ObjectiveTo elucidate the effects of autonomic neuromodulators [calcium chloride (CaCl₂)-acetylcholine (ACh)] on atrial electrical remodeling and histopathological changes in rats, thereby providing evidence for further investigation into the pathological mechanisms by which autonomic imbalance induces atrial fibrillation (AF). MethodsTen 8-week-old male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were randomly divided into experimental and control groups, with 5 rats in each group. The experimental group received daily tail vein injections of a CaCl₂-ACh mixed solution for 28 days, while the control group received an equal volume of saline. Surface electrocardiograms were recorded before and after daily administration. On day 28 of administration, under isoflurane inhalation anesthesia, echocardiography was performed, and then the rats were euthanized by exsanguination under isoflurane anesthesia for tissue collection. Body weight and heart weight of rats were measured, and electrophysiological parameters including AF inducibility, conduction velocity, and conduction dispersion in isolated rat hearts were monitored using the MappingLab multichannel electrophysiological mapping system. HE staining was performed to evaluate atrial tissue architecture and inflammatory cell infiltration. The expression levels of matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9) and interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β) were analyzed by Western blotting. Masson staining was used to quantitatively analyze the proportional distribution of collagen fibers and myocardial fibers, and to calculate the area of collagen deposition, thereby evaluating the degree of myocardial fibrosis. Wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) staining was used to evaluate morphological changes of cardiomyocytes. Dihydroethidium (DHE) staining was used to detect the level of oxidative stress in atrial myocytes. Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick-end labeling (TUNEL) staining was used to detect atrial cell apoptosis. ResultsCompared with the control group, the experimental group showed obvious arrhythmias on electrocardiograms. Echocardiography after 28 days of administration revealed significant structural remodeling in the experimental group, with a marked increase in left atrial anteroposterior diameter (P < 0.05), and also showed cardiac dysfunction, with significant decreases in left ventricular ejection fraction and left ventricular fractional shortening (P < 0.01). Compared with the control group, the experimental group showed a significantly increased heart weight-to-body weight ratio (P < 0.05), a markedly higher AF inducibility (P < 0.001), a significantly slowed atrial conduction velocity (P < 0.05), an uneven isochronal map with irregular directions, and a significantly increased conduction dispersion (P < 0.01). HE staining showed that atrial myocytes in the experimental group were disorganized, with slight inflammatory cell infiltration. Western blotting showed that the expression levels of MMP-9 and IL-1β in the atrial tissue of the experimental group were significantly upregulated (P < 0.05). Masson staining showed a significant increase in collagen deposition and a significant increase in fibrosis area in the atrial tissue of the experimental group (P < 0.001). WGA staining showed that cardiomyocytes in the experimental group were significantly hypertrophied compared with the control group (P < 0.05). DHE staining and TUNEL staining revealed that the level of oxidative stress in atrial myocytes (P < 0.001) and the apoptotic rate (P < 0.01) were both significantly increased. Conclusion Daily tail vein injections of the autonomic neuromodulator CaCl₂-ACh mixed solution for 28 days can successfully induce AF in rats, accompanied by significant atrial structural remodeling, electrical remodeling, and oxidative stress.

Objective: To investigate the status and associated factors of sports supplement usage among grade 9 students, so as to provide a scientific basis for targeted supervision and health education regarding sports supplement usage among junior high school students. Methods: From June to September 2025, a stratified cluster random sampling method was used to select 2 261 grade 9 students from 10 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities) in China. A questionnaire survey was conducted on their sports supplement usage and related factors. The Chi square test was used to compare the usage rates of sports supplements among different groups of students, and binary Logistic regression analysis was employed to investigate the related factors of sports supplement usage among grade 9 students. Results: Totally 59.7% of the grade 9 students used sports supplements. The usage rate (62.5%) was higher among boys than girls (56.3%), higher among students from rural areas and towns/counties (66.5%, 66.2%) than those from urban districts (52.9%), higher among boarding students (65.2%) than non resident students (54.3%), higher among students whose parents occupations were businessmen and workers (fathers: 65.0%, 63.7%; mothers: 63.6%, 61.1%) than those whose parents were farmers and civil servants (fathers: 57.5%, 54.1%; mothers: 58.8%, 55.7%), higher among students with a monthly family income of 5 000- 10 000 yuan (66.3%) than those in other income groups, and higher among students in the high score zone for the entrance physical examination to senior high school (67.7%) than those in the medium and low score zones ( 56.3% , 56.5%) ( χ 2=8.99, 42.21, 27.98, 20.55, 8.20, 22.74, 24.70, respectively, all P <0.05). Binary Logistic regression analysis showed that boys ( OR =1.26), those from rural areas ( OR =1.59), boarding students ( OR =1.36), those with a monthly family income of 5 000- 10 000 yuan ( OR =1.41), and those in the high score zone for entrance physical examination to senior high school ( OR =1.34) were more likely to use sports supplements during the entrance physical examination to senior high school; the probability of sports supplement usage was lower among students whose fathers were civil servants ( OR =0.74) (all P <0.05). Conclusions The usage of sports supplements is relatively common among grade 9 students. Intervention measures should be targeted at specific populations to reduce the risk of misuse.

