This paper systematically reviews the current status of integrated traditional Chinese and western medicine in the treatment of Helicobacter pylori （Hp） infection， as well as recent progress in clinical and basic research both in China and internationally. It summarizes the advantages of traditional Chinese medicine （TCM） in Hp infection management， including improving Hp eradication rates， enhancing antibiotic sensitivity， reducing antimicrobial resistance， decreasing drug-related adverse effects， and ameliorating gastric mucosal lesions. These advantages are particularly evident in patients who are intolerant to bismuth-containing regimens， those with refractory Hp infection， and individuals with precancerous gastric lesions. An integrated， whole-process management approach and individualized， staged comprehensive treatment strategies combining TCM and western medicine are proposed for Hp infection. Future prevention and control of Hp infection should adopt an integrative Chinese-western medical strategy， emphasizing prevention， strengthening primary care， implementing proactive long-term monitoring， optimizing screening strategies， and advancing the development of novel technologies and mechanistic studies of Chinese herbal interventions. These efforts aim to provide a theoretical basis and practical pathways for the establishment and improvement of Hp infection prevention and control systems.

Objective: To understand the hydration status and related factors of rural boarding primary school students, so as to provide a scientific basis for drinking water health intervention for primary school students. Methods: In November 2023, a convenience sampling approach was employed to conduct a hydration status survey among 144 boarding students in grades 5 and 6 of a rural primary school in Guangxi. The Duplicate meal method and weighing method were utilized to measure the food derived water intake over three consecutive days. Urine osmolarity of students was measured on site for three days, and a simple physical examination was also carried out. A self administered questionnaire was used to investigate students drinking water literacy, daily water intake, and physical activity levels. Meanwhile, a drinking water literacy survey was conducted among 21 substitute teachers and 144 parents of the boarding students in grades 5 and 6. Logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with students hydration status. Results: The median daily total water intake of students was 2 043.55 mL, and 54.86% of the students did not reach the recommended Adequate Intake (AI). The median food derived water intake was 1 149.24 mL, accounting for 53.94% of the total water intake. Univariate analysis revealed that the daily drinking frequency, daily water intake, and food derived water intake of students were related factors of hydration status ( β =-1.60, -1.01, -0.00, all P <0.05). Multivariate Logistic regression analysis showed that primary school students with a daily drinking frequency of ≥7 times were more likely to maintain an adequate hydration status ( OR =0.28, 95% CI =0.09-0.93, P ＜0.05). Conclusions The water intake from food is the main source of water in the body for boarding primary school students in a certain rural school in Guangxi. Primary school students should increase their water intake frequency appropriately to maintain an adequate hydration status.

ObjectiveTo investigate the status of overlapping hepatitis B virus （HBV） infection in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus （HCV） infection and the serological characteristics of such patients. MethodsA total of 8 637 patients with HCV infection who were hospitalized from January 1， 2010 to December 31， 2020 and had complete data of HBV serological markers were enrolled， and the composition ratio of patients with overlapping HBV serological markers was analyzed among the patients with HCV infection. The patients were divided into groups based on age and year of birth， and serological characteristics were analyzed， and the distribution of HBV-related serological characteristics were analyzed across different HCV genotypes. ResultsThe patients with HCV/HBV overlapping infection accounted for 5.85%， and the patients with previous HBV infection accounted for 48.10%； the patients with protective immunity against HBV accounted for 14.67%， while the patients with a lack of protective immunity against HBV accounted for 31.39%. The patients were divided into groups based on age： in the 0 — 17 years group， the patients with protective immunity against HBV accounted for 61.41% （304 patients）； the 18 — 44 years group was mainly composed of patients with previous HBV infection （698 patients， 37.31%）， the 45 — 59 years group was predominantly composed of patients with previous HBV infection （1 945 patients， 50.38%）， and the ≥60 years group was also predominantly composed of patients with previous HBV infection （1 486 patients， 61.66%）. The patients were divided into groups based on the year of birth： in the pre-1992 group， the patients with previous HBV infection accounted for 51.63% （4 112 patients）； in the 1992 — 2005 group， the patients with protective immunity against HBV accounted for 54.72% （168 patients）； in the post-2005 group， the patients with protective immunity against HBV accounted for 64.38% （235 patients）. In this study， 6 301 patients underwent HCV genotype testing： the patients with genotype 1b accounted for the highest proportion of 51.71% （3 258 patients）， followed by those with genotype 2a （1 769 patients， 28.07%）， genotype 3b （63 patients， 1.00%）， genotype 3a （10 patients， 0.16%）， genotype 4 （21 patients， 0.33%）， and genotype 6a （5 patients， 0.08%）. ConclusionWith the implementation of hepatitis B planned vaccination program in China， there has been a significant reduction in the proportion of patients with previous HBV infection among the patients with HCV/HBV overlapping infection， but there is still a relatively high proportion of patients with a lack of protective immunity against HBV.

