Publications by authors named "Xiao-Fan Liu"

After 10 weeks of feeding C57BL/6J mice with a normal diet (ND) or a high-fat diet (HFD), a 7-week intervention with milk fat and whole milk was conducted to assess their long-term effects on host blood lipid levels. The results showed that milk fat and whole milk did not significantly elevate low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) in either ND- or HFD-fed mice. In ND mice, milk fat and whole milk improved gut microbiota diversity and Amplicon Sequence Variants.

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  • Thyroid hormones (THs) have an unclear effect on chronic thyrotoxic myopathy (CTM), prompting a study on their sensitivity and related risks in patients with Graves' disease.
  • A total of 162 patients were divided into CTM and non-CTM groups, and various muscle strength and function tests were conducted to assess their relationship with TH sensitivity.
  • Results showed that higher sensitivity to THs (measured by TFQI) was linked to an increased risk of CTM, with specific tests like lower-limb fatigue (LLFT) and squat-up (SUT) effectively predicting CTM in male and female patients, respectively.
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  • A study evaluated the effectiveness and safety of avatrombopag (AVA) in treating immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) in 121 adult patients across three medical centers in China, filling the gap in limited real-world research.
  • Patients were split into two groups: those intolerant to previous treatments (eltrombopag or hetrombopag) and those unresponsive to them, with differences in medical history and treatment experiences noted.
  • The results showed that 83% of patients had a positive platelet response after AVA treatment, but many faced financial difficulties leading to discontinuation, highlighting both the drug's effectiveness and the economic challenges it poses.
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Phytochemical studies on the leaves and twigs of Garcinia oligantha Merr. led to the isolation of twelve previously undescribed depsidone derivatives (oliganthdepsidones A-L, 1-12). Their structures were elucidated by extensive spectroscopic analysis including H and C NMR, HSQC, HMBC and NOESY along with HRESIMS.

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Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder with a neurodevelopmental origin. Although schizophrenia results from changes in the brain, the underlying biological mechanisms are unknown. Transcriptomics studies quantitative expression changes or qualitative changes of all genes and isoforms, providing a more meaningful biological insight.

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The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of international data sharing and access to improve health outcomes for all. The International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) programme enabled 12 exemplar or driver projects to use existing health-related data to address major research questions relating to the pandemic, and developed data science approaches that helped each research team to overcome challenges, accelerate the data research cycle, and produce rapid insights and outputs. These approaches also sought to address inequity in data access and use, test approaches to ethical health data use, and make summary datasets and outputs accessible to a wider group of researchers.

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Catatonia is a psychomotor syndrome that can occur in a broad spectrum of brain disorders, including schizophrenia. Current findings suggest that the neurobiological process underlying catatonia symptoms in schizophrenia is poorly understood. However, emerging neuroimaging studies in catatonia patients have indicated that a disruption in anatomical connectivity of the cortico-striatal-cerebellar system is part of the neurobiology of catatonia, which could serve as a target of neurostimulation such as electroconvulsive therapy and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.

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  • * Activating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) by using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) could potentially enhance cognitive function in individuals with schizophrenia.
  • * Research reveals that first-episode schizophrenia patients exhibit connectome damage and abnormal brain activity related to the DLPFC and inferior parietal lobule (IPL), suggesting that addressing the DLPFC-IPL pathway could be key to improving cognitive impairments in these patients.
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Objective: The function of Bcl-6 in T follicular helper (Tfh) cell maturation is indispensable, and Tfh cells play a pivotal role in asthma. This study investigated the impact of Bcl-6 on asthmatic traits.

Methods: The microscopic pathological alterations, airway resistance (AR), and lung compliance (LC) were determined in asthmatic mice and Bcl-6 interference mice.

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Understanding different gender roles forms part of the efforts to reduce gender inequality. This paper analyses COVID-19 family clusters outside Hubei Province in mainland China during the 2020 outbreak, revealing significant differences in spreading patterns across gender and family roles. Results show that men are more likely to be the imported cases of a family cluster, and women are more likely to be infected within the family.

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  • Acute thyrotoxic myopathy (ATM) is a rare but serious complication of thyrotoxicosis, typically presenting with bulbar paralysis, and this report highlights the first known Chinese patient with ATM and neck pain.
  • The 23-year-old patient experienced progressive weakness and painful thyroid swelling and was diagnosed with ATM, chronic thyrotoxic myopathy, and Graves' ophthalmopathy due to Graves' disease.
  • Treatment involved a combination of low-dose glucocorticoids, antithyroid drugs, and an intrathyroidal steroid injection, leading to significant improvement without recurrence of symptoms.
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Background: Cognitive impairment is the main factor in the poor prognosis of schizophrenia, but its mechanism remains unclear. The inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is related to various clinical symptoms and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. We aimed to explore the relationship between IPL-related functions and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia.

