Does temporary ileostomy via specimen extraction site affect the short outcomes and complications after laparoscopic low anterior resection in rectal cancer patients? A propensity score matching analysis.

PURPOSE: The purpose of the current study was to compare the outcomes of temporary stoma through the specimen extraction site (SSES) and stoma through a new site (SNS) after laparoscopic low anterior resection. METHODS: The rectal cancer patients who underwent laparoscopic low anterior resection plus temporary ileostomy were recruited in a single clinical database from Jun 2013 to Jun 2020. The SSES group and the SNS group were compared using propensity score matching (PSM) analysis. RESULTS: A total of 257 rectal cancer patients were included in this study, there were 162 patients in the SSES group and 95 patients in the SNS group. After 1:1 ratio PSM, there was no difference in baseline information (p > 0.05). The SSES group had smaller intraoperative blood loss (p = 0.016 < 0.05), shorter operation time (p < 0.01) and shorter post-operative hospital stay (p = 0.021 < 0.05) than the SNS group before PSM. However, the SSES group shorter operation time (p = 0.006 < 0.05) than the SNS group after PSM, moreover, there was no significant difference in stoma-related complications (p > 0.05). In the multivariate analysis, longer operation time was an independent factor (p = 0.019 < 0.05, OR = 1.006, 95% CI = 1.001-1.011) for the stoma-related complications. CONCLUSION: Based on the current evidence, the SSES group had smaller intraoperative blood loss, shorter operation time and shorter post-operative hospital stay before PSM, and shorter operation time after PSM. Therefore, SSES might be superior than SNS after laparoscopic low anterior resection for rectal cancer patients.

Detection of rabies virus via exciton energy transfer between CdTe quantum dots and Au nanoparticles.

Rabies is a fatal encephalitis caused by the rabies virus. The diagnosis of the disease depends in large part on the exposure history of the victim and clinical manifestations of the disease. Rapid rabies diagnosis is an important step in its prevention and control. Therefore, for accurate and timely diagnosis and prevention of rabies, we developed nanomaterials for a novel photoelectrochemical biosensing approach (PBA) for the rapid and reliable diagnosis of rabies virus. This approach uses high-efficiency exciton energy transfer between cadmium telluride quantum dots and Au nanoparticles and is low cost, and easy to miniaturize. By constructing PBA, rabies virus can be detected quickly and with a high degree of sensitivity and specificity; the minimum detection concentration limit for rabies virus is approximately 2.16 ffu/mL of rabies virus particles, or 2.53 × 101 fg/mL of rabies virus RNA. PBA could also detect rabies virus in the brain and lung tissue from rabid dogs and mice with better sensitivity than RT-PCR.

Heterogeneous Types of miRNA-Disease Associations Stratified by Multi-Layer Network Embedding and Prediction.

Abnormal miRNA functions are widely involved in many diseases recorded in the database of experimentally supported human miRNA-disease associations (HMDD). Some of the associations are complicated: There can be up to five heterogeneous association types of miRNA with the same disease, including genetics type, epigenetics type, circulating miRNAs type, miRNA tissue expression type and miRNA-target interaction type. When one type of association is known for an miRNA-disease pair, it is important to predict any other types of the association for a better understanding of the disease mechanism. It is even more important to reveal associations for currently unassociated miRNAs and diseases. Methods have been recently proposed to make predictions on the association types of miRNA-disease pairs through restricted Boltzman machines, label propagation theories and tensor completion algorithms. None of them has exploited the non-linear characteristics in the miRNA-disease association network to improve the performance. We propose to use attributed multi-layer heterogeneous network embedding to learn the latent representations of miRNAs and diseases from each association type and then to predict the existence of the association type for all the miRNA-disease pairs. The performance of our method is compared with two newest methods via 10-fold cross-validation on the database HMDD v3.2 to demonstrate the superior prediction achieved by our method under different settings. Moreover, our real predictions made beyond the HMDD database can be all validated by NCBI literatures, confirming that our method is capable of accurately predicting new associations of miRNAs with diseases and their association types as well.

Complete Nucleotide Sequence of a Novel Plasmid Bearing the High-Level Tigecycline Resistance Gene tet(X4).

We reported the complete nucleotide sequence of a tet(X4)-carrying plasmid, pSTB20-1T, from a tigecycline-resistant Escherichia coli isolate in China. Sequence analysis indicated that pSTB20-1T contains a hybrid plasmid backbone and a tet(X4)-containing multidrug resistance region, likely originated through recombination of multiple plasmids. tet(X4) was flanked by two ISCR2, which may be responsible for tet(X4) mobilization. The occurrence and transmission of this novel hybrid plasmid may exacerbate the spread of the clinically significant tet(X4) gene.

Inferring microRNA-disease association by hybrid recommendation algorithm and unbalanced bi-random walk on heterogeneous network.

More and more research works have indicated that microRNAs (miRNAs) play indispensable roles in exploring the pathogenesis of diseases. Detecting miRNA-disease associations by experimental techniques in biology is expensive and time-consuming. Hence, it is important to propose reliable and accurate computational methods to exploring potential miRNAs related diseases. In our work, we develop a novel method (BRWHNHA) to uncover potential miRNAs associated with diseases based on hybrid recommendation algorithm and unbalanced bi-random walk. We first integrate the Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity into the miRNA functional similarity network and the disease semantic similarity network. Then we calculate the transition probability matrix of bipartite network by using hybrid recommendation algorithm. Finally, we adopt unbalanced bi-random walk on the heterogeneous network to infer undiscovered miRNA-disease relationships. We tested BRWHNHA on 22 diseases based on five-fold cross-validation and achieves reliable performance with average AUC of 0.857, which an area under the ROC curve ranging from 0.807 to 0.924. As a result, BRWHNHA significantly improves the performance of inferring potential miRNA-disease association compared with previous methods. Moreover, the case studies on lung neoplasms and prostate neoplasms also illustrate that BRWHNHA is superior to previous prediction methods and is more advantageous in exploring potential miRNAs related diseases. All source codes can be downloaded from https://github.com/myl446/BRWHNHA .

Summary of 32 patients with cardiac syndrome X treated by TCM therapy of regulating qi relieving chest stuffiness and promoting blood circulation.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the clinical effect of Liqi Kuanxiong Huoxue method LKH, traditional Chinese medicine, TCM therapeutic method for regulating qi, relieving chest stuffiness and promoting blood circulation) in treating patients with cardiac syndrome X (CSX). METHODS: The prospective, non-randomized controlled study was conducted on 51 selected patients with CSX, who were non-randomly assigned to 2 groups, the treated group treated with LKH in addition to the conventional treatment (32 patients), and the control group treated with conventional treatment (19 patients) like nitrate, diltiazem hydrochloride, etc. The treatment course was 14 days. The changes of such symptoms as angina pectoris, TCM syndrome and indexes of treadmill exercise test before and after treatment were observed. RESULTS: After treatment, such symptoms as chest pain and stuffy feeling and palpitation in the treated group were improved more than those in the control group (P<0.05); the total effective rate on angina pectoris and TCM syndrome in the treated group was better than that in the control group (P<0.05). The treadmill exercise test showed that the maximal metabolic equivalent (Max MET), the time of angina onset and ST segment depression by 0.1 mV were obviously improved after treatment in both groups, but the improvement in the treated group was better than that in the control group respectively (P<0.05). CONCLUSION: The LKH method could reduce the frequency of angina attacks and improve the clinical condition of patients with CSX.