Objective To investigate the clinical charactors and treatment of IgM nephropathy with nephrotic syndrome(NS) in children.Methods Thirty-six IgM nephropathy patients hospitalized in Hunan Children's Hospital as research group(group A),from June 2005 to June 2012.One hundred and six patients with minimal change disease (MCD) as control group (group B),followed up for 1 ～ 8 years.Results (1) Hematuria at presentation of the two groups respectly 3.8％ vs 30.6％ (x2 =20.403,P ＜ 0.05).(2) Renal pathology revealed that there were 26 (72.2％)patients with minimal change disease,9 cases (72.2 ％)with moderate membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis,1 cases with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis.(3) According to renal pathology,group A patients were divided into two sub groups:mild group and moderate group.To compared with group B,the steroid-resistant incidence of the 3 group were respectly 12.3％,19.2％,77.8％ (x2 =24.369,P ＜ 0.05).There was no significant difference between control group and mild group.(4)The remission rate of proteinuria in steroid-resistant patients who combined to use mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) with the two groups were respectively 50％ and 85.7 ％ (x2 =3.60,P ＞ 0.05).Conclusion Incidence of hematuria is higher in IgM nephropathy patients and patients with renal pathology for moderate lesions have a high steroid-resistant,and need use immunosuppressive early.MMF may be a good immunosuppressive for theses patients.

Automatic speaker gender identification based on voice feature is an important task in voice processing and analysis fields. In this paper non-linear parameters such as fractal dimension are applied to be one part of feature space for improving the ability of describing speaker gender feature through conventional linear parameters method. Pitch is picked using lifting scheme, and audio fractal dimension is extracted. Then based on Takens theory, the time delay method is used to reconstruct the phase space of fractal dimension sequence. And fractal dimension complexity is obtained by calculating Approximate Entropy. Three dimension feature vectors, including the pitch, the fractal dimension and the fractal dimension complexity, are applied to speaker gender identification. Experiment results show that through adding non-linear parameters, compared with the linear parameter using one dimension only such as pitch, the proposed method is more accurate and robust, and thus provides a new way for speaker gender identification.
Algorithms ; Artificial Intelligence ; Biometry ; methods ; Humans ; Nonlinear Dynamics ; Pattern Recognition, Automated ; methods ; Pitch Discrimination ; Sex Characteristics ; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted ; Speech ; Speech Acoustics ; Voice

In this paper, a new calculating method of generalized dimension, based on boxes-coupling principle, is proposed to overcome the edge effects and to improve the capability of the speech endpoint detection which is based on the original calculating method of generalized dimension. This new method has been applied to speech endpoint detection. Firstly, the length of overlapping border was determined, and through calculating the generalized dimension by covering the speech signal with overlapped boxes, three-dimension feature vectors including the box dimension, the information dimension and the correlation dimension were obtained. Secondly, in the light of the relation between feature distance and similarity degree, feature extraction was conducted by use of common distance. Lastly, bi-threshold method was used to classify the speech signals. The results of experiment indicated that, by comparison with the original generalized dimension (OGD) and the spectral entropy (SE) algorithm, the proposed method is more robust and effective for detecting the speech signals which contain different kinds of noise in different signal noise ratio (SNR), especially in low SNR.
Artificial Intelligence ; Humans ; Pattern Recognition, Automated ; methods ; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted ; Speech ; Speech Production Measurement ; methods ; Speech Recognition Software

Recently, accumulating evidence suggests that high bilirubin level is involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. High bilirubin level during early childhood may increase the risk of being suffered from schizophrenia after adulthood, and schizophrenia patients with high bilirubin level have aggravated psychiatric symptoms. As compared with other psychiatric patients and general population, schizophrenia patients usually have relatively higher bilirubin level; high bilirubin level is associated with acute psychotic states, positive symptoms, and poor prognosis in patients with schizophrenia. This article reviews the relation between bilirubin and schizophrenia and its potential pathophysiological mechanism in order to provide a new direction for the study of schizophrenia pathogenesis and auxiliary diagnosis.

Overuse of antibiotics in medical care and animal husbandry has led to the development of bacterial antimicrobial resistance, causing increasingly more health concern. In addition to genetic mutations and the formation of resistance, the various stresses bacteria encountered in the natural environment trigger their stress responses, which not only protect them from these stresses, but also change their tolerance to antimicrobials. The emergence of antimicrobial tolerance will inevitably affect the physiological metabolism of bacteria. However, bacteria can restore their sensitivity to drugs by regulating their own metabolism. This article reviews recent studies on the relationship between bacterial stress responses or the physiological metabolism and antimicrobial tolerance, intending to take more effective measures to control the occurrence and spread of antimicrobial resistance.
Animals ; Anti-Bacterial Agents/pharmacology* ; Anti-Infective Agents ; Bacteria/genetics* ; Drug Resistance, Bacterial ; Stress, Physiological

Objective:To assess the effectiveness of a 6-month Ba Duan Jin exercise program in improving the balance of community-dwelling older adults.Methods:A two arms, parallel-group, cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted in 1 028 community residents aged 60-80 years in 40 communities in 5 provinces of China. Participants in the intervention group (20 communities, 523 people) received Ba Duan Jin exercise 5 days/week, 1 hour/day for 6 months, and three times of falls prevention health education, and the control group (20 communities, 505 people) received falls prevention health education same as the intervention group. The Berg balance scale (BBS) score was the leading outcome indicator, and the secondary outcome indicators included the length of time of standing on one foot (with eyes open and closed), standing in a tandem stance (with eyes open and closed), the closed circle test, and the timed up to test.Results:A total of 1 028 participants were included in the final analysis, including 731 women (71.11%) and 297 men (28.89%), and the age was (69.87±5.67) years. After the 3-month intervention, compared with the baseline data, the BBS score of the intervention group was significantly higher than the control group by 3.05 (95% CI: 2.23-3.88) points ( P<0.001). After the 6-month intervention, compared with the baseline data, the BBS score of the intervention group was significantly higher than the control group by 4.70 (95% CI: 4.03-5.37) points ( P<0.001). Ba Duan Jin showed significant improvement ( P<0.05) in all secondary outcomes after 6 months of exercise in the intervention group compared with the control group. Conclusions:This study showed that Ba Duan Jin exercise can improve balance in community-dwelling older adults aged 60-80. The longer the exercise time, the better the improvement.