BACKGROUND:A large number of studies have found that pyroptosis is closely related to the occurrence and development of motor system diseases,but there are few studies and reviews on pyroptosis in motor system diseases.OBJECTIVE:To review the current clinical and preclinical studies,summarize the role of pyroptosis in motor system diseases and related molecular mechanisms,and provide reference for the pyroptosis-targeted treatment for motor system diseases in the future.METHODS:The relevant literatures in PubMed and CNKI database were searched by computer from January 2000 to January 2024.The English search terms were"pyroptosis,tendons,ligaments,cartilage,muscles,bones"and the Chinese search terms were"pyroptosis,tendon,ligament,cartilage,skeletal muscle,bone"in Chinese.A combination of subject terms and free search terms was used.There were a total of 422 documents,including 334 in English and 88 in Chinese.After excluding duplicate literature and irrelevant literature,the literature without inclusion value was further excluded by reading the whole paper,and finally 78 documents were included for review and analysis.RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:Different pathways of pyroptosis and subsequent inflammatory responses can affect the progression of motor system diseases and the repair process of injuries.Excessive pyroptosis can not only cause a large number of tissue cells to die,but also aggravate tissue inflammation and degrade the extracellular matrix through substances such as inflammatory factors released after cell lysis,and damaging related molecular patterns can act as upstream signals to further aggravate pyroptosis.Current methods for preventing and treating motor system diseases mainly include NOD-like receptor thermal protein domain-associated protein 3 inhibitors,Chinese herbal extracts,exosome therapy,mesenchymal stem cell therapy,and exercise therapy.The review suggests that targeted intervention of some key factors in the process of pyroptosis may be a new direction for the treatment and prevention of motor system diseases.

Objective:To investigate causal relationship between intestinal flora and risk of developing ankylosing spondylitis(AS)by a two-sample Mendelian randomization(MR)analysis.Methods:Genome-wide association study(GWAS)data on 211 types of intestinal flora and AS were obtained,and single nucleotide polymorphism(SNP)was used as an instrumental variable and sensi-tive SNPs were selected for analysis.Two-sample MR analyses were performed by inverse variance weighted(IVW)as well as MR-Eg-ger,Weighted median,to assess causal relationship between AS and intestinal flora by OR,and results were tested for heterogeneity and pleiotropy.Results:IVW analysis showed a significant causal relationship between 11 intestinal flora and AS risk.Among them,Verrucomicrobiae,Verrucomicrobiales,Verrucomicrobiaceae,Akkermansia,Erysipelatoclostridium,Holdermannia,Holdemania,Bacillales and Verrucomicrobia had positive causal effect on AS risk,while Dialister,Howardella and Oscillospira had negative causal effect.Causal effect estimates obtained by different methods(MR-Egger,Weighted median)were consistent,and sensitivity tests did not reveal significant horizontal pleiotropy and heterogeneity.Conclusion:Intestinal flora plays an important role in pathogenesis of AS,while specific mechanism remains to be further investigated.

The accurate segmentation of breast ultrasound images is an important precondition for the lesion determination. The existing segmentation approaches embrace massive parameters, sluggish inference speed, and huge memory consumption. To tackle this problem, we propose T ²KD Attention U-Net (dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation Attention U-Net), a lightweight semantic segmentation method combined double-path joint distillation in breast ultrasound images. Primarily, we designed two teacher models to learn the fine-grained features from each class of images according to different feature representation and semantic information of benign and malignant breast lesions. Then we leveraged the joint distillation to train a lightweight student model. Finally, we constructed a novel weight balance loss to focus on the semantic feature of small objection, solving the unbalance problem of tumor and background. Specifically, the extensive experiments conducted on Dataset BUSI and Dataset B demonstrated that the T ²KD Attention U-Net outperformed various knowledge distillation counterparts. Concretely, the accuracy, recall, precision, Dice, and mIoU of proposed method were 95.26%, 86.23%, 85.09%, 83.59%and 77.78% on Dataset BUSI, respectively. And these performance indexes were 97.95%, 92.80%, 88.33%, 88.40% and 82.42% on Dataset B, respectively. Compared with other models, the performance of this model was significantly improved. Meanwhile, compared with the teacher model, the number, size, and complexity of student model were significantly reduced (2.2×10 ⁶ vs. 106.1×10 ⁶, 8.4 MB vs. 414 MB, 16.59 GFLOPs vs. 205.98 GFLOPs, respectively). Indeedy, the proposed model guarantees the performances while greatly decreasing the amount of computation, which provides a new method for the deployment of clinical medical scenarios.
Humans ; Breast Neoplasms/diagnostic imaging* ; Female ; Ultrasonography, Mammary/methods* ; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted/methods* ; Algorithms ; Neural Networks, Computer ; Breast/diagnostic imaging*