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Background: Inflammation has been implicated in the pathology of schizophrenia and may cause neuronal cell death and dendrite loss. Neuroimaging studies have highlighted longitudinal brain structural changes in patients with schizophrenia, yet it is unclear whether this is related to inflammation. We aim to address this question, by relating brain structural changes with the transcriptional profile of inflammation markers in the early stage of schizophrenia.

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The lack of systems to automatically extract epidemiological fields from open-access COVID-19 cases restricts the timeliness of formulating prevention measures. Here we present a protocol for using CCIE, a COVID-19 Cases Information Extraction system based on the pre-trained language model. We describe steps for preparing supervised training data and executing python scripts for named entity recognition and text category classification.

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Major psychiatric disorders create a significant public health burden, and mental disorders such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia are major contributors to the national disease burden. The search for biomarkers has been a leading endeavor in the field of biological psychiatry in recent decades. And the application of cross-scale and multi-omics approaches combining genes and imaging in major psychiatric studies has facilitated the elucidation of gene-related pathogenesis and the exploration of potential biomarkers.

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Unlabelled: Human mobility restriction policies have been widely used to contain the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). However, a critical question is how these policies affect individuals' behavioral and psychological well-being during and after confinement periods. Here, we analyze China's five most stringent city-level lockdowns in 2021, treating them as natural experiments that allow for examining behavioral changes in millions of people through smartphone application use.

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Population-level national networks on social media are precious and essential for network science and behavioural science. This study collected a population-level Twitter network, based on both language and geolocation tags. We proposed a set of validation approaches to evaluate the validity of our datasets.

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We analysed the effectiveness of various non-pharmaceutical interventions in containing the 2022 Omicron outbreak in China. The results show that the Rapid Antigen Test contributed to containing the outbreak, reducing the reproduction number by 0.788 (95% CI:−0.

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As a non-invasive detection method and an advanced imaging method, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been widely used in the research of schizophrenia. Although a large number of neuroimaging studies have confirmed that MRI can display abnormal brain phenotypes in patients with schizophrenia, no valid uniform standard has been established for its clinical application. On the basis of previous evidence, we argue that MRI is an important tool throughout the whole clinical course of schizophrenia.

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Although open-access data are increasingly common and useful to epidemiological research, the curation of such datasets is resource-intensive and time-consuming. Despite the existence of a major source of COVID-19 data, the regularly disclosed case reports were often written in natural language with an unstructured format. Here, we propose a computational framework that can automatically extract epidemiological information from open-access COVID-19 case reports.

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Background And Purpose: The proportion of patients with somatic diseases associated with anxiety is increasing each year, and pulmonary nodules have become a non-negligible cause of anxiety, the mechanism of which is unclear. The study focus on the cerebral blood flow (CBF) of anxiety in patients with pulmonary nodules to explore the cerebral perfusion pattern of anxiety associated with pulmonary nodules, blood perfusion status and mode of pulmonary nodule induced anxiety state.

Materials And Methods: Patients with unconfirmed pulmonary nodules were evaluated by Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAMA).

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Precision mitigation of COVID-19 is in pressing need for postpandemic time with the absence of pharmaceutical interventions. In this study, the effectiveness and cost of digital contact tracing (DCT) technology-based on-campus mitigation strategy are studied through epidemic simulations using high-resolution empirical contact networks of teachers and students. Compared with traditional class, grade, and school closure strategies, the DCT-based strategy offers a practical yet much more efficient way of mitigating COVID-19 spreading in the crowded campus.

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Thrombocytopenia is a frequent occurrence in a variety of hematopoietic diseases; however, the details of the mechanism leading to low platelet count remain elusive. Megakaryocytes are a series of progenitor cells responsible for the production of platelets. Alterations in megakaryocytes in the bone marrow are a causative factor resulting in thrombocytopenia in varied diseases.

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Attempts to determine why some patients respond to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) are valuable in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is associated with aberrant dynamic functional architecture, which might impact the efficacy of ECT. We aimed to explore the relationship between pre-treatment temporal variability and ECT acute efficacy.

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