Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive cognitive decline, functional impairment, and neuropsychiatric symptoms. It represents the most prevalent form of dementia among the elderly population. Accumulating evidence indicates that oxidative stress plays a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of AD. Notably, elevated levels of oxidative stress have been observed in the brains of AD patients, where excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS) can cause extensive damage to lipids, proteins, and DNA, ultimately compromising neuronal structure and function. Amyloid β‑protein (Aβ) has been shown to induce mitochondrial dysfunction and calcium overload, thereby promoting the generation of ROS. This, in turn, exacerbates Aβ aggregation and enhances tau phosphorylation, leading to the formation of two pathological features of AD: extracellular Aβ plaque deposition and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). These events ultimately culminate in neuronal death, forming a vicious cycle. The interplay between oxidative stress and these pathological processes constitutes a core link in the pathogenesis of AD. The signaling pathways mediating oxidative stress in AD include Nrf2, RCAN1, PP2A, CREB, Notch1, NF‑κB, ApoE, and ferroptosis. Nrf2 signaling pathway serves as a key regulator of cellular redox homeostasis, exerts important antioxidant capacity and protective effects in AD. RCAN1 signaling pathway, as a calcineurin inhibitor, and modulates AD progression through multiple mechanisms. PP2A signaling pathway is involved in regulating tau phosphorylation and neuroinflammation processes. CREB signaling pathway contributes to neuroplasticity and memory formation; activation of CREB improves cognitive function and reduce oxidative stress. Notch1 signaling pathway regulates neuronal development and memory, participates in modulation of Aβ production, and interacts with Nrf2 toco-regulate antioxidant activity. NF‑κB signaling pathway governs immune and inflammatory responses; sustained activation of this pathway forms “inflammatory memory”, thereby exacerbating AD pathology. ApoE signaling pathway is associated with lipid metabolism; among its isoforms, ApoE-ε4 significantly increases the risk of AD, leading to elevated oxidative stress, abnormal lipid metabolism, and neuroinflammation. The ferroptosis signaling pathway is driven by iron-dependent lipid peroxidation, and the subsequent release of lipid peroxidation products and ROS exacerbate oxidative stress and neuronal damage. These interconnected pathways form a complex regulatory network that regulates the progression of AD through oxidative stress and related pathological cascades. In terms of therapeutic strategies targeting oxidative stress, among the drugs currently used in clinical practice for AD treatment, memantine and donepezil demonstrate significant therapeutic efficacy and can improve the level of oxidative stress in AD patients. Some compounds with antioxidant effects (such asα-lipoic acid and melatonin) have shown certain potential in AD treatment research and can be used as dietary supplements to ameliorate AD symptoms. In addition, non-drug interventions such as calorie restriction and exercise have been proven to exerted neuroprotective effects and have a positive effect on the treatment of AD. By comprehensively utilizing the therapeutic characteristics of different signaling pathways, it is expected that more comprehensive multi-target combination therapy regimens and combined nanomolecular delivery systems will be developed in the future to bypass the blood-brain barrier, providing more effective therapeutic strategies for AD.

OBJECTIVE: To construct a prediction model for fracture reduction fixator therapy using the multi-modal multi-label classification (MMC) method. METHODS: Medical record data of 818 orthopedic patients from 2019 to 2023 were collected. Medical image features were extracted using the VGG19 network, text features of TCM four diagnostic methods (Inspection, Auscultation & Olfaction, Inquiry, Palpation) were extracted via the MiniLM model, and clinical case features were extracted through a fully connected neural network. After fusing the multi-modal information, multi-label therapy prediction was achieved using a linear layer. RESULTS: Experimental results on the clinical multi-modal dataset showed that the MMC method performed excellently in terms of subset accuracy(SA), accuracy(Acc), precision, and F₁-score, reaching 0.661, 0.856, 0.897, and 0.899 respectively. When the image modality and text modality were removed, the model performance decreased by an average of 8.1% and 2.4% respectively, while the hamming loss(HL) increased by 21.1% and 5.6% respectively. CONCLUSION The fracture reduction fixator therapy prediction model constructed in this study can effectively fuse multi-modal data, accurately predict personalized treatment plans for patients, and significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of treatment decisions. It provides a new solution for the digitalization and intellectualization of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM) in fracture treatment and has important clinical application prospects.
Humans ; Female ; Male ; Middle Aged ; Fracture Fixation/methods* ; Adult ; Fractures, Bone/surgery* ; Neural Networks, Computer ; Medicine, Chinese Traditional ; Aged

