Forty women with polycystic ovary syndrome( PCOS) were enrolled. Basal plasma and urine cortisol, pituitary hormones, homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance, and plasma cortisol in 0. 25 mg dexamethasone inhibition test were determined. In over-weight or obese PCOS patients, cortisol levels before and after inhibition test were increased (P<0. 05 or P<0. 01 ). The results suggest that the feed-back regulation of glucocorticoids to hypothalamas-pituitary is impaired and the change in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is associated with insulin resistance.

To test the hypothesis that the first degree relatives of Chinese women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) have higher risk of cardiovascular disease than those without PCOS.The metabolic phenotype and risks of cardiovascular disease were evaluated in 110 family members of 35 women with PCOS and 85 unrelated healthy control subjects without family history of diabetes and PCOS ( four age- and weight-matched subgroups ).The prevalence of impaired glucose tolerance was 51.4％ in mothers and 57.5％ in fathers with their daughters suffering from PCOS.The first degree relatives of PCOS women had significantly higher serum fasting insulin level,homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance,insulin area under the curve,and lower insulin sensitivity index in all subgroups than the control subjects( P＜0.05 ).The control subjects had significantly elevated high molecular weight-adiponectin levels and decreased high sensitive-C reactive protein levels compared to the first degree relatives of PCOS women in all subgroups.Parents and brothers,but not sisters,of women with PCOS had significantly higher total cholesterol and low density lipoprotein-cholesterol ( P＜ 0.05 ),as well as triglyceride levels ( P＜ 0.05 ),compared with control subjects.The first degree relatives of PCOS women had features of insulin resistance and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Technology for rapid detection of trace microbes combined with flow cytometry and image cytometry is used for rapid detection of cells and microorganisms, quantification of fluorescent signals, and visualization of cells and mi-crobes.Its fast and accurate count of microorganisms plays an important role in detection of the quantity of food and water, and can help to improve residents′quality of life and health.This article describes several common methods for detecting microorganisms with emphasis on their advantages and disadvantages.Current applications and future developlments are also discussed.

Objective To develop a multi-channel dry type biochemistry sensor with a compact structure and high measurement accuracy.Methods The principle of double beam compensation based on reference LED was applied to improve the measurement accuracy.The complex splitting system was replaced by MXN fiber bundle and free-form surface lens to make the instrument more compact and lightweight.Use of the adaptive amplification photoelectric detection improved the measurement accuracy while simplifying the process.Results and Conclusion It has been proved by experiments that this sensor has the advantages of high measurement accuracy, little interference and compact construction. This sensor may well meet the requirements of dry type biochemistry analysis.

Cells sense various in vivo mechanical stimuli, which initiate downstream signaling to mechanical forces. While a body of evidences is presented on the impact of limited mechanical regulators in past decades, the mechanisms how biomechanical responses globally affect cell function need to be addressed. Complexity and diversity of in vivo mechanical clues present distinct patterns of shear flow, tensile stretch, or mechanical compression with various parametric combination of its magnitude, duration, or frequency. Thus, it is required to understand, from the viewpoint of mechanobiology, what mechanical features of cells are, why mechanical properties are different among distinct cell types, and how forces are transduced to downstream biochemical signals. Meanwhile, those in vitro isolated mechanical stimuli are usually coupled together in vivo, suggesting that the different factors that are in effect individually could be canceled out or orchestrated with each other. Evidently, omics analysis, a powerful tool in the field of system biology, is advantageous to combine with mechanobiology and then to map the full-set of mechanically sensitive proteins and transcripts encoded by its genome. This new emerging field, namely mechanomics, makes it possible to elucidate the global responses under systematically-varied mechanical stimuli. This review discusses the current advances in the related fields of mechanomics and elaborates how cells sense external forces and activate the biological responses.
Biomechanical Phenomena ; Gene Expression Regulation ; Humans ; Mechanotransduction, Cellular ; Models, Biological ; Proteome ; genetics ; metabolism ; Stress, Physiological ; Transcriptome