two groups. RESULTS: All 47 patients were followed up. At 6 months after treatment, the MAS classification of the two groups was significantly improved(P<0.05), and the improvement of group A was more obvious than that of group B(P<0.05). Six months after treatment, the D, E and total scores of GMFM-88 between two groups were significantly improved compared with those before operation(P<0.05). The improvement of D and total scores in group A was more obvious than that in group B. There was no significant difference in the improvement of area E between two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Selective posterior rhizotomy combined with rehabilitation can significantly improve the spastic state and gross motor function of lower limbs in children with cerebral palsy, and can effectively promote the reconstruction and recovery of motor function of lower limbs in children with cerebral palsy.

Serum netrin-1 serves as a prognostic biomarker of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage.

BACKGROUND: Netrin-1 exhibits anti-inflammatory properties. Netrin-1 could alleviate brain injury of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) rat. This study was designed to discern the utility of serum netrin-1 as a biomarker for assessing the severity and prognosis of patients with aneurysmal SAH. METHODS: Netrin-1 concentrations were gauged in serum from 104 patients and 104 controls. Hemorrhagic clinical and radiological severity was assessed utilizing World Federation of Neurological Surgeons (WFNS) score, modified Fisher score, and Hunt Hess score. Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) score was recorded at 6 months after SAH. GOS score of 1-3 was considered as a poor outcome. RESULTS: Patients showed substantially lower serum netrin-1 concentrations than controls (median, 237.9 pg/ml; interquartile range, 189.6-271.2 pg/ml vs. median, 815.4 pg/ml; interquartile range, 581.8-990.4 pg/ml). Netrin-1 concentrations were independently correlated with WNFS score, modified Fisher score, Hunt Hess score and serum C-reactive protein concentrations (t = -4.667, -3.792, -4.304 and - 3.549 respectively). Area under ROC curve was 0.837 (95% CI, 0.752-0.902) for predicting 6-month poor prognosis. Serum netrin-1 concentrations <229.3 pg/ml emerged as an independent prognostic predictor (odds ratio, 14.316; 95% confidence interval, 5.032-40.726). CONCLUSIONS: Serum netrin-1 might represent a potential biomarker for reflecting severity, inflammation and prognosis of human aneurysmal SAH.

Subterranean infestation by Holotrichia parallela larvae is associated with changes in the peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) rhizosphere microbiome.

Rhizosphere microorganisms contribute to the health and development of crops and these beneficial microbes are recruited to the root-zone when plants experience biotic/abiotic stress. The subterranean pests Holotrichia parallela cause severe crop loss in peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) fields. Hypothesizing that infestation by H. parallela larva may influence the composition of rhizosphere microbial communities, deep sequencing of V3 and V4 hypervariable regions of 16S rRNA gene was used to characterize the rhizosphere bacteria of infested and uninfested peanuts. A total of 2,673,656 reads were generated and an average of 2558 OTUs were obtained for each sample. Comparisons of rhizosphere bacterial community structure of peanuts with those infested by H. parallela larva revealed that the relative abundance of Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes increased, while that of Actinobacteria decreased in the rhizosphere with infestation. A significant shift in bacterial communities was observed within 24 h after infestation by principal coordinate analysis. For the 332 genera identified in 24 h treatment, infestation of white grubs led to the significant changes of abundance of 67 genera. An increase in the Pseudomonas genus of infested-samples for 24 h was verified by real-time qPCR. Our results indicate H. parallela larvae infestation can quickly leads to the change of peanut rhizosphere microbiome and enrichment of specific bacterial species. But the effects were not persistent. This study provides the insight into the function of rhizosphere microbiome in the interaction between subterranean pests and crops.

The NLRP3 Inflammasome: An Important Driver of Neuroinflammation in Hemorrhagic Stroke.

Hemorrhagic stroke is a devastating clinical event with no effective medical treatment. Neuroinflammation, which follows a hemorrhagic stroke, is an important element that involves both acute brain injury and subsequent brain rehabilitation. Therefore, delineating the key inflammatory mediators and deciphering their pathophysiological roles in hemorrhagic strokes is of great importance in the development of novel therapeutic targets for this disease. The NOD-like receptor family pyrin domain-containing 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome is a multi-protein complex that is localized within the cytoplasm. This NOD-like receptor orchestrates innate immune responses to pathogenic organisms and cell stress through the activation of caspase-1 and the maturation of the proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-1ß (IL-1ß) and IL-18. Mounting evidence has demonstrated that when the NLRP3 inflammasome is activated, it exerts harmful effects on brain tissue after a hemorrhagic stroke. This review article summarizes the current knowledge regarding the role and the underlying mechanisms of the NLRP3 inflammasome in the pathophysiological processes of hemorrhagic strokes. A better understanding of the function and regulation of the NLRP3 inflammasome in hemorrhagic strokes will provide clues for devising novel therapeutic strategies to fight this disease.

