Objective To evaluate the clinical efficacy and safty of le-vocarnitine combined with alprostadil in the treatment of diabetic ne-phropathy.Methods A total of 68 patients with diabetic nephropathy were randomly divided into control group ( n=34 ) and treatment group (n=34).Control group was given alprostadil 1 mL, qd by intravenous drip.Treatment group was received levocarnitine 1 g, qd by intravenous drip on the basis of control group .The course of two groups was 28 d. The clinical efficacy , biochemical indexes before and after treatment and the incidence of adverse drug reactions were compared between two groups.Results After treatment , the total effective rate of control group was significantly lower than that of treatment group ( 67.65% vs 94.12%, P<0.05).After treatment, the levels of serum 24 h urinary protein , urinary microglobulin , urea nitrogen , cystatin C , homocysteine , glycosylated hemoglobin , transforming growth factor -β1 ,Ⅳcollagen in two groups were significantly decreased ( P<0.05 ) , and those indexes of treatment group after treatment were significantly lower than those of control group (P<0.05).After treatment, the levels of serum of serum creatinine , 25 -hydroxy vitamin D 3 in two groups were decreased with significant difference ( P <0.05 ) , and the treatment group was more obvious ( P<0.05 ).The incidence of adverse drug reactions in control group was significantly higher than that in treat -ment group (23.53%vs 8.82%,P<0.05 ) .Conclusion Levocarnitine combined with alprostadil have a definitive clinical efficacy and safety for the treatment of diabetic nephropathy .

BACKGROUND: How to efficiently and uniformly disperse carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into a tissue-engineered scaffold is crucial to construct an ideal CNTs-Polymer composite scaffold and it is also a hotspot of research in the tissue engineering. OBJECTIVE: To review the advances in the methodology progress of constructing a scaffold for cardiac tissue engineering, which contains uniformly and stably dispersed CNTs. METHODS: The Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed were searched by the first author for related papers about CNTs dispersion in the cardiac tissue engineering published from October 2004 to January 2017. The key words were "carbon nanotubes, dispersion, cardiac tissue engineering" in English. Original research papers were searched, which were screened through titles, abstracts and contents, and then reviewed. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: CNTs are easy to aggregate because of high surface area, high aspect ratio and rough surface. Thus, it is one of the key points to construct an ideal CNTs-Polymer composite scaffold that whether CNTs could be uniformly and stably dispersed in polymer scaffolds. In the cardiac tissue engineering, covalent or non-covalent surface modification of CNTs significantly enhances the uniformity and stability of CNTs in the polymer scaffolds, which is conducive to construct the uniformly and stably CNTs-dispersed scaffold for cardiac tissue engineering, leading to notable improvement in mechanical and electrical properties of engineered cardiac tissues.

Objective To study the genetic characterizations of VP1 region of Human enterovirus 71 ( HEV71 ) isolated from clinical specimens of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) patients in Beijing in 2008. Methods 285 clinical samples were collected from HFMD patients in hospitals and day-care centers in Chaoyang district. They were performed by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction ( RT-PCR )specific for HEV71. 10 HEV71 isolates were selected for entire VP1 coding gene amplification and sequencing. Results 129 samples were RT-PCR positive, the positive rate is 45.26%. The homology of the nucleotide and the amino acid of the 10 strains were 94.6%-99. 6% and 95.9%-100%. The phylogenetic tree revealed that 10 Beijing strains clustered within the C4a evolution branch of C4 subgenotype. Conclusions RT-PCR played an important role in identifying HFMD outbreak in Beijing in 2008. The HEV71 strains were all belong to C4a evolution branch of C4 subgenotype with several transmission chains, and it showed that C4 subgenotype HEV71 spread in mainland China widely after 1998.The molecular epidemiology surveillance and the research of genetic characterizations of HEV71 should be strengthened in mainland China.