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As a traditional Chinese alternative health care approach, acupuncture is gaining increasing attention and reputation in China and overseas. While becoming increasingly popular globally, some consumers and professionals still know little about the therapy and underlying mechanisms of acupuncture. Due to local superiority, there are large numbers of both clinical applications and mechanistic studies performed in China compared to countries overseas. Herein, this review attempts to give a comprehensive profile of the development, application, and mechanisms of acupuncture in treating major diseases. The number of clinical publications concerning acupuncture-treated neurological diseases, endocrine and metabolic diseases, circulatory diseases, respiratory diseases, etc. is first counted, and then, the application and therapeutic mechanisms of acupuncture on the predominant diseases in each category, including obesity, facial paralysis, sciatica, depression, hypertension, asthma, etc., are specifically discussed in this paper. The evolution of acupuncture tools and the rationality of acupoints are also discussed. This review not only summarizes the mechanisms of acupuncture but also provides useful information, such as specific acupoints and acupuncture procedures, for treating common diseases. Therefore, the current study provides useful information for both investigators and acupuncturists.

In this paper, we have investigated women’s malignant disease, cervical cancer, by constructing the compartmental model. An extended fractal–fractional model is used to study the disease dynamics. The points of equilibria are computed analytically and verified by numerical simulations. The key role of $R_0$ in describing the stability of the model is presented. The sensitivity analysis of $R_0$ for deciding the role of certain parameters altering the disease dynamics is carried out. The numerical simulations of the proposed numerical technique are demonstrated to test the claimed facts.

Mathematical modeling has proven to be a viable alternative for investigating the temperature distribution inside the human eye. This is due to its ability to overcome the limitations infrared (IR) thermography; the leading method in ocular temperature measurement. A wide range of mathematical studies on the ocular temperature distribution during various conditions have been published in the literature. In this paper, we carry out an in-depth review of the various mathematical models of the eye that have been developed in the past. Various problems and the implications from the mathematical predictions of these studies are discussed. The future directions of studies in ocular temperature distribution are deliberated.

It is generally, but not always, accepted that alternative food plays a stabilizing role in predator–prey interaction. Parasites, on the other hand, have the ability to change both the qualitative and quantitative dynamics of its host population. In recent times, researchers are showing growing interest in formulating models that integrate both the ecological and epidemiological aspects. The present paper deals with the effect of alternative food on a predator–prey system with disease in the predator population. We show that the system, in the absence of alternative food, exhibits different dynamics viz. stable coexistence, limit cycle oscillations, period-doubling bifurcation and chaos when infection rate is gradually increased. However, when predator consumes alternative food coupled with its focal prey, the system returns to regular oscillatory state from chaotic state through period-halving bifurcations. Our study shows that alternative food may have larger impact on the community structure and may increase population persistence.

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are a type of non-coding RNA molecules that are effective on the formation and the progression of many different diseases. Various researches have reported that miRNAs play a major role in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of complex human diseases. In recent years, researchers have made a tremendous effort to find the potential relationships between miRNAs and diseases. Since the experimental techniques used to find that new miRNA-disease relationships are time-consuming and expensive, many computational techniques have been developed. In this study, Weighted $K$-Nearest Known Neighbors and Network Consistency Projection techniques were suggested to predict new miRNA-disease relationships using various types of knowledge such as known miRNA-disease relationships, functional similarity of miRNA, and disease semantic similarity. An average AUC of 0.9037 and 0.9168 were calculated in our method by 5-fold and leave-one-out cross validation, respectively. Case studies of breast, lung, and colon neoplasms were applied to prove the performance of our proposed technique, and the results confirmed the predictive reliability of this method. Therefore, reported experimental results have shown that our proposed method can be used as a reliable computational model to reveal potential relationships between miRNAs and diseases.

In ecological systems, the fear of predation risk asserts a privilege to the prey species by restricting their exposure to the potential predators. It also imposes costs by constraining the exploration of optimal resources. Additional foods for predators play a pivotal role in the biological conservation programs. The predators have ability to distinguish between the susceptible and infected prey items, and they avoid the latter ones to reduce their fitness cost. A predator-prey model with disease in prey is investigated in this study with an aim to explore the effects of fear factor, additional foods and selective predation on the ecological systems. We also investigate the spatio-temporal model to incorporate the facts that the prey and predator populations perform active movements in the spatial directions for their biological relevance. Both the temporal and spatio-temporal models are analyzed through noteworthy mathematical as well as numerical techniques. Our simulation results show that the level of fear responsible for the reduction in the birth rate of susceptible prey, rate of disease transmission and the selective feeding behavior of predators have potentials to create instability in the ecosystem. In contrast, the level of fear responsible for reduction in the disease prevalence can restore stability in the ecosystem by killing the persistent oscillations. Our eco-epidemic system exhibits chaotic nature if the growth of predators due to additional food sources is very low. We find that the spatio-temporal model demonstrates different spatial patterns of the prey and predator populations in the ecosystem.

