Objective To review the research progress on acid fibroblast growth factor (aFGF) in promoting tissue injury repair and its mechanism of action. Methods By searching and reviewing the basic and clinical studies on aFGF published in recent years, the roles of aFGF in tissue injury including full-thickness skin, mucous and skin barrier, bone and nerve fiber were summarized. Results As a key member of the FGF family, aFGF exhibits potent mitogenic activity, it can regulate various cells proliferation and migration, accelerate extracellular matrix synthesis, promote angiogenesis and nerve fiber repair, upregulate tight junction protein expression, and therefore exert dual regulatory effects on dermal and epidermal regeneration and repair. It demonstrates promising clinical application for full-thickness healing and skin and mucosal barriers repair. Additionally, it mediates the regeneration and differentiation of osteoblasts, cardiomyocytes, and follicle cells, exhibiting potential for repairing multiple tissues and organs. Furthermore, the aFGF's functions in regulating energy metabolism, immune-inflammatory responses, and alleviating aging have revealed in recent years, indicating a broad clinical application. Conclusion aFGF is a valuable member of the FGF family. It is widely used in various kinds of wound healing, besides, it also holds promising application in multiple tissue and organ regeneration and repair.
The high frequency oscillatory ventilation (HFOV) is characterized with low tidal volume and low mean airway pressure, and can well support the breathing of the patients with respiratory diseases. Since the HFOV was proposed, it has been widely concerned by medical and scientific researchers. About the HFOV, this paper discussed its current research status and prospected its future development in technologies. The research status of ventilation model, mechanisms and ventilation mode were introduced in detail. In the next years, the technologies in developing HFOV will be focused on: to develop the branched high-order nonlinear or volume-depended resistance-inertance-compliance (RIC) ventilation model, to fully understand the mechanisms of HFOV and to achieve the noninvasive HFOV. The development in technologies of HFOV will be beneficial to the patients with respiratory diseases who failed with conventional mechanical ventilation as one of considerable ventilation methods.
Endogenous adult neural stem cells are closely related to the normal physiological functions of the brain and many neurodegenerative diseases. Neurons are affected by factors such as extracellular microenvironment and intracellular signaling. In recent years, some specific signaling pathways have been found that affect the occurrence of neural stem cells in adult neural networks, including proliferation, differentiation, maturation, migration, and integration with host functions. In this paper, we summarize the signals and their molecular mechanisms, including the related signaling pathways, neurotrophic factors, neurotransmitters, intracellular transcription factors and epigenetic regulation of neuronal differentiation from both the extracellular and intracellular aspects, providing basic theoretical support for the treatment of central nervous system diseases through neural stem cells approach.
Currently, all the conventional antibiotics have developed corresponding drug-resistant pathogenic strains, which have increasingly become a serious threat to people's health. Development of completely new types of antibiotics is one of effective ways to solve the drug resistance issue. Antimicrobial peptides with broad-spectrum antibacterial and antimicrobial activity and wild variety become the ideal alternative to traditional antibiotics. Antimicrobial peptides are derived from wide range of sources, such as plants, animals, and microorganisms. Mechanism of function of the antimicrobial peptides and the investigation approaches of different antimicrobial peptides also vary dramatically. In this paper, we give an overview of preparation, antibacterial mechanisms, and research methodology of antimicrobial peptides.
At present, the potential hazards of infrasound on heart health have been identified in previous studies, but a comprehensive review of its mechanisms is still lacking. Therefore, this paper reviews the direct and indirect effects of infrasound on cardiac function and explores the mechanisms by which it may induce cardiac abnormalities. Additionally, in order to further study infrasound waves and take effective preventive measures, this paper reviews the mechanisms of cardiac cell damage caused by infrasound exposure, including alterations in cell membrane structure, modulation of electrophysiological properties, and the biological effects triggered by neuroendocrine pathways, and assesses the impact of infrasound exposure on public health.
Diabetes mellitus patients have the characteristics of higher morbidity of ischemic stroke, severe symptoms, more recurrent stroke and higher mortality. Current studies have shown that stroke patients with or without diabetes mellitus have different pathophysiological mechanisms during stroke progress. Accordingly, treatment that is beneficial to non-diabetes mellitus patients may not be beneficial to diabetes mellitus stroke patients. This article reviews the current research status of pathophysiological mechanism of diabetes mellitus complicated with ischemic stroke, and provides reference for the relevant research of drug intervention in diabetes mellitus patients complicated with stroke.