Elevated serum IL-11, TNF α, and VEGF expressions contribute to the pathophysiology of hypertensive intracerebral hemorrhage (HICH).

To study the changes in serum interleukin-11 (IL-11), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expressions following hypertensive intracerebral hemorrhage (HICH), and explore their associations with disease severity and prognosis. Serum IL-11, TNF-α, and VEGF levels after 1, 3, 7, and 14 days after HICH were assayed using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and neurological deficit score (NDS) were recorded at admission and discharge for 99 HICH cases. Then 45 healthy controls were included and assayed for serum IL-11, TNF-α, and VEGF levels. Serum IL-11, TNF-α, and VEGF levels were higher in HICH patients than healthy controls (all P < 0.05). TNF-α was higher at the 3rd day following disease onset than other time points (all P < 0.05), while IL-11 and VEGF peaked at the 7th day and dropped below baseline values at the 14th day (all P < 0.05). Serum IL-11 was positively correlated with TNF-α (r = 0.70, P < 0.05) and VEGF (r = 0.72, P < 0.05). Serum TNF-α was positively correlated with VEGF (r = 0.46, P < 0.05). Serum IL-11, TNF-α, and VEGF were associated with disease severity in HICH patients. Patients with more severe disease tended to have higher NDS at admission, and higher IL-11, TNF-α, and VEGF during treatment were associated with higher NDS at discharge. Serum IL-11, TNF-α, and VEGF may involve in the pathophysiology of HICH, thus IL-11, TNF-α, and VEGF may be prognostic factors for post HICH neurologic damage.

Kernelized Elastic Net Regularization: Generalization Bounds, and Sparse Recovery.

Kernelized elastic net regularization (KENReg) is a kernelization of the well-known elastic net regularization (Zou & Hastie, 2005). The kernel in KENReg is not required to be a Mercer kernel since it learns from a kernelized dictionary in the coefficient space. Feng, Yang, Zhao, Lv, and Suykens (2014) showed that KENReg has some nice properties including stability, sparseness, and generalization. In this letter, we continue our study on KENReg by conducting a refined learning theory analysis. This letter makes the following three main contributions. First, we present refined error analysis on the generalization performance of KENReg. The main difficulty of analyzing the generalization error of KENReg lies in characterizing the population version of its empirical target function. We overcome this by introducing a weighted Banach space associated with the elastic net regularization. We are then able to conduct elaborated learning theory analysis and obtain fast convergence rates under proper complexity and regularity assumptions. Second, we study the sparse recovery problem in KENReg with fixed design and show that the kernelization may improve the sparse recovery ability compared to the classical elastic net regularization. Finally, we discuss the interplay among different properties of KENReg that include sparseness, stability, and generalization. We show that the stability of KENReg leads to generalization, and its sparseness confidence can be derived from generalization. Moreover, KENReg is stable and can be simultaneously sparse, which makes it attractive theoretically and practically.

Refined Generalization Bounds of Gradient Learning over Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces.

Gradient learning (GL), initially proposed by Mukherjee and Zhou (2006) has been proved to be a powerful tool for conducting variable selection and dimensional reduction simultaneously. This approach presents a nonparametric version of a gradient estimator with positive definite kernels without estimating the true function itself, so that the proposed version has wide applicability and allows for complex effects between predictors. In terms of theory, however, existing generalization bounds for GL depend on capacity-independent techniques, and the capacity of kernel classes cannot be characterized completely. Thus, this letter considers GL estimators that minimize the empirical convex risk. We prove generalization bounds for such estimators with rates that are faster than previous results. Moreover, we provide a novel upper bound for Rademacher chaos complexity of order two, which also plays an important role in general pairwise-type estimations, including ranking and score problems.

[A novel dipeptidyl peptidase IV inhibitors developed through scaffold hopping and drug splicing strategy].

Though all the marketed drugs of dipeptidyl peptidase IV inhibitors are structurally different, their inherent correlation is worthy of further investigation. Herein we rapidly discovered a novel DPP-IV inhibitor 8g (IC50 = 4.9 nmol.L-1) which exhibits as good activity and selectivity as the market drugs through scaffold hopping and drug splicing strategies based on alogliptin and linagliptin. This study demonstrated that the employment of classic medicinal chemistry strategy to the marketed drugs with specific target is an efficient approach to discover novel bioactive molecules.

A novel dipeptidyl peptidase IV inhibitors developed through scaffold hopping and drug splicing strategy / 药学学报

Though all the marketed drugs of dipeptidyl peptidase IV inhibitors are structurally different, their inherent correlation is worthy of further investigation. Herein we rapidly discovered a novel DPP-IV inhibitor 8g (IC50 = 4.9 nmol.L-1) which exhibits as good activity and selectivity as the market drugs through scaffold hopping and drug splicing strategies based on alogliptin and linagliptin. This study demonstrated that the employment of classic medicinal chemistry strategy to the marketed drugs with specific target is an efficient approach to discover novel bioactive molecules.

