Military Medical Research最新文献

As the body's integumentary system, the skin is vulnerable to injuries. The subsequent wound healing processes aim to restore dermal and epidermal integrity and functionality. To this end, multiple tissue-resident cells and recruited immune cells cooperate to efficiently repair the injured tissue. Such temporally- and spatially-coordinated interplay necessitates tight regulation to prevent collateral damage such as overshooting immune responses and excessive inflammation. In this context, regulatory T cells (Tregs) hold a key role in balancing immune homeostasis and mediating cutaneous wound healing. A comprehensive understanding of Tregs' multifaceted field of activity may help decipher wound pathologies and, ultimately, establish new treatment modalities. Herein, we review the role of Tregs in orchestrating the regeneration of skin adnexa and catalyzing healthy wound repair. Further, we discuss how Tregs operate during fibrosis, keloidosis, and scarring.

Background: Physiological and biochemical processes across tissues of the body are regulated in response to the high demands of intense physical activity in several occupations, such as firefighting, law enforcement, military, and sports. A better understanding of such processes can ultimately help improve human performance and prevent illnesses in the work environment.

Methods: To study regulatory processes in intense physical activity simulating real-life conditions, we performed a multi-omics analysis of three biofluids (blood plasma, urine, and saliva) collected from 11 wildland firefighters before and after a 45 min, intense exercise regimen. Omics profiles post- versus pre-exercise were compared by Student's t-test followed by pathway analysis and comparison between the different omics modalities.

Results: Our multi-omics analysis identified and quantified 3835 proteins, 730 lipids and 182 metabolites combining the 3 different types of samples. The blood plasma analysis revealed signatures of tissue damage and acute repair response accompanied by enhanced carbon metabolism to meet energy demands. The urine analysis showed a strong, concomitant regulation of 6 out of 8 identified proteins from the renin-angiotensin system supporting increased excretion of catabolites, reabsorption of nutrients and maintenance of fluid balance. In saliva, we observed a decrease in 3 pro-inflammatory cytokines and an increase in 8 antimicrobial peptides. A systematic literature review identified 6 papers that support an altered susceptibility to respiratory infection.

Conclusion: This study shows simultaneous regulatory signatures in biofluids indicative of homeostatic maintenance during intense physical activity with possible effects on increased infection susceptibility, suggesting that caution against respiratory diseases could benefit workers on highly physical demanding jobs.

Hypoxic-ischemic injury is a common pathological dysfunction in clinical settings. Mitochondria are sensitive organelles that are readily damaged following ischemia and hypoxia. Dynamin-related protein 1 (Drp1) regulates mitochondrial quality and cellular functions via its oligomeric changes and multiple modifications, which plays a role in mediating the induction of multiple organ damage during hypoxic-ischemic injury. However, there is active controversy and gaps in knowledge regarding the modification, protein interaction, and functions of Drp1, which both hinder and promote development of Drp1 as a novel therapeutic target. Here, we summarize recent findings on the oligomeric changes, modification types, and protein interactions of Drp1 in various hypoxic-ischemic diseases, as well as the Drp1-mediated regulation of mitochondrial quality and cell functions following ischemia and hypoxia. Additionally, potential clinical translation prospects for targeting Drp1 are discussed. This review provides new ideas and targets for proactive interventions on multiple organ damage induced by various hypoxic-ischemic diseases.