Mental disorders are a type of behavioral, emotional, cognitive, or thinking disorder that cause pain and social dysfunction, and are one of the top ten global disease burdens. Cannabidiol (CBD) is one of the main components of cannabis, with high safety and tolerability, and is a hot topic in drug research. CBD has a wide range of therapeutic effects, and research has found that CBD has neuropsychiatric effects such as anti-addiction, anti-depression, anti-anxiety, and anti-stress, making it one of the candidate drugs for mental disorders. This article summarizes the mechanism and research progress of CBD for major mental disorders, in order to provide useful references for CBD-related compounds in the treatment of mental disorders.
ObjectiveTo investigate the neural mechanisms of subjects with anisometropic amblyopia using event-related potential (ERP) technology.MethodsNineteen subjects diagnosed with anisometropic amblyopia were consecutively recruited from the outpatients of the West China Hospital of Sichuan University from June 2013 to February 2014, and twenty normal subjects were recruited as control subjects. All subjects were given different orientation Gabor stimuli with three spatial frequencies (1, 2, 8 cpd) and their ERP was recorded. The differences of P3b, including amplitude and latency, were compared between amblyopic eye and fellow or control eye.ResultsAmong the three groups of amblyopic eye and fellow or control eye, there was no statistically significant difference in accuracy or response time at three spatial frequencies (P>0.05), in latency or amplitude of P3b at low spatial frequencies (1, 2 cpd) ((P>0.05), or in amplitude of P3b at high spatial frequency (8 cpd) (P>0.05). P3b latency of amblyopic eye extended at high spatial frequency (8 cpd), compared to fellow or control eye. Amblyopic eye was most significantly weakened in Brodmann area 17 at the P3b wave of each spatial frequency (1, 2, 8 cpd), and there was most significantly weakened in high spatial frequency (8 cpd).ConclusionThe P3b latency of amblyopic eye extended at high spatial frequency suggests that the cognitive function of amblyopia is impaired, at an extent, in the late visual processing stage.
Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), histones, and granule enzymes, exhibit a “double-edged sword” effect in retinal neovascularization (RNV) diseases. The formation of NETs involves classical lytic and non-lytic pathways, as well as peptidylarginine deiminase 4 (PAD4)-dependent and reactive oxygen species-dependent molecular mechanisms. Across different types of RNV, the roles of NETs vary markedly. In diabetic retinopathy, NETs accelerate disease progression by amplifying inflammatory responses, disrupting the blood-retinal barrier, and increasing vascular permeability. During specific stages of retinopathy of prematurity, NETs participate in the clearance of senescent vessels and promote beneficial vascular remodeling. In retinal vein occlusion, their pro-coagulant and pro-inflammatory properties may exacerbate thrombosis and ischemia. The functions of NETs are dynamically regulated by disease stage, microenvironmental factors, and interactions with immune cells. Therefore, therapeutic strategies aimed at clearing NETs (e.g., deoxyribonuclease I) or inhibiting NET formation (e.g., PAD4 inhibitors) may serve as complementary approaches to current anti-vascular endothelial growth factor therapies, although further studies are needed to elucidate optimal intervention timing, safety, and combination treatment strategies for clinical translation.
Skin cancer is a significant public health issue, and computer-aided diagnosis technology can effectively alleviate this burden. Accurate identification of skin lesion types is crucial when employing computer-aided diagnosis. This study proposes a multi-level attention cascaded fusion model based on Swin-T and ConvNeXt. It employed hierarchical Swin-T and ConvNeXt to extract global and local features, respectively, and introduced residual channel attention and spatial attention modules for further feature extraction. Multi-level attention mechanisms were utilized to process multi-scale global and local features. To address the problem of shallow features being lost due to their distance from the classifier, a hierarchical inverted residual fusion module was proposed to dynamically adjust the extracted feature information. Balanced sampling strategies and focal loss were employed to tackle the issue of imbalanced categories of skin lesions. Experimental testing on the ISIC2018 and ISIC2019 datasets yielded accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score of 96.01%, 93.67%, 92.65%, and 93.11%, respectively, and 92.79%, 91.52%, 88.90%, and 90.15%, respectively. Compared to Swin-T, the proposed method achieved an accuracy improvement of 3.60% and 1.66%, and compared to ConvNeXt, it achieved an accuracy improvement of 2.87% and 3.45%. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method accurately classifies skin lesion images, providing a new solution for skin cancer diagnosis.