QTL mapping of grain weight in rice and the validation of the QTL qTGW3.2.

A recombinant inbred line (RIL) population bred from a cross between a javanica type (cv. D50) and an indica type (cv. HB277) rice was used to map seven quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for thousand grain weight (TGW). The loci were distributed on chromosomes 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 10. The chromosome 3 QTL qTGW3.2 was stably expressed over two years, and contributed 9-10% of the phenotypic variance. A residual heterozygous line (RHL) was selected from the RIL population and its selfed progeny was used to fine map qTGW3.2. In this "F2" population, the QTL explained about 23% of the variance, rising to nearly 33% in the subsequent "F2:3" generation. The physical location of qTGW3.2 was confined to a ~556 kb region flanked by the microsatellite loci RM16162 and RM16194. The region also contains other factors influencing certain yield-related traits, although it is also possible that qTGW3.2 affects these in a pleiotropic fashion.

[Comparative assessment of SSR diversity in aromatic rice germplasm].

The genetic diversity in 370 aromatic rice germplasms introduced from home and abroad, was investigated by using a total of 60 SSR markers. 361 alleles were detected, with the number of alleles (Na) per loci ranging from 2 to 10. The Nei's genetic diversity index (He) among loci varied widely from 0.104 at RM308 to 0.885 at RM2634 with an average value of 0.663. There was an obvious difference in SSR allelic diversity between indica and japonica rice. Indica rice showed more variation than japonica rice both for Na and He. Meanwhile, the genetic diversity of the landraces was higher than that of the improved varieties, and Na of the improved varieties was 86.5% of the landraces. Analysis of molecular variance indicated that 43.08% of the variation was from genetic differences between subspecies. It was also demonstrated that the genetic differentiation among different rice ecological regions ranged from 1.69% to 14.40%. There was significant differentiation between Southern China and Southwestern China, Central China and Southwestern China, respectively. Cluster analysis showed that 370 aromatic rice varieties were mainly classified into indica and japonica, and aromatic rice varieties from the same areas or the neighboring provinces were basically assigned to the same group.

[Preliminary report for treatment of discogenic low back pain with combined percutaneous laser and O2-O3 mixture].

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the efficacy of percutaneous laser and O2-O3 mixture in treating chronic discogenic low back pain. METHODS: There were 48 patients included 32 male and 16 female with the mean age of 43.5 years (range, from 21 to 66 years). The duration of symptoms was more than 6 months, all patients were treated with percutaneous laser and O2-O3 mixture under TV monitoring. RESULTS: Forty-eight patients followed-up showed no severe complications. At 1 week follow up, 8 cases were evaluated as excellent, 28 as good, 8 as fair and 4 as poor by Macnab standard. The excellent and good rate reached 75%. At 3 months follow up, 17 cases were evaluated as excellent, 23 as good, 6 as fair and 2 as poor with the excellent and good rate of 83.3%. At 6 months follow up, 20 cases were evaluated as excellent, 22 as good, 4 as fair and 2 as poor with a total effective rate of 87.5%. At 12 months follow up, 21 cases were evaluated as excellent, 22 as good, 4 as fair and 1 as poor with a total effective rate of 89.6%. CONCLUSION: Combined percutaneous laser and O3-O3 mixture is an effective and safe method in treating discogenic low back pain.

The role of inflammatory mediators in severe acute pancreatitis and regulation of glucocorticoids.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of glucocorticoids on systemic inflammatory mediator release in rats with acute pancreatitis and the outcome of dexamethasone in treatment of acute pancreatitis. METHODS: Sixty-eight Wistar rats were divided into sham, acute pancreatitis, and treatment (intravenous dexamethasone 0.5 mg/kg) groups. Experimental acute pancreatitis was induced by the injection of 5% sodium taurocholate (0.1 ml/100 mg body weight) into the pancreatic-biliary duct. The blood samples were obtained and examined for 6-keto-PGI1alpha, TXB2 and IL-6 postoperatively at 3, 6 and 12 hours, respectively. The pancreatic samples were evaluated by a blinded method. Twelve-hour survival rate was determined and compared between the groups. RESULTS: The high serum concentrations of 6-keto-PGI1alpha, TXB2 and IL-6 were noted in the rats with acute pancreatitis associated with pancreatic hemorrhage and necrosis. Their 12-hour survival rate was 42.9%. The rats in the treatment group survived with significantly reduced serum concentrations of 6-keto-PGI1alpha, TXB2 and IL-6 (P<0.05). Their pancreatic morphology was normal. CONCLUSION: Dexamethasone may reduce the serum concentration of 6-keto-PGI1alpha, TXB2, and IL-6, and the severity of acute pancreatitis while increasing the survival rate of rats with acute pancreatitis.