Spatiotemporal, kinematic and kinetic assessment of the effects of a foot drop stimulator for home-based rehabilitation of patients with chronic stroke: a randomized clinical trial.

Background: Gait disability affects the daily lives of patients with stroke in both home and community settings. An abnormal foot-ankle position can cause instability on the supporting surface and negatively affect gait. Our research team explored the ability of a portable peroneal nerve-targeting electrical stimulator to improve gait ability by adjusting the foot-ankle position during walking in patients with chronic stroke undergoing home-based rehabilitation.

Dysfunction of natural killer cells mediated by PD-1 and Tim-3 pathway in anaplastic thyroid cancer.

The survival rate of anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) remains about 7% to 14%. The natural killer (NK) cells are a critical component of antitumor immunity, and their composition and function in thyroid cancer patients are investigated in this study. In healthy controls and early stage thyroid cancer patients, >90% of circulating NK cells were CD56CD16 and fewer than 10% were CD56CD16.

Effects and mechanism characterization of ionic liquids as mobile phase additives for the separation of matrine-type alkaloids by liquid chromatography.

The mechanism for the separation of matrine-type alkaloids (sophoridine, sophoramine, sophocarpine, matrine, and oxymatrine) on a C(18) column with a mobile phase containing room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) as additive was studied in the current work by investigating several factors that influenced chromatographic behavior, including mobile phase pH, buffer solution concentration, ionic liquid concentration, and length of alkyl groups in RTILs. Peak efficiency was selected as the criterion for chromatographic efficiency whereas peak efficiency was also selected for triethylamine (TEA). The addition of RTILs in a mobile phase demonstrated superior effects on the separation of these basic compounds because of the increase in peak efficiency.

Requirement of regulated endocrine-specific protein-18 for development and expression of regulated endocrine-specific protein-18 isoform c in mice.

Regulated endocrine-specific protein-18 (RESP18) is distributed mainly in the peripheral endocrine and neuroendocrine tissues. The expression of RESP18 protein is regulated by physiological factors, such as blood glucose or dopaminergic drugs, but its functions remain unclear. In this study, to explore the biological functions of RESP18 in vivo, we generated RESP18 heterozygous deficient mice, and further found RESP18 was essential for embryonic development.