Short-term exposure to ambient nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter and cause-specific mortality: a causal modeling approach in four regions.

Ambient air pollution still represents a major health burden. While the link between short-term air pollution exposures and mortality has been well-documented globally, few studies have applied causal modeling approaches. Therefore, we aimed to quantify the relationship between day-to-day changes in ambient particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.

Naturally inspired chimeric quinolone derivatives to reverse bacterial drug resistance.

Antimicrobial resistance poses an urgent threat to global health, underscoring the critical need for new antibacterial drugs. Ciprofloxacin, a third-generation quinolone antibiotic, is used to treat different types of bacterial infections; however, it often results in the rapid emergence of resistance in clinical settings. Inspired by low susceptibility to antimicrobial resistance of natural antimicrobial peptides, we herein propose a host defense peptide-mimicking strategy for designing chimeric quinolone derivatives which may reduce the likelihood of antibacterial resistance.

Validation of the Iwate scoring system for the stratification of laparoscopic liver resections: An international multicenter study.

Introduction: The Iwate difficulty scoring system (DSS) is one of the most widely validated DSS for laparoscopic liver resection (LLR). However, these studies only validated the 4 difficulty levels and did not validate the 12-point difficulty index of the system. To address current limitations in the studies validating the Iwate difficulty scoring system (DSS), we performed an international multicenter study to validate the Iwate DSS across both its four difficulty levels and 12-point difficulty index.

Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index as a prognostic marker for predicting survival outcomes in patients with UTUC after radical nephroureterectomy.

The purpose of this study was to determine the prognostic value of the Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index (GNRI) in patients with upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) after radical nephrectomy (RNU). A retrospective study of UTUC patients was conducted at West China Hospital between May 2016 and June 2019. The optimal cut-off point for GNRI was determined using the X-Tile procedure.