Association of plasma aldosterone concentration with arterial stiffness progression in hypertensive patients: insights from a longitudinal analysis.

Purpose: Limited studies have examined the relationship between plasma aldosterone concentration (PAC) and arterial stiffness progression. This study aimed to investigate the longitudinal association between baseline PAC and arterial stiffness progression in hypertensive patients.

Patients And Methods: This was a longitudinal study conducted at the Hypertension Center of People's Hospital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region between April 2020 and October 2023.

Precipitation changes reshape desert soil microbial community assembly and potential functions.

Understanding the responses of desert microbial communities to escalating precipitation changes is a significant knowledge gap in predicting future soil health and ecological function. Through a five-year precipitation manipulation experiment, we investigated the contrasting eco-evolutionary processes of desert bacteria and fungi that manifested in changes to the assembly and potential functions of the soil microbiome. Elevated precipitation increased the alpha diversity and network complexity of bacteria and fungi, proportion of non-dominant phyla, and abundance of carbon- and nitrogen-fixing bacteria and saprophytic, symbiotic, and pathogenic fungi.

Altered hippocampal effective connectivity predicts BMI and food approach behavior in children with obesity.

Objective: The vicious circle model of obesity proposes that the hippocampus plays a crucial role in food reward processing and obesity. However, few studies focused on whether and how pediatric obesity influences the potential direction of information exchange between the hippocampus and key regions, as well as whether these alterations in neural interaction could predict future BMI and eating behaviors.

Methods: In this longitudinal study, a total of 39 children with excess weight (overweight/obesity) and 51 children with normal weight, aged 8 to 12, underwent resting-state fMRI.

Physalis Calyx seu Fructus relieves chicken intestinal damage to heat via improving the antioxidant ability.

Heat-stress-induced oxidative and inflammatory responses were important factors contributing to chicken intestinal damage. The purpose of this study was based on the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities of Physalis Calyx seu Fructus (Jin Deng Long, JDL) to investigate its efficacy and mechanism in relieving chicken heat stress damage. Primary chicken embryo duodenum cells and 90 30-day-old specific-pathogen-free chicken were randomly divided into control and JDL groups to establish heat stress models and .

An ultra-high absorptivity solar absorber with excellent thermal radiation efficiency based on a metal-dielectric stacked structure.

Metamaterials hold great promise for application in the field of perfect absorbers due to their remarkable ability to manipulate electromagnetic waves. In this work, a full-spectrum ultra-wideband solar absorber with a multilayer metal-dielectric stacked structure is designed. Our absorber is simple and easy to manufacture, with Ti serving as the substrate, overlaid with SiN spacer layers and four pairs of Ti-SiN ring columns.