Effect of pregnancy, menopause and hormone substitution therapy on disseminated systemic lupus erythematosus

EXACERBATIONS DURING PREGNANCY: Clinical and experimental data have clearly evidenced the influence of hormones on the course of systemic lupus erythematosus. In prospective studies of pregnant women, an exacerbation is observed in 57% to 60% of the cases. It can be severe in 10% of the cases and occur in the post partum in 7%. For most patients, the exacerbation is moderate and has no unfavorable effect on the outcome of pregnancy. In case of renal involvement, it is difficult to differentiate an intricated HELPP syndrome. MARKERS AND RISK FACTORS: Low complement and elevated anti-DNA levels are distinctive markers. Earlier renal involvement and hypertension are important prognostic factors, particularly when the lupus begins during pregnancy. However, when serum creatinine is lower than 100 mumol/l at pregnancy onset in patients in remission, pregnancy does not alter renal function. An association with antiphospholipid antibodies increases the risk for the fetus and the kidney function. TREATMENT: Optimal treatment remains to be defined. Commonly, patients are given aspirin, heparin in case of a history of thromboembolism, or both. The rate of success currently exceeds 70%. The risk of thromboembolism in the peri or post partum period requires anticoagulant treatment. Outside pregnancy: Ovulation induction raises two risks: triggering a lupus flare-up and thrombosis, particularly for patients with antiphospholipid antibodies. The influence of menopause and hormone replacement therapy remains poorly understood.     

Predictors of men's acceptance of modern contraceptive practice: study in rural Vietnam.

Studies have shown family planning adoption is likely to be more effective for women when men are actively involved. The transtheoretical model of behavior change was used to examine men's involvement in general contraception and intrauterine device (IUD) use by their wives. The study was carried out in rural Vietnam with 651 eligible participants. Cons of IUD use for men in precontemplation and contemplation/preparation were significantly higher than those in the action/maintenance stages, whereas the reverse was true for pros of IUD. The self-efficacy for convincing wife to have IUD in precontemplation was significantly lower than for those in higher stages. Women's education and ages, spontaneous recall of modern contraceptive method, cons for IUD, and self-efficacy for contraception and for convincing wives to get IUD inserted (or continue use) were significant predictors of men's readiness to accept IUD. Interventions are targeted to reduce cons and increase self-efficacy for IUD use.     

A ridge-to-reef ecosystem microbial census reveals environmental reservoirs for animal and plant microbiomes

Microbes are found in nearly every habitat and organism on the planet, where they are critical to host health, fitness, and metabolism. In most organisms, few microbes are inherited at birth; instead, acquiring microbiomes generally involves complicated interactions between the environment, hosts, and symbionts. Despite the criticality of microbiome acquisition, we know little about where hosts’ microbes reside when not in or on hosts of interest. Because microbes span a continuum ranging from generalists associating with multiple hosts and habitats to specialists with narrower host ranges, identifying potential sources of microbial diversity that can contribute to the microbiomes of unrelated hosts is a gap in our understanding of microbiome assembly. Microbial dispersal attenuates with distance, so identifying sources and sinks requires data from microbiomes that are contemporary and near enough for potential microbial transmission. Here, we characterize microbiomes across adjacent terrestrial and aquatic hosts and habitats throughout an entire watershed, showing that the most species-poor microbiomes are partial subsets of the most species-rich and that microbiomes of plants and animals are nested within those of their environments. Furthermore, we show that the host and habitat range of a microbe within a single ecosystem predicts its global distribution, a relationship with implications for global microbial assembly processes. Thus, the tendency for microbes to occupy multiple habitats and unrelated hosts enables persistent microbiomes, even when host populations are disjunct. Our whole-watershed census demonstrates how a nested distribution of microbes, following the trophic hierarchies of hosts, can shape microbial acquisition.

