Mol Med Rep
July 2025
Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect, affecting 2‑8% of newborns, with a marked impact on neonatal health. In the present study, the parents of a fetus diagnosed with CHD were recruited to investigate the genetic causes of this condition. Whole exome sequencing was conducted on tissue obtained from the fetus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThermogenic adipose tissue, consisting of brown and beige fat, regulates nutrient utilization and energy metabolism. Human brown fat is relatively scarce and decreases with obesity and aging. Hence, inducing thermogenic differentiation of white fat offers an attractive way to enhance whole-body metabolic capacity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClinical studies have shown that individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) are particularly susceptible to infectious diseases, resulting in a syndrome called SCI-induced immunodeficiency syndrome (SCI-IDS), which is the leading cause of death after SCI. It is believed that SCI-IDS is associated with exaggerated activation of sympathetic preganglionic neurons (SPNs). After SCI, disruption of bulbospinal projections from the medulla oblongata C1 neurons to the SPNs results in the loss of sympathetic inhibitory modulation from the brain and brainstem and the occurrence of abnormally high levels of spinal sympathetic reflexes (SSR), named sympathetic hyperreflexia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrown and beige adipocytes are renowned for their unique ability to generate heat through a mechanism known as thermogenesis. This process can be induced by exposure to cold, hormonal signals, drugs, and dietary factors. The activation of these thermogenic adipocytes holds promise for improving glucose metabolism, reducing fat accumulation, and enhancing insulin sensitivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, thermogenic differentiation and activation in brown and white adipose tissues have been regarded as one of the major innovative and promising strategies for the treatment and amelioration of obesity. However, the pharmacological approach towards this process has had limited and insufficient commitments, which presents a greater challenge for obesity treatment. This research evaluates the effects of U0126 compound on the activation of thermogenic differentiation during adipogenesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Playing computer-aided games could enhance children's interest in learning about nutritional knowledge and eventually promote healthy dietary intake behavior.
Objective: This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a computer game (Healthy Rat King) in improving the knowledge on nutrition and junk food intake among preschool children in Taiwan.
Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study that utilized the computer game Healthy Rat King as the nutrition education tool.
Polymers (Basel)
October 2020
Hemostasis is a process causing bleeding to stop, and it is known from the literature that hemostasis can be enhanced using chitosan on wound gauzes. We proposed here a continuous flow-through device, with the test blood flowing through the gauze sample at a constant flow rate and the pressure drop across the gauze measured, for assessing the hemostatic performance of the gauze. Experiments were performed using the device with both whole blood and washed blood (with clotting factors and platelets removed from the whole blood), and their results agree with each other within 10% discrepancy, indicating quantitatively that hemostatic enhancement via chitosan is essentially independent of classical clotting pathways, which was demonstrated qualitatively through animal tests in the literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF(BP) is an edible Asteraceae plant found worldwide that has traditionally been used as food without noticeable side effects. BP has also been used as an herbal medicine to treat over 41 categories of disease in humans and animals. However, to date no long-term toxicity study of BP has been conducted in animals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMath Biosci Eng
May 2019
According to the educational regulations in Taiwan, students are required to learn English when they are at the first grade of elementary school. However, not all the students have an appropriate environment to practice English, especially, for those students whose school is not located in the city. Thus, their English abilities in speaking, reading, and listening are poor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSensors (Basel)
April 2018
Modern societies are moving toward an information-oriented environment. To gather and utilize information around people's modern life, tiny devices with all kinds of sensing devices and various sizes of gateways need to be deployed and connected with each other through the Internet or proxy-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Within this kind of Internet of Things (IoT) environment, how to authenticate each other between two communicating devices is a fundamental security issue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEimeriosis is a severe protozoan disease in poultry. Because of increasing concern about drug residue and drug resistance with the use of anticoccidial drugs, natural products are emerging as an alternative and complementary approach to control avian eimeriosis. Our previous publication showed that feed supplemented with B.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNan Fang Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao
November 2007
Objective: To investigate the expression of B7-H1 on peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients with chronic HBV infection.
Methods: Immunofluorescent staining and flow cytometry assay were used to measure the expression of B7-H1 on peripheral blood CD3high T cells, CD19high B cells and CD14high monocytes from chronic HBV infected patients.
Results: No significant difference was observed in B7-H1 expression on T cells and B cells between chronic HBV infected patients (CHB) and health controls (HC).