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), which is primarily transmitted by Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus, has recently rapidly spread across the world, which poses a huge threat to public health. Chikungunya fever (CHIKF), caused by CHIKV infection, typically manifests as acute febrile illness with severe polyarthralgia that may persist for months to years. A few severe CHIKF cases may be accompanied by serious neurological complications, even resulting in death. The accelerating global expansion of CHIKV is closely associated with genetic variations of the virus, and mutated genes in CHIKV may augment the virus adaptability to Aedes vectors and transmission efficiency. Currently, the diagnosis of the CHIKV infection primarily relies on molecular and serological assays; however, there are still multiple challenges for early and differential diagnosis of CHIKV infections due to co-infections with arboviruses and nonspecific early symptoms. The first prophylactic vaccine for CHIKF has been recently approved in the United States; however, the large-scale application still awaits further validations. More importantly, there are no licensed antiviral therapies against CHIKV until now. This review describes the structure and pathogenesis of CHIKV, summarizes the latest epidemiology and advances in the diagnosis of CHIKV infections, and depicts the current status and prospects of antiviral agents and vaccine development, so as to inform evidence-based prevention and control strategies.

BACKGROUND:Various clinical strategies for the treatment of tendinopathy have good short-term effects but poor long-term effects,and some studies have proven that mitochondria are closely related to the occurrence and development of tendinopathy.However,the relationship between mitochondria and tendinopathy and mitochondria-targeting therapeutic strategies for tendinopathy have not been summarized so far,which is not good for specialists and scholars in related fields to understand the recent research situation.OBJECTIVE:To review the existing clinical or preclinical original studies,in order to summarize the relationship between mitochondrial dysfunction and tendinopathy and the mitochondria-targeting methods for the treatment of tendinopathy,and to provide certain prospects for the evaluation and management of mitochondria in tendinopathy in the future.METHODS:The relevant literatures in PubMed,Web of Science,CNKI,WanFang and VIP databases were searched.The search time was from January 2009 to March 2024,and the search terms were"tendinopathy,tendon injuries,tendon,tendons,mitochondria,mitochondria dysfunction,mitochondria disease"both in English and Chinese.According to the exclusion and inclusion criteria,62 articles were finally included for review and analysis.RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:(1)In clinical tendinopathy patients or tendinopathy models,mitochondrial dysfunction is common,mainly represented by excessive production of reactive oxygen species,decreased activity of superoxide dismutase,ridge clutter and decreased number of mitochondria,which indicates that mitochondrial dysfunction will occur due to tendon injury,thus further worsening tendinopathy and forming a vicious cycle.(2)When the tendon has not been injured or tendinopathy has not yet occurred,the mitochondrial function will be affected by various internal and external factors,resulting in tendinopathy.This indicates that the normal tendon will be damaged,lesioned or even ruptured due to the abnormal function of the mitochondria.(3)Mechanical tensile stress,advanced glycosylation end products,aging and other internal and external factors are the main causes of mitochondrial dysfunction,and these factors will damage and weaken the biological activity and mechanical properties of normal tendons through molecular mechanisms such as apoptosis,inflammation and respiratory chain damage,and thereby induce tendinopathy.(4)According to molecular mechanisms,mitochondria-targeting therapies mainly include mitochondrial transfer/transplantation,transplantation,targeted antioxidants,etc.(5)This review mainly aims at clinical patients with tendinopathy or animal models with similar modeling methods,providing a reliable idea for clinical exploration of the pathogenesis of tendinopathy and targeted therapies for tendinopathy.However,the disadvantage is that the included studies are mainly animal experiments,and there is a lack of more clinical trials for verification.