Recently， the American College of Gastroenterology （ACG） released the clinical guidelines on perioperative risk assessment and management of patients with cirrhosis， proposing a comprehensive approach for perioperative risk assessment and management in these patients. The guidelines mainly focus on the severity of liver diseases， extrahepatic comorbidities， and surgery-specific factors， with an emphasis on individualized risk stratification using validated risk assessment tools （such as the VOCAL-Penn score） for patients with cirrhosis. This article gives an excerpt of the key statements in the guidelines.

Ferroptosis is a key driver of the onset and progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease （COPD）. By exploring the role of ferroptosis in COPD from the perspective of "qi deficiency with retention and stagnation"， it is considered that mitochondrial dysfunction and imbalanced antioxidant defenses are the microscopic manifestations of "qi deficiency"， whereas iron accumulation and lipid peroxide deposition constitute the pathological basis of "retention and stagnation". In traditional Chinese medicine （TCM）， the treatment principle is tonifying deficiency and benefiting qi， scattering retention and unblocking stagnation. Its mechanism involves improving the antioxidant system and mitochondrial function to enhance cellular resistance to ferroptosis， as well as relieving pulmonary iron overload， excessive lipid peroxidation， and inflammatory factor release to reduce the accumulation of pathological products， thereby exerting therapeutic effects on COPD.

Owing to its inherent advantages—such as being non-destructive, rapid, highly molecule-specific, and minimally interfered with by moisture—Raman spectroscopy has been widely adopted in the fields of skin barrier function assessment, monitoring the transdermal penetration of active cosmetic ingredients, and the identification and quality control of cosmetic products. Despite these strengths, the practical application of this technique faces a significant bottleneck: the strong fluorescence background generated by endogenous skin components and exogenous cosmetic additives. Endogenous skin substances, such as structural proteins (e.g., collagen and elastin), metabolic coenzymes (e.g., nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), and pigments (e.g., melanin), together with exogenous cosmetic constituents like organic colorants, chemical sunscreens, and fragrances, often possess strong absorption and emission characteristics. When excited by lasers, these components produce a fluorescence background that can be 10⁶ to 10⁸ times stronger than the Raman scattering signals, effectively masking the inherently weak vibrational fingerprint information. In recent years, driven by the rapid development of optoelectronic hardware and artificial intelligence algorithms, fluorescence suppression strategies have evolved from isolated, single-method approaches into comprehensive, multi-level synergistic systems. These systems are categorized into three distinct tiers: sample preparation, signal acquisition, and data processing. At the sample preparation level, techniques such as photobleaching and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) are employed to eliminate or bypass the generation of fluorescence at the source. At the signal acquisition level, instrumental improvements—including the use of long-wavelength near-infrared excitation (typically 785 nm or 1 064 nm), confocal spatial filtering, and shifted excitation Raman difference spectroscopy (SERDS)— are utilized to physically isolate Raman signals from the fluorescence background. Furthermore, at the data processing level, numerical baseline correction methods such as polynomial fitting, penalized least squares (e.g., airPLS, arPLS), wavelet transform, and derivative algorithms are increasingly integrated into the analytical pipeline to extract Raman spectral features from mixed signals without increasing hardware costs or acquisition time. This review provides a systematic categorization and critical evaluation of these fluorescence suppression methods, detailing their underlying principles, technical advantages, and inherent limitations in diverse experimental setups. By focusing on critical application scenarios—including skin barrier assessment, percutaneous absorption monitoring, the routine quality control of cosmetics, and the emerging field of portable on-site detection—this paper explores the current state of technique selection and optimization. Finally, the article discusses future development trends, emphasizing the necessity of constructing adaptive, tiered suppression strategies, developing intelligent and automated data processing algorithms, and promoting the integration of portable, multi-modal diagnostic devices. The objective of this review is to provide a comprehensive technical reference to facilitate the transition of Raman spectroscopy from a specialized laboratory tool into a routine, robust analytical platform for advancements in skin science and cosmetic research.