Integrated traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicine (WM) is a new medical science grounded in the knowledge bases of both TCM and WM, which then forms a unique modern medical system in China. Integrated TCM and WM has a long history in China, and has made important achievements in the process of clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, the methodological defects in currently published clinical practice guidelines limit its development. The organic integration of TCM and WM is a deeper integration of TCM and WM. To realize the progression of "integration" to "organic integration", a targeted and standardized guideline development methodology is needed. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to establish a standardized development procedure for clinical practice guidelines for the organic integration of TCM and WM to promote the systematic integration of TCM and WM research results into clinical practice guidelines in order to achieve optimal results as the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Auscultation is crucial for the diagnosis of respiratory system diseases. However, traditional stethoscopes have inherent limitations, such as inter-listener variability and subjectivity, and they cannot record respiratory sounds for offline/retrospective diagnosis or remote prescriptions in telemedicine. The emergence of digital stethoscopes has overcome these limitations by allowing physicians to store and share respiratory sounds for consultation and education. On this basis, machine learning, particularly deep learning, enables the fully-automatic analysis of lung sounds that may pave the way for intelligent stethoscopes. This review thus aims to provide a comprehensive overview of deep learning algorithms used for lung sound analysis to emphasize the significance of artificial intelligence (AI) in this field. We focus on each component of deep learning-based lung sound analysis systems, including the task categories, public datasets, denoising methods, and, most importantly, existing deep learning methods, i.e., the state-of-the-art approaches to convert lung sounds into two-dimensional (2D) spectrograms and use convolutional neural networks for the end-to-end recognition of respiratory diseases or abnormal lung sounds. Additionally, this review highlights current challenges in this field, including the variety of devices, noise sensitivity, and poor interpretability of deep models. To address the poor reproducibility and variety of deep learning in this field, this review also provides a scalable and flexible open-source framework that aims to standardize the algorithmic workflow and provide a solid basis for replication and future extension: https://github.com/contactless-healthcare/Deep-Learning-for-Lung-Sound-Analysis .

Background: Climate change profoundly shapes the population health at the global scale. However, there was still insufficient and inconsistent evidence for the association between heat exposure and chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Methods: In the present study, we studied the association of heat exposure with hospitalizations for cause-specific CKD using a national inpatient database in China during the study period of hot season from 2015 to 2018. Standard time-series regression models and random-effects meta-analysis were developed to estimate the city-specific and national averaged associations at a 7 lag-day span, respectively.

Results: A total of 768,129 hospitalizations for CKD was recorded during the study period. The results showed that higher temperature was associated with elevated risk of hospitalizations for CKD, especially in sub-tropical cities. With a 1 °C increase in daily mean temperature, the cumulative relative risks (RR) over lag 0-7 d were 1.008 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.003-1.012] for nationwide. The attributable fraction of CKD hospitalizations due to high temperatures was 5.50%. Stronger associations were observed among younger patients and those with obstructive nephropathy. Our study also found that exposure to heatwaves was associated with added risk of hospitalizations for CKD compared to non-heatwave days (RR = 1.116, 95% CI 1.069-1.166) above the effect of daily mean temperature.

Conclusions: Short-term heat exposure may increase the risk of hospitalization for CKD. Our findings provide insights into the health effects of climate change and suggest the necessity of guided protection strategies against the adverse effects of high temperatures.

The treatment of chronic and non-healing wounds in diabetic patients remains a major medical problem. Recent reports have shown that hydrogel wound dressings might be an effective strategy for treating diabetic wounds due to their excellent hydrophilicity, good drug-loading ability and sustained drug release properties. As a typical example, hyaluronic acid dressing (Healoderm) has been demonstrated in clinical trials to improve wound-healing efficiency and healing rates for diabetic foot ulcers. However, the drug release and degradation behavior of clinically-used hydrogel wound dressings cannot be adjusted according to the wound microenvironment. Due to the intricacy of diabetic wounds, antibiotics and other medications are frequently combined with hydrogel dressings in clinical practice, although these medications are easily hindered by the hostile environment. In this case, scientists have created responsive-hydrogel dressings based on the microenvironment features of diabetic wounds (such as high glucose and low pH) or combined with external stimuli (such as light or magnetic field) to achieve controllable drug release, gel degradation, and microenvironment improvements in order to overcome these clinical issues. These responsive-hydrogel dressings are anticipated to play a significant role in diabetic therapeutic wound dressings. Here, we review recent advances on responsive-hydrogel dressings towards diabetic wound healing, with focus on hydrogel structure design, the principle of responsiveness, and the behavior of degradation. Last but not least, the advantages and limitations of these responsive-hydrogels in clinical applications will also be discussed. We hope that this review will contribute to furthering progress on hydrogels as an improved dressing for diabetic wound healing and practical clinical application.