Objective:To investigate causal relationship between intestinal flora and risk of developing ankylosing spondylitis(AS)by a two-sample Mendelian randomization(MR)analysis.Methods:Genome-wide association study(GWAS)data on 211 types of intestinal flora and AS were obtained,and single nucleotide polymorphism(SNP)was used as an instrumental variable and sensi-tive SNPs were selected for analysis.Two-sample MR analyses were performed by inverse variance weighted(IVW)as well as MR-Eg-ger,Weighted median,to assess causal relationship between AS and intestinal flora by OR,and results were tested for heterogeneity and pleiotropy.Results:IVW analysis showed a significant causal relationship between 11 intestinal flora and AS risk.Among them,Verrucomicrobiae,Verrucomicrobiales,Verrucomicrobiaceae,Akkermansia,Erysipelatoclostridium,Holdermannia,Holdemania,Bacillales and Verrucomicrobia had positive causal effect on AS risk,while Dialister,Howardella and Oscillospira had negative causal effect.Causal effect estimates obtained by different methods(MR-Egger,Weighted median)were consistent,and sensitivity tests did not reveal significant horizontal pleiotropy and heterogeneity.Conclusion:Intestinal flora plays an important role in pathogenesis of AS,while specific mechanism remains to be further investigated.

BACKGROUND:A large number of studies have found that pyroptosis is closely related to the occurrence and development of motor system diseases,but there are few studies and reviews on pyroptosis in motor system diseases.OBJECTIVE:To review the current clinical and preclinical studies,summarize the role of pyroptosis in motor system diseases and related molecular mechanisms,and provide reference for the pyroptosis-targeted treatment for motor system diseases in the future.METHODS:The relevant literatures in PubMed and CNKI database were searched by computer from January 2000 to January 2024.The English search terms were"pyroptosis,tendons,ligaments,cartilage,muscles,bones"and the Chinese search terms were"pyroptosis,tendon,ligament,cartilage,skeletal muscle,bone"in Chinese.A combination of subject terms and free search terms was used.There were a total of 422 documents,including 334 in English and 88 in Chinese.After excluding duplicate literature and irrelevant literature,the literature without inclusion value was further excluded by reading the whole paper,and finally 78 documents were included for review and analysis.RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:Different pathways of pyroptosis and subsequent inflammatory responses can affect the progression of motor system diseases and the repair process of injuries.Excessive pyroptosis can not only cause a large number of tissue cells to die,but also aggravate tissue inflammation and degrade the extracellular matrix through substances such as inflammatory factors released after cell lysis,and damaging related molecular patterns can act as upstream signals to further aggravate pyroptosis.Current methods for preventing and treating motor system diseases mainly include NOD-like receptor thermal protein domain-associated protein 3 inhibitors,Chinese herbal extracts,exosome therapy,mesenchymal stem cell therapy,and exercise therapy.The review suggests that targeted intervention of some key factors in the process of pyroptosis may be a new direction for the treatment and prevention of motor system diseases.

Objective To analyze the influencing factors of postoperative live birth in patients with tubal ectopic pregnancy who had received fresh double cleavage-stage embryo transfer through in vitro fertilization/intracytoplasmic sperm injection(IVF/ICSI).Methods A retrospective cohort study was performed by analyzing clinical data of patients receiving laparoscopic salpingectomy for clinical diagnosed tubal ectopic pregnancy who had undergone double fresh cleavage-stage embryo transfer in our department from January 2016 to June 2018.A follow-up study was performed in terms of pregnancy outcomes in patients who were willing to conceive or attempt pregnancy for 6 years after the operation.The patients were categorized into two groups according to postoperative pregnancy outcomes.A logistic regression analysis was performed to analyze the influencing factors of postoperative live births.Results A total of 188 patients were included,110 of which had live birth within 6 years after surgery,with a live birth rate of 58.5％(110/188).A multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted on variables with P＜0.2 in the univariate analysis(age,duration of infertility,ovarian reserve dysfunction,number of egg retrieval after laparoscopic resection,endometrial thickness,pelvic adhesions,and fimbrial morphology of the fallopian tube)and the baseline antral follicle count in the last transplantation cycle of the live birth cycle(P=0.205),which would affect the outcome of subsequent pregnancy.The analysis showed that pelvic single site and multiple site dense adhesions were independent prognostic factors affecting the live birth again(OR=0.185,95％ CI:0.046-0.736,P=0.017;OR=0.124,95％ CI:0.024-0.640,P=0.013).Conclusions Intraoperative pelvic adhesion negatively affects the pregnancy outcomes of patients diagnosed with tubal ectopic pregnancy who have received fresh double cleavage-stage embryo transfer,and is an independent prognosis factor for postoperative live birth within 6 years.Improving pelvic adhesion and preventing pelvic inflammatory disease are beneficial for refining fertility outcome after surgery.