BACKGROUND: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac arrhythmia in the elderly. This study aimed to evaluate urban-rural disparities in its prevalence and management in elderly Chinese. METHODS: Consecutive participants aged ≥ 65 years attending outpatient clinics were enrolled for AF screening using handheld single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) from April 2017 to December 2022. Each ECG rhythm strip was reviewed from the research team. AF or uninterpretable single-lead ECGs were referred for 12-lead ECG. Primary study outcome comparison was between rural and urban areas for the prevalence of AF. The Student's t-test was used to compare mean values of clinical characteristics between rural and urban participants, while the Pearson's chi-square test was used to compare between-group proportions. Multivariate stepwise logistic regression analysis was performed to estimate the association between AF and various patient characteristics. RESULTS: The 29,166 study participants included 13,253 men (45.4%) and had a mean age of 72.2 years. The 7073 rural participants differed significantly (P ≤ 0.02) from the 22,093 urban participants in several major characteristics, such as older age, greater body mass index, and so on. The overall prevalence of AF was 4.6% (n = 1347). AF was more prevalent in 7073 rural participants than 22,093 urban participants (5.6% vs. 4.3%, P < 0.01), before and after adjustment for age, body mass index, blood pressure, pulse rate, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption and prior medical history. Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified overweight/obesity (OR = 1.35, 95% CI: 1.17-1.54) in urban areas and cigarette smoking (OR = 1.62, 95% CI: 1.20-2.17) and alcohol consumption (OR = 1.42, 95% CI: 1.04-1.93) in rural areas as specific risk factors for prevalent AF. In patients with known AF in urban areas (n = 781) and rural areas (n = 338), 60.6% and 45.9%, respectively, received AF treatment (P < 0.01), and only 22.4% and 17.2%, respectively, received anticoagulation therapy (P = 0.05). CONCLUSIONS In China, there are urban-rural disparities in AF in the elderly, with a higher prevalence and worse management in rural areas than urban areas. Our study findings provide insight for health policymakers to consider urban-rural disparity in the prevention and treatment of AF.

Nitazoxanide is an FDA-approved antiprotozoal drug. Our previous study found that oral administration of nitazoxanide inhibited Western diet (WD)-induced hepatic steatosis in ApoE^-/- mice. However, the specific mechanism remains to be elucidated. In the present study, we performed an untargeted metabolomics approach to reveal the effect of nitazoxanide on the liver metabolic profiles in WD-fed ApoE^-/- mice, and carried out the cellular experiments to elucidate the underlying mechanisms. UPLC-MS-based untargeted metabolomics analysis was used to investigate the effect of nitazoxanide on global metabolite changes in liver tissues. The differential metabolites were screened for enrichment analysis and pathway analysis. Hepatocytes were treated with tizoxanide, the metabolite of nitazoxanide, to investigate the underlying mechanism based on the findings in metabolomics study. The improvement of liver lipid metabolism disorders by nitazoxanide treatment in WD-fed ApoE^-/- mice was mainly through regulating glycerophospholipid metabolism, D-glutamine and glutamate metabolism, glutathione metabolism, and arginine biosynthesis metabolism. Tizoxanide, the active metabolite of nitazoxanide, increased glutathione (GSH) contents and glutamate-cysteine ligase catalytic subunit (Gcl-c) and glutathione reductase (Gsr) mRNA expressions in HepG2 cells. Tizoxanide increased cystathionine β-synthase (CBS) and phosphatidylethanolamine N-methyltransferase (PEMT) protein levels, inhibited lipid accumulation in hepatocytes induced by free fatty acid (FFA). Tizoxanide increased S-adenosyl-L-homocysteine hydrolase (SAHH) protein levels in HepG2 cells and mouse primary liver cells stimulated with free fatty acid (FFA). Tizoxanide increased N-acetyl glutamate synthase (Nags) and carbamoylphosphate synthetase 1 (Cps1) mRNA expressions in HepG2 cells. In conclusion, nitazoxanide improves WD-induced hepatic steatosis in ApoE^-/- mice and the underlying mechanisms include increasing CBS expression, GSH content, PEMT protein expression, Nags and Cps1 mRNA expression in hepatocytes.