Objective To explore the relationship between nutritional status and sarcopenia in patients with chronic kidney disease. Methods This study included 310 patients with chronic kidney disease (assigned to the kidney disease group) and 150 healthy volunteers who underwent physical examinations during the same period (assigned to the healthy group) between May 2022 and October 2024.The clinical data and related nutritional indicators were compared between the two groups, and the correlation between nutritional status indicators and clinical parameters was analyzed. According to the presence or absence of sarcopenia in the kidney disease group, the patients were divided into a sarcopenia group (n=107) and a non-sarcopenia group (n=203). The nutritional indicators were compared between the two subgroups, the correlation between patients' nutritional status and sarcopenia was analyzed, and the value of nutritional status indicators in diagnosing sarcopenia was evaluated. Results BMI, 25(OH)D3, total body water, muscle mass, and adipose mass in the kidney disease group were significantly lower than those in the healthy group (P<0.05), while the UA, SCr, TC, TG, LDL-C, BUN, CRP, and UACR were significantly higher than those in the healthy group (P<0.05). BMI, 25(OH)D3, total body water, and muscle mass in the kidney disease group were significantly negatively correlated with UA, SCr, CRP, TC, TG, and LDL-C (P<0.05), while UACR was significantly positively correlated with UA, SCr, CRP, TC, TG, and LDL-C (P<0.05). BMI, 25(OH)D3, total body water, and total muscle volume in the sarcopenia group were significantly lower than in the non-sarcopenia group (P<0.05), whereas UACR was significantly higher (P<0.05). BMI, 25(OH)D3, total body water, and muscle mass were protective factors against sarcopenia (OR < 1, P < 0.05), whereas UACR was a risk factor associated with sarcopenia (OR > 1, P < 0.05). The AUCs of BMI, 25 (OH) D3, UACR, total body water, and muscle mass for predicting sarcopenia were 0.614, 0.786, 0.881, 0.675, and 0.734, respectively. The combined diagnostic AUC was 0.951, indicating higher diagnostic value. Conclusion In patients with chronic kidney disease, decreases in BMI, 25(OH)D3, total body water, and muscle mass, and an increase in UACR, can all indicate the occurrence of sarcopenia. Among these, BMI, 25(OH)D3, total body water, and muscle mass serve as nutritional status indicators, and their combination with UACR has auxiliary diagnostic value for sarcopenia.

ObjectiveTo address the key challenges in breast electrical impedance tomography (EIT) reconstruction including the severe ill‑posedness of the inverse problem, limited measurement information from the electrodes, low contrast of small lesions, as well as the common drawbacks of traditional reconstruction methods such as boundary blurring, low spatial resolution, and weak small-target detection capability, and to overcome the limitations of existing deep learning approaches namely low training efficiency, insufficient physical consistency, and substantial information loss during the low‑to‑high dimensional mapping process, this study proposes a multi‑scale attention and dynamic sparse mask fusion network (MADS‑Net). The proposed method aims to enhance high‑resolution reconstruction accuracy, small-lesion detectability, noise robustness, and computational efficiency in breast‑screening-oriented EIT, thereby providing a feasible solution for the application of EIT in breast functional imaging. MethodsThe proposed network adopts a strategy of “locate first, reconstruct later”. It realizes adaptive allocation of computational resources through a dynamic mask module, alleviates information loss in the low-to-high dimensional mapping process via a multi-scale attention mechanism, and embeds physical constraints to improve the physical rationality of reconstruction results. The performance of the proposed method was validated through systematic numerical simulations, agar phantom experiments, and porcine tissue experiments. Comparisons were made with mainstream methods including the Gauss-Newton algorithm, convolutional neural networks, U-Net, and Deep D-Bar. The image correlation coefficient (ICC), root mean square error (RMSE), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) were adopted as quantitative evaluation metrics. Furthermore, lesion‑level evaluation metrics were introduced to assess the capability of different methods in reconstructing abnormal target boundaries and small‑sized target regions. ResultsExperimental results demonstrate that MADS-Net outperforms all comparison methods across all test scenarios. In numerical simulations, it achieves higher accuracy in target morphology and spatial location recovery as well as better background suppression. In agar phantom experiments, its detection and imaging reliability for small targets is significantly superior to the comparison methods. In porcine tissue experiments, the model maintains good generalization performance and can adapt to complex biological tissue imaging scenarios. Quantitative results show that MADS-Net achieves an average ICC of 0.917 6±0.048 8, an RMSE as low as0.060 6±0.031 6, and a PSNR of (23.893 9±2.685 3) dB. It successfully detects tiny targets as small as 5 mm within a 100 mm diameter sensing field, reduces the total training duration by 23.5% compared with the baseline method, and maintains stable reconstruction performance even under strong noise interference. ConclusionThe results demonstrate that MADS-Net achieves favorable EIT reconstruction performance in numerical simulations, agar phantom experiments, and porcine tissue experiments, even under common practical imaging challenges including low signal-to-noise ratio and blurred tissue boundaries. This study provides a methodological reference for further research on EIT in breast-screening-related scenarios and other medical functional imaging tasks, and also offers a low-cost, radiation-free alternative for breast lesion screening that aligns with the clinical demand for non-invasive diagnostic tools. It should be noted that real clinical breast data have not yet been used for validation in this study, and the clinical applicability of the proposed method requires further investigation. Future work will prioritize collecting multi-center real clinical breast datasets, and further optimize the model’s generalization ability to adapt to individual differences in breast tissue composition to promote its clinical application.

