BACKGROUND: Since December 2019, when coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) emerged in Wuhan city and rapidly spread throughout China, data have been needed on the clinical characteristics of the affected patients. METHODS: We extracted data regarding 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 from 552 hospitals in 30 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in mainland China through January 29, 2020. The primary composite end point was admission to an intensive care unit (ICU), the use of mechanical ventilation, or death. RESULTS: The median age of the patients was 47 years; 41.9% of the patients were female. The primary composite end point occurred in 67 patients (6.1%), including 5.0% who were admitted to the ICU, 2.3% who underwent invasive mechanical ventilation, and 1.4% who died. Only 1.9% of the patients had a history of direct contact with wildlife. Among nonresidents of Wuhan, 72.3% had contact with residents of Wuhan, including 31.3% who had visited the city. The most common symptoms were fever (43.8% on admission and 88.7% during hospitalization) and cough (67.8%). Diarrhea was uncommon (3.8%). The median incubation period was 4 days (interquartile range, 2 to 7). On admission, ground-glass opacity was the most common radiologic finding on chest computed tomography (CT) (56.4%). No radiographic or CT abnormality was found in 157 of 877 patients (17.9%) with nonsevere disease and in 5 of 173 patients (2.9%) with severe disease. Lymphocytopenia was present in 83.2% of the patients on admission. CONCLUSIONS: During the first 2 months of the current outbreak, Covid-19 spread rapidly throughout China and caused varying degrees of illness. Patients often presented without fever, and many did not have abnormal radiologic findings. (Funded by the National Health Commission of China and others.)
BACKGROUND: Although abnormal accumulation of amyloid beta (Aβ) protein is thought to be the main cause of Alzheimer's disease (AD), emerging evidence suggests a pivotal vascular contribution to AD. Aberrant amyloid β induces neurovascular dysfunction, leading to changes in the morphology and function of the microvasculature. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms between Aβ deposition and vascular injuries. Recent studies have revealed that pericytes play a substantial role in the vasculopathy of AD. Additional research is imperative to attain a more comprehensive understanding. METHODS: Two-photon microscopy and laser speckle imaging were used to examine cerebrovascular dysfunction. Aβ oligomer stereotactic injection model was established to explain the relationship between Aβ and vasculopathy. Immunofluorescence staining, western blot, and real-time PCR were applied to detect the morphological and molecular alternations of pericytes. Primary cultured pericytes and bEnd.3 cells were employed to explore the underlying mechanisms. RESULTS: Vasculopathy including BBB damage, hypoperfusion, and low vessel density were found in the cortex of 8 to 10-month-old 5xFAD mice. A similar phenomenon accompanied by pericyte degeneration appeared in an Aβ-injected model, suggesting a direct relationship between Aβ and vascular dysfunction. Pericytes showed impaired features including low PDGFRβ expression and increased pro-inflammatory chemokines secretion under the administration of Aβ in vitro, of which supernatant cultured with bEND.3 cells led to significant endothelial dysfunction characterized by TJ protein deficiency. CONCLUSIONS: Our results provide new insights into the pathogenic mechanism underlying Aβ-induced vasculopathy. Targeting pericyte therapies are promising to ameliorate vascular dysfunction in AD.
As a key factor in determining testis size and sperm number, sertoli cells (SCs) play a crucial role in male infertility. Heat stress (HS) reduces SCs counts, negatively impacting nutrient transport and supply to germ cells, and leading to spermatogenesis failure in humans and animals. However, how HS affects the number of SCs remains unclear. We hypothesized that changes in SC metabolism contribute to the adverse effects of HS. In this study, we first observed an upregulation of arachidonic acid (AA), an unsaturated fatty acid after HS exposure by LC-MS/MS metabolome detection. By increasing ROS levels, expression of KEAP1 and NRF2 proteins as well as LC3 and LAMP2, 100 µM AA induced autophagy in SCs by activating oxidative stress (OS). We observed adverse effects of AA on mitochondria under HS with a decrease of mitochondrial number and an increase of mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP). We also found that AA alternated the oxygen transport and absorption function of mitochondria by increasing glycolysis flux and decreasing oxygen consumption rate as well as the expression of mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) proteins Complex I, II, V. However, pretreatment with 5 mM NAC (ROS inhibitor) and 2 µM Rotenone (mitochondrial ETC inhibitor) reversed the autophagy induced by AA. In summary, AA modulates autophagy in SCs during HS by disrupting mitochondrial ETC function, inferring that the release of AA is a switch-like response, and providing insight into the underlying mechanism of high temperatures causing male infertility.
Abstract Power electronic devices are of great importance in modern society. After decades of development, Si power devices have approached their material limits with only incremental improvements and large conversion losses. As the demand for electronic components with high efficiency dramatically increasing, new materials are needed for power device fabrication. Beta-phase gallium oxide, an ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor, has been considered as a promising candidate, and various β -Ga 2 O 3 power devices with high breakdown voltages have been demonstrated. However, the realization of enhancement-mode (E-mode) β -Ga 2 O 3 field-effect transistors (FETs) is still challenging, which is a critical problem for a myriad of power electronic applications. Recently, researchers have made some progress on E-mode β -Ga 2 O 3 FETs via various methods, and several novel structures have been fabricated. This article gives a review of the material growth, devices and properties of these E-mode β -Ga 2 O 3 FETs. The key challenges and future directions in E-mode β -Ga 2 O 3 FETs are also discussed.
Aiming at the problem of insufficient feature extraction and low recognition rate of traditional convolutional neural network in facial expression recognition, a multi-layer feature recognition algorithm based on three-channel convolutional neural network (HFT-CNN) was proposed. In the three-channel convolutional neural network, one channel trained the local image of the eyes and eyebrows extracted from the facial expression image, another channel trained the local image of the mouth extracted from the facial expression image, and the last channel tained the whole facial expression image. In order to better extract the facial features of the three channel, the higher-order tensor singular value decomposition was used to decompose the convolution kernel to remove the redundancy.The detail convolution kernel was constructed for the eyes and eyebrow and mouth image channeles, while the contour convolution kernel was constructed for the whole facial expression image channel. Finally, the features extracted from the three network channels were fused to obtain the expression classification results. Facial expression recognition experiments were carried out on CK+ and JAFFE facial expression datasets respectively, and HFT-CNN was compared to traditional deep neural networks and the state of the art deep neural networks, the network structure in this paper achieved higher recognition rates with fewer network layers.