Our current research is based on the investigation of an eco-epidemiological model that solely includes illness in predators. Predators, both healthy and diseased, are thought to consume prey and breed; however, the offsprings are expected to be vulnerable. To achieve a more realistic and explicit outcome of the existing phenomena correlated with our model system, we consider that the process of disease transmission is mediated by some time lag and the intensity of disease prevalence is seasonally forced. Our simulation results show that the disease dies out for lower intensity of disease prevalence or higher rate of consumption of prey by susceptible predator. The system undergoes subcritical/supercritical Hopf bifurcation as the parameters representing the intensity of disease prevalence, consumption rate of prey by susceptible/infected predator vary. The system exhibits two types of bistabilities: the first one between stable coexistence and oscillating coexistence, and the second one between two oscillatory coexistence cycles. Moreover, we see that with gradual increase in the incubation delay, the system shows transitions from stable focus to limit cycle oscillations to period doubling oscillations to chaotic dynamics. Chaotic dynamics is also observed for the periodic changes in the intensity of disease prevalence if it takes much time for the pathogens to develop sufficiently inside body of the susceptible predators.

The new idea of group defense as recently introduced by the author in the context of two interacting populations is in this paper applied to communities subject also to a disease. The system is formulated with the bare minimum of interactions among all the populations involved in order to highlight the effects of the nonlinearity describing the defense mechanism. A key parameter identified in the purely demographic model, which completely describes its outcomes, is seen here to have an important role also, in that it is dropping below a threshold prevents the disease from invading the environment and causes the healthy prey and predators to coexist via persistent oscillations.

Physiological status and pathological changes in an individual can be captured by metabolic state that reflects the influence of both genetic variants and environmental factors such as diet, lifestyle and gut microbiome. The totality of environmental exposure throughout lifetime – i.e., exposome – is difficult to measure with current technologies. However, targeted measurement of exogenous chemicals and untargeted profiling of endogenous metabolites have been widely used to discover biomarkers of pathophysiologic changes and to understand functional impacts of genetic variants. To investigate the coverage of chemical space and interindividual variation related to demographic and pathological conditions, we profiled 169 plasma samples using an untargeted metabolomics platform. On average, 1,009 metabolites were quantified in each individual (range 906 – 1,038) out of 1,244 total chemical compounds detected in our cohort. Of note, age was positively correlated with the total number of detected metabolites in both males and females. Using the robust Q_n estimator, we found metabolite outliers in each sample (mean 22, range from 7 to 86). A total of 50 metabolites were outliers in a patient with phenylketonuria including the ones known for phenylalanine pathway suggesting multiple metabolic pathways perturbed in this patient. The largest number of outliers (N=86) was found in a 5-year-old boy with alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency who were waiting for liver transplantation due to cirrhosis. Xenobiotics including drugs, diets and environmental chemicals were significantly correlated with diverse endogenous metabolites and the use of antibiotics significantly changed gut microbial products detected in host circulation. Several challenges such as annotation of features, reference range and variance for each feature per age group and gender, and population scale reference datasets need to be addressed; however, untargeted metabolomics could be immediately deployed as a biomarker discovery platform and to evaluate the impact of genomic variants and exposures on metabolic pathways for some diseases.

Hantavirus outbreaks in the American Southwest are hypothesized to be driven by episodic seasonal events of high precipitation, promoting rapid increases in virus-reservoir rodent species that then move across the landscape from high quality montane forested habitats (refugia), eventually over-running human residences and increasing disease risk. In this study, the velocities of rodents and virus diffusion wave propagation and retraction were documented and quantified in the sky-islands of northern New Mexico and related to rodent-virus relationships in refugia versus nonrefugia habitats. Deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) refugia populations exhibited higher Sin Nombre Virus (SNV) infection prevalence than nonrefugia populations. The velocity of propagating diffusion waves of Peromyscus from montane to lower grassland habitats was measured at $24.6\pm 5.6$ m/day (SE), with wave retraction velocities of $28\pm 8.4$ m/day. SNV infection diffusion wave propagation velocity within a deer mouse population averaged $27.5\pm 7.8$ m/day, with a faster retraction wave velocity of $161.5\pm 80.7$ m/day. A spatio-temporal analysis of human Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) cases during the initial 1993 epidemic revealed a positive linear relationship between the time during the epidemic and the distance of human cases from the nearest deer mouse refugium, with a landscape diffusion wave velocity of $19.6\pm 1.0$ m/day ($r^2=0.96$). These consistent diffusion propagation wave velocity results support the traveling wave component of the HPS outbreak theory and can provide information on space–time constraints for future outbreak forecasts.

Understanding Diabetes

Prediabetes: The Gap between the Onset of Disease and Initiation of Treatment.

Diabetes: A Dietitian’s Perspective.

Use of Modelling for Better Diabetes Care.

No More Highs and Lows with Toujeo®: A New and Improved Insulin Injection.

We have analyzed codon usage for poly-Q stretches of different lengths for the human proteome. First, we have obtained that all long poly-Q stretches in Protein Data Bank (PDB) belong to the disordered regions. Second, we have found the bias for codon usage for glutamine homo-repeats in the human proteome. In the cases when the same codon is used for poly-Q stretches only CAG triplets are found. Similar results are obtained for human proteins with glutamine homo-repeats associated with diseases. Moreover, for proteins associated with diseases (from the HraDis database), the fraction of proteins for which the same codon is used for glutamine homo-repeats is less (22%) than for proteins from the human proteome (26%). We have demonstrated for poly-Q stretches in the human proteome that in some cases (28) the splicing sites correspond to the homo-repeats and in 11 cases, these sites appear at the $C$-terminal part of the homo-repeats with statistical significance 10${}^{-8}$.