Objectives: Hypoparathyroidism (HP) is a rare endocrine disorder caused by parathyroid hormone (PTH) defi ciency. The PTH is a candidate gene for familial isolated hypoparathyroidism (FIH). This study aimed to investigate the pathogenicity of two novel rare variants (RVs) ofPTH through in vitro functional study. Methods: Targeted next-generation sequencing was used to identify candidate gene mutations. Clinical data were retrospectively collected. Wild-type (WT) PTH was used as a template for site-directed mutagenesis to create mutant eukaryotic expression plasmids, which were transfected into cells. Treated with or without 4-phenylbu tyric acid (4-PBA), the levels of intact PTH (iPTH) and PTH (1-84) were measured by chemiluminescence, and protein expression was assessed using Western blotting. Results: Two patients carrying PTH mutations (c.154G > A: p.Val52Ile, c.270G > T: p.Leu90Phe) were identified.Patient 1, a 45-year-old male, presented with carpal and pedal numbness, muscle cramps, and low serum calcium (1.29 mmol/L). Patient 2, a 12-year-old female, had muscle twitches, convulsions, low calcium (1.50 mmol/L), and iPTH of 4 pg/mL. The iPTH or PTH (1-84) levels in the medium transfected with mutant Val52Ile and Leu90Phe PTH decreased by 31%–38%, and 51%–96% compared to WT (allP < 0.05), which were not rescued by 4-PBA. No significant changes in intracellular PTH expression were observed. Conclusions In this study, two novel RVs of PTH(Val52Ile and Leu90Phe) were identified that may impair hormone synthesis and secretion. Our study has broadened the mutation spectrum of the PTH and shed light on potential mechanisms underlying FIH.

Mental state is an important part of the normal life activities of the human body, and it is also the most external expression and the most easily obtained information of the physical condition. The normal activities of the mind depend on the normal operation of the viscera, qi, and blood, and are a unified whole that prospers together and suffers together. The theory of the five-spirit-viscera in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic revealed that the normal mental activities of the human body were dominated by the five internal organs, that is, the five internal organs were the body and the five spirits were the function. And it highlighted the viewpoint that the five internal organs store the spirits and are actually one. The heart governs the spirit and belongs to the four internal organs. On this basis, Synopsis of Golden Chamber used the internal organs to diagnose and treat mental diseases, integrating the theory of the five spirits into it, forming a unique method of diagnosis and treatment with the heart as the leading factor and regulating the qi and blood of the four internal organs. It identified the pathogenesis of diseases such as pathogenic crying, lily disease, and hysteria from five levels: heart deficiency and weak qi, heart-lung disharmony, heart-liver disharmony, the heart of the loss of the spleen nourishment, and disharmony between heart and kidney. The treatment was mainly to replenish the deficiency of the viscera and eliminate the pathogens, reflecting the characteristics of regulating the mind and calming the four internal organs. This unique view on diagnosis and treatment has profoundly influenced the diagnosis and treatment theories of mental illnesses by later doctors, and is of great significance to the current clinical treatment of such illnesses.