Microbial partners metabolize our food, fight off disease, and run the machinery that sustains the air we breathe, water we drink, and soil under our feet. Despite their importance, most host-associated microbes are generally not present at birth and are instead acquired (1). Because microbial symbionts can influence host health and fitness, the processes that determine how different microbiomes assemble within different hosts is a matter of active and urgent inquiry. Microbial ecologists have made great progress in determining how factors such as abiotic conditions (2–4), host evolution (5, 6), and microbial traits (7–9) shape environmental microbiomes, but considerably less is known about how surrounding environments or different guilds of host organisms contribute to host-associated microbiome composition. Longitudinal studies show that microbial richness accumulates and community composition changes over time across a wide diversity of hosts and habitats (1), but we know comparatively little about from where these microbes originate. To better understand microbial transmission and its role in community composition, we propose a framework that relies on theory from foodweb and landscape ecology.The concept of a foodweb has had a place in the ecological lexicon since at least the time of Elton (1927; (10)), and others such as Lindeman (11) and Odum (12) significantly expanded upon this notion to include how macroorganisms interact within their environments, in addition to their feeding relationships. The units of study for foodwebs are ecosystems, which are spatially explicit and include all organisms along with their abiotic environments and their interactions within its bounds (13). This definition was born from the efforts of the founders of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES; 1963), who recognized that a watershed naturally delineates the boundaries of an ecosystem, an idea that parallels the Hawaiian ahupuaʻa concept. Since then, the HBES and its framework have led to numerous milestones in our understanding of processes such as the effects of long-term changes in acidification (14) and ecosystem impacts of global warming (15). Here, we adopt the notion of the watershed as an entire discrete ecosystem to better understand the landscape ecology of microbes. Landscape ecology is a means to understand how spatial processes affect biodiversity (16). In classic landscape ecology theory, the structure (heterogeneity) and fragmentation of habitats (or patches) within a matrix of otherwise inhospitable areas affect species’ dispersal ability and establishment. This ultimately shapes species’ abundance and distributions across the landscape (17). Contemporary landscape ecology theory extends this idea to include the concept of a landscape continuum, where continuous environmental variables, as opposed to discrete habitat patches surrounded by a matrix, better describe species’ distributions. Connecting these concepts, foodwebs are embedded in landscapes, and watersheds constitute a useful unit of measure to better understand their interactions.To expand concepts from foodweb and landscape ecology to be inclusive of microbes, we must first consider the following: a landscape for microbes can be both structural (e.g., different land covers or hydrology) and biotic (e.g., variation in the distribution of host populations). Also, microbes might better fit a continuous landscape model rather than a patch model if their distributions are not governed merely by the presence of a compatible host or habitat, but rather, if they exist among multiple hosts across a gradient of environmental conditions. This requires microbes to be generalists to some degree and/or a matrix that is at least partially hospitable (18). These considerations are important because while microbial transmission among related hosts is one obvious means of microbiome assembly, this model, in and of itself, is insufficient to sustain microbiomes (defined here as communities of bacteria and archaea) across a dynamic landscape. For example, many plants and animals are either sparse, seasonal, or ephemeral, requiring that their symbiotic microbes be capable of residing, at times, in alternate nearby hosts or environments. This potential for a microbe to persist in, and disperse among, hosts of different kingdoms and guilds, or even between liquid and land, is a trait with the potential to add an additional dimension to microbiome assembly theory (19). Where, then, might a host’s microbes reside when not inside that host? In addition, what factors might predict microbiome distributions among potentially interacting hosts and environments?Variability in matrix suitability and host specialization may result in differing microbial communities reflected in one of three nonmutually exclusive patterns, each of which leaves a diagnostic imprint on microbiome structure. If any host or environment has an equal likelihood of harboring microbes that are present in any other host or environment, we might expect host–microbe interaction networks that are randomly structured. Alternatively, if microbes are more likely to co-occur among related hosts or guilds, we might expect these to contain unique and specific consortia of microbes (modules) that are not found elsewhere in the interaction network. Finally, host–microbe interactions might be best characterized as stratified, resulting in a network topology in which microbial diversity is nested such that taxa-poor microbiomes are subsets of those that are taxa-rich. In this scenario, nonhost environmental matrices (e.g., soil, sediment, water) serve as reservoirs of broad microbial diversity that is subsequently, and hierarchically, partitioned into simpler microbiomes. While this concept is fairly intuitive, there are actually few, if any, studies that demonstrate transmission among environmental microbiomes and multiple hosts at ecosystem scales. Instead, many of the insights gleaned into assembly processes of microbiomes are owed to studies of single hosts, tractable model systems, or global syntheses (20). We address this gap by sampling microbiomes from aquatic, marine, and terrestrial foodwebs within a single watershed to examine the dynamics of sources and sinks of microbial diversity.Here, we present a microbial census of a model ecosystem metacommunity in which continental-scale environmental heterogeneity is recapitulated within a comparatively small watershed. Because of this, we can surmise the distribution limits of microbiomes across land, stream, and sea, a feat that would not be plausible in most other landscapes of similar size or environmental variability. From ridge to reef, our compact watershed spans a roughly 3.5 m rainfall differential, ∼27 times that encountered along the Mississippi, the largest watershed in continental North America. Also, our model ecosystem is located on the most isolated archipelago on the planet, making exogenous microbial inputs infrequent, if not unlikely. Furthermore, owing to parallels in environmental heterogeneity and foodweb structure across this compact watershed compared to others, our findings are potentially relevant for highly connected ecosystems that span substantially larger geographic areas.For example, a long-standing question in biogeography is the relationship between organisms’ local distributions and those at larger scales. Many factors influence the distributions of microbes, including their physiology, size, population density, and dispersal abilities (21–23). A common assumption is that niche breadth should also predict the range size of an organism, since the ability to survive in broader environments, and to use a greater array of resources, should indicate the ability to occupy more habitats that occur over greater distances (24, 25). This is an important component of source and sink dynamics, because it suggests that local occupancy should predict global distributions. This relationship is seldom tested empirically, however, because small areas rarely contain, or are sampled for, broad climatic variability and host diversity. In the absence of phenotypic, genomic, or even well-resolved taxonomic information about the majority of the earth’s microbial biodiversity, geographic range is one of the few traits that can be directly inferred from short environmental DNA sequence reads. By examining our ecosystem-wide microbiome census within the context of the global survey of the Earth Microbiome Project (26), we assess the relationship between global and local microbial distributions.     

