Objective To explore the effectiveness of microendoscopic discectomy (MED) in the treatment of lumbar disc herniation. Methods A retrospective analysis of clinical data of 59 cases of lumbar disc herniation treated by MED was made. The experience as well as lessons was summed up. Results All the 59 cases were followed for 4~24 months (mean, 15 months). Clinical outcomes were determined according to the Macnab criteria, which revealed that 43 cases had excellent, 14 cases had good, 1 had fair, and 1 had poor outcomes (with postoperative paralysis), the “excellent or good” rate being 96.6%(57/59). Conclusions MED is the first choice for contained herniated lumbar discs. A successful MED depends upon proper selection of patients and skillful surgical techniques.

Hyperlipidaemic rats were randomly divided into a model group,a total flavonoids from echinops latifolius tausch(TFET)high,medium and low dose group,and a positive control group;meanwhile,healthy rats were selected as a blank control group.The rats in each group were dosed with the corresponding concentrations of TFET,simvastatin and distilled water for 45 consecutive days,and were tested for relevant lipid biochemical indexes,antioxidant indexes and PPARα path-way-related gene expression.The results showed that high-dose TFET could reduce the concentra-tions of TC,TG and LDL-C and increase the concentration of HDL-C very significantly;medium-dose TFET could reduce the concentrations of TC and TG very significantly and reduce the con-centration of LDL-C significantly;and low-dose TFET could reduce the concentrations of TC and LDL-C significantly.High,medium and low doses of TFET can extremely significantly reduce in-crease SOD activity;high and medium doses of TFET can extremely significantly reduce MDA content;high dose of TFET can extremely significantly increase T-AOC activity.The high dose of TFET could extremely significantly increase the expression of PPARα,CYP7A1 and CPT-1 genes in rat liver;the medium dose of TFET could extremely significantly increase the expression of CYP7A1 and CPT-1 genes,and could significantly increase the expression of PPARα gene;the low dose of TFET could extremely significantly increase the expression of CYP7A1 gene,and signifi-cantly increase the CPT-1 gene expression.The results suggest that TFET has antioxidant and lip-id-lowering effects on hyperlipidaemic rats,and its mechanism may be related to the activation of PPARα and its downstream related genes to promote fatty acid β-oxidation.