It has become an industry consensus that self-assembled nanoparticles (SAN) are formed by molecular recognition of chemical components in traditional Chinese medicine during the decoction process. The insoluble components in the decoction are mostly in the form of nanoparticles, which can improve the problem of poor water solubility. However, the transfer rate of these insoluble components in the decoction is still very low, which limits the efficacy of the drug. This study aimed to refine the traditional decoction self-assembly phenomenon. The self-assembled nanoparticles were constructed by micro-precipitation method (MP-SAN), and characterized by particle size, zeta potential, stability index and morphology. The formation of MP-SAN and alterations in related physicochemical properties were evaluated using modern spectroscopic and thermal analysis techniques. The quality value transmitting pattern of lignan components within the MP-SAN was assessed via high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The MP-SAN showed sphere-like structure with uniform morphology, particle size of (245.3 ± 3.2) nm, polydispersity index (PDI) of (0.13 ± 0.03), zeta potential of (-48.9 ± 5.9) mV and stability index (SI) of (86.05% ± 2.27%). Comprehensive analyses using ultraviolet visible spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, and other techniques confirmed molecular recognition between the decoction and ethanol extraction, leading to electron rearrangement under the influence of non-covalent bonding. This resulted in the formation of nanoparticles possessing superior thermal stability. As determined by HPLC, the encapsulation rates of the index components in the MP-SAN were all greater than 75% (dehydrodiconiferyl alcohol: 77.00%; herpetolide A: 78.57%; herpetrione: 94.53%), and the transfer rates were all higher than 65% (dehydrodiconiferyl alcohol: 96.01%; herpetolide A: 67.86%; herpetrione: 65.55%), which were 1.34, 1.38 and 4.81 times compared with those of the traditional decoction. In summary, this study successfully constructed the MP-SAN based on micro-precipitation method to achieve high transfer rate and high encapsulation rate of insoluble components in docoction, which provides a pharmaceutics idea for the efficient utilization of pharmacodynamic substance basis of traditional Chinese medicine.

Hepatic fibrosis(HF)is a pathophysiological outcome of chronic liver injury and is characterized by excessive accumulation of extracellular matrix protein.A number of studies have confirmed that the signaling pathways formed by transforming growth factor-β1(TGF-β1)and its downstream Smad family play an important role in the occurrence and development of HF,and the traditional Chinese medicine(TCM)research targeting this pathway is currently a hot spot in the reversal of HF.Therefore,taking TGF-β1/Smads signaling pathway as the entry point,this paper reviewed the mechanism of action of TCM compound formula and single drug extract in intervening TGF-β1/Smad pathway and related factors upstream and downstream of the pathway to reverse HF in recent years,revealed the targeted therapeutic effect of TCM,and provided new strategies for clarifying the mechanism of TCM.

Objective To establish a method for the determination of lorlatinib in human plasma by two-dimensional high performance liquid chromatography.Methods In the two-dimensional high performance liquid chromatography method,one-dimensional column SX1E-1A(50 mm × 3.5 mm,5 μm)and two-dimensional column SCB-C18(125 mm × 4.6 mm,5 μm)were used with flow rates of 0.8 mL·min-1 and 1.0 mL·min-1,respectively.The column temperature was 40 ℃,The UV detection wavelength was 317 nm,and the sample size was 500 μL.This study investigated the specificity,standard curve and minimum quantification limit,precision and recovery rate,as well as stability of the method.Results The concentration of lolatinib in human plasma showed a good linear relationship in the range of 11.72-1 018.98 ng·mL-1,and the regression equation was y=944.50x-588.90(R2=0.999 7).The minimum limit of quantification was 11.72 ng·mL-1.The extraction recovery rates of the three quality control samples were 97.61％-99.86％,and the intra-day and inter-day precisions were less than 5.29％,indicating that the detection performance of the method was good.Conclusion The method has the characteristics of good stability,high sensitivity and strong anti-interference ability,and is suitable for the determination of loratinib in human plasma.