Chestnut Shell-Activated Carbon Mixed with Pyrolytic Snail Shells for Methylene Blue Adsorption

Activated carbon has been used to treat organic dyes in water systems; however, the adsorption capacity of the samples studied was limited by the specific surface area and influenced by the pH of the aqueous solution. In this study, a hybrid adsorbent consisting of a mixture (MCS) of activated chestnut shell biochar (CN) and pyrolyzed snail shell material (SS) was developed to solve this problem, with the waste snail shell samples being processed by pyrolysis and the chestnut shell samples chemically pretreated and then pyrolyzed. The BET and SEM results revealed that the SS had a mesoporous fluffy structure with a higher specific surface (1705 m²/g) and an average pore diameter of about 4.07 nm, providing a large number of sites for adsorption. In addition, XPS and FTIR results showed that the main component of SS was calcium oxide, and it also contained a certain amount of calcium carbonate, which not only provided an alkaline environment for the adsorption of biochar but also degradation and photocatalytic capabilities. The results showed that the MCS3-1 sample, obtained when CN and SS were mixed in the ratio of 3:1, had good capacity for adsorption for methylene blue (MB), with 1145 mg/g at an initial concentration of 1300 mg/L (92% removal rate). The adsorption behaviors were fitted with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model and Freundlich isotherm model, which indicated that the adsorption was multilayer chemisorption with a saturated adsorption capacity of 1635 mg/g. The photocatalytic capacity from the SS composition was about 89 mg/g, and the sorption of MB dye onto the sorbent reached equilibrium after 300 min. The results suggested that MCS3-1 has enormous potential for removing MB from wastewater.     

Experimental Design,Equilibrium Modeling and Kinetic Studies on the Adsorption of Methylene Blue by Adsorbent: Activated Carbon from Durian Shell Waste

For the first time, activated carbon from a durian shell (ACDS) activated by H₂SO₄ was successfully synthesized in the present study. The fabricated ACDS has a porous surface with a specific surface area of 348.0017 m²·g⁻¹, average capillary volume of 0.153518 cm³·g⁻¹, the average pore diameter of 4.3800 nm; ash level of 55.63%; humidity of 4.74%; density of 0.83 g·cm⁻³; an iodine index of 634 mg·g⁻¹; and an isoelectric point of 6.03. Several factors affecting Methylene Blue (MB) adsorption capacity of ACDS activated carbon was investigated by the static adsorption method, revealing that the adsorption equilibrium was achieved after 90 min. The best adsorbent pH for MB is 7 and the mass/volume ratio is equal to 2.5 g·L⁻¹. The MB adsorption process of ACDS activated carbon follows the Langmuir, Freundlich, Tempkin, and Elovich isotherm adsorption model, which has determined the maximum adsorption capacity for MB of ACDS as q_max = 57.47 mg·g⁻¹. The MB adsorption process of ACDS follows the of pseudo-second-order adsorption kinetic equation. The Weber and Morris Internal Diffusion Model, the Hameed and Daud External Diffusion Model of liquids have been studied to see if the surface phase plays any role in the adsorption process. The results of thermodynamic calculation of the adsorption process show that the adsorption process is dominated by chemical adsorption and endothermic. The obtained results provide an insight for potential applications of ACDS in the treatment of water contaminated by dyes.     