Objective To understand the antimicrobial resistance of Escherichia spp.from member units of Hu-nan Province Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System from 2012 to 2021.Methods According to the technical scheme of China Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System(CARSS),data about Escherichia spp.and the anti-microbial susceptibility testing results reported from member units of Hunan Province Antimicrobial Resistance Sur-veillance System were analyzed by WHONET 5.6 software.Results From 2012 to 2021,a total of 476 351 clini-cally isolated Escherichia spp.were collected,475 520 of which were Escherichia coli,accounting for 99.8％;92.6％were isolated from inpatients;39.3％were isolated from urine specimens.Over the past 10 years,the proportion of Escherichia spp.in total detected pathogens remained relatively stable,ranging 20％-23％,the lowest rate was 18.7％in 2012,and the highest rate was 22.9％in 2015.In the past 10 years,the resistance rates of Escherichia spp.to ampicillin,ceftriaxone,cefotaxime and ampicillin/sulbactam were＞80％,＞47％,＞45％,and＞39％,respectively;resistance rates to piperacillin/tazobactam,cefoperazone/sulbactam,and nitrofurantoin were all＜8％,to tigecycline,amikacin,imipenem,and meropenem(except in 2012)were all＜5％.Resistance of Escherichia spp.to 22 commonly clinically used antimicrobial agents fluctuated,but overall trend decreased year by year.The resistance rates of Escherichia spp.from patients in the intensive care unit(ICU),non-ICU patients,outpatients,and emergency patients to 22 clinically commonly used antimicrobial agents were compared among different depart-ments,and the differences were statistically significant(all P＜0.05).The resistance rates of Escherichia spp.iso-lated from ICU and non-ICU patients were compared,and except for tigecycline,the resistance rates to the other 21 antimicrobial agents were statistically different(all P＜0.05).The resistance rates of Escherichia spp.isolated from patients to commonly clinically used antimicrobial agents were statistically different among patients of different age groups(all P＜0.05).Conclusion Escherichia spp.isolated from patients in different years,departments,specimens,and ages have different resistance to commonly used antimicrobial agents.It is necessary to continue to strengthen the surveillance on bacterial resistance,so as to guide the rational choice of antimicrobial agents.

Objective To develop an automatic urine volume detection and collection device to solve the problems of routine urine test.Methods An automatic urine volume detection and collection device was developed with the components of a main control system,a detection system,a prompting system and a grasping and moving system.The main control system consisted of two STM32 microcontrollers and a reset switch;the detection system was made up of a weighing module,an infrared module and indicator lights,which had its urine volume automatic detection algorithm developed based on the Keil5 platform;the prompting system realized voice broadcasting through the voice module fixed on the back panel of the box;the grasping and moving system was composed of a rail drive motor(86CM stepper motor),a photoelectric switch and a motorized gripper.Results The device developed tested urine samples with an accuracy of 99.44％,and could collect qualified samples automatically and quickly.Conclusion The device developed detects urine volume and collects samples automatically,and enhances the accuracy and efficiency of urine examination.[Chinese Medical Equipment Journal,2024,45(4):66-69]

Objective To understand the distribution and changes in antimicrobial resistance of clinically isolated Pseudomonas aeruginosa(P.aeruginosa)in the member hospitals of Hunan Provincial Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System from 2012 to 2021.Methods Antimicrobial susceptibility testing by disk diffusion or automa-ted instrument was performed on clinical isolates.Testing results were determined according to the standards of 2022 edition from American Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute(CLSI).Statistical analysis was performed by WHONET 5.6 software.Data were analyzed by trend test(Cochran-armitage)and Chi-square test with SPSS.Results A total of 176 441 strains of P.aeruginosa were surveilled by Hunan Provincial Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System from 2012 to 2021.99.4％of the strains were isolated from hospitalized patients,and about 70％of the strains were isolated from respiratory specimens.8.4％of P.aeruginosa were from children(0-17 years old),91.6％were from adults.Antimicrobial susceptibility testing results showed that P.aeruginosa was most sensitive to polymyxin B over 10 years,with a resis-tance rate of less than 6％.Resistance rates to piperacil-lin,piperacillin/tazobactam,ceftazidime,cefepime,aztreonam,imipenem,amikacin,gentamicin,tobramycin,cip-rofloxacin,levofloxacin,and polymyxin B all showed downward trends.A total of 29 920 carbapenem-resistant P.aeruginosa(CRPA)strains were detected.The average isolation rate of CRPA in this province was 18.0％over 10 years.CRPA detection rate from adult was 18.5％,higher than that from children(12.3％),and both showing downward trends.Conclusion The resistance rate of clinically isolated P.aeruginosa in Hunan Province to most commonly used antimicrobial agents is decreasing.