Relationship between Vitamin Intake and Resilience Based on Sex in Middle-Aged and Older Japanese Adults: Results of the Shika Study

Epidemiological studies reported that resilience, generally regarded as the ability to manage stress in the face of adversity, correlates with mental health in middle-aged and older adults. Currently, there is limited information on eating habits that affect resilience. Therefore, this cross-sectional study investigated the relationship between vitamin intake and resilience based on sex in community-dwelling middle-aged and older individuals in Shika town, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. A total of 221 participants (106 men and 115 women) aged 40 years or older were included in the analysis. We assessed vitamin intake and resilience using a brief-type self-administered diet history questionnaire (BDHQ) and the resilience scale (RS), respectively. A two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) revealed that higher intakes of β-carotene and vitamin K were associated with higher RS in women, but not in men. Furthermore, a multiple logistic regression analysis stratified by sex showed that β-carotene and vitamin K were significant independent variables for RS only in women. The present study suggests that higher intakes of β-carotene and vitamin K were associated with higher resilience among middle-aged and older women. The results obtained demonstrate that β-carotene and vitamin K intakes may enhance resilience by strengthening stress tolerance.     

Ultra-low detection limit chemoresistive NO2 gas sensor using single transferred MoS2 flake: an advanced nanofabrication

In this work, a method of fabricating a NO₂ nano-sensor working at room temperature with a low detectable concentration limit is proposed. A 2D-MoS₂ flake is isolated by transferring a single MoS₂ flake to SiO₂/Si substrate, followed by applying an advanced e-beam lithography (EBL) to form a metal contact with Au/Cr electrodes. The resulting chemoresistive nano-sensor using a single MoS₂ flake was applied to detect a very low concentration of NO₂ at the part-per-billion (ppb) level. This result is obtained due to the ability to create microscopic nano-sized MoS₂ gaps using e-beam lithography (300 nm–400 nm). Experimental results also show that the sensor can capture changes in concentration and send the information out extremely quickly. The response and recovery time of the sensor also reached the lowest point of 50 and 75 ms, outperforming other sensors with a similar concentration working range.

In this work, a method of fabricating a NO₂ nano-sensor working at room temperature with a low detectable concentration limit is proposed.     

Stilbenes and oligostilbenes from leaf and stem of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Vitis amurensis</Emphasis> and their cytotoxic activity

Chromatographic separation of the EtOAc fraction from the leaf and stem of Vitis amurensis led to the isolation of six oligostilbenoids (i.e., r-2-viniferin (1), trans-amurensin B (2), trans-ɛ-viniferin (3), gnetin H (4), amurensin G (5), (+)-ampelopsin A (8)) and four stilbenoids (i.e., trans-resveratrol (6), (+)-ampelopsin F (7), piceatannol (9), and trans-piceid (10)). The structures have been identified on the basis of spectroscopic evidence and physicochemical properties. The isolates were investigated for cytotoxic activity against three cancer cell lines in vitro using the MTT assay method. Amurensin G (5) and trans-resveratrol (6) showed significant cytotoxic activity against L1210, K562 and HTC116 cancer cell lines with IC₅₀ values ranging from 15.7 ± 2.1 to 30.9 ± 1.8 μM. (+)-Ampelopsin A (8) and trans-piceid (10) exhibited considerable cytotoxic activity against L1210 (IC₅₀ values of 30.6 ± 4.1 and 28.7 ± 2.81 μM, respectively) and K562 (IC₅₀ values of 38.6 ± 0.82 and 24.6 ± 0.76 μM, respectively). Gnetin H (4) showed only weak cytotoxic activity against L1210 with an IC₅₀ value of 40.1 ± 4.23 μM. On the other hand, r-2-viniverin (1), trans-amurensin B (2), trans-ɛ-viniferin (3), (+)-ampelopsin F (7), and piceatannol (9) exhibited no activity on three cancer cell lines.