Biology subjects

Dai, B.

Publications and source records attributed to Dai, B..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Population based hospitalization burden of laboratory-confirmed hand, foot and mouth disease caused by multiple enterovirus serotypes in southern China

BackgroundHand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is spread widely across Asia, and the hospitalization burden is as yet not well understood. Here, we estimated serotype-specific and age-specific hospitalization rates of HFMD in Southern China.\n\nMethodsWe enrolled pediatric patients admitted to 3/3 county-level hospitals and 3/23 township level hospitals in Anhua county, Hunan (CN) with HFMD, and collected samples to identify enterovirus serotypes by RT-PCRs between October 2013 and September 2016. The information of other eligible but un-enrolled patients were retrospectively collected from the same six hospitals. Monthly number of hospitalizations for all causes was collected from each of 23 township level hospitals to extrapolate hospitalizations associated with HFMD among these.\n\nResultsDuring the three years, an estimated 3,236 pediatric patients were hospitalized with lab-confirmed HFMD, and among these only one patient was severe. The mean hospitalization rates were 660 (95% CI: 638-684) per 100,000 person-years for lab-confirmed HFMD, with higher rates among CV-A16 and CV-A6 associated HFMD (213 vs 209 per 100,000 person-years), and lower among EV-A71, CV-A10 and other enteroviruses associated HFMD (134, 39 and 66 per 100,000 person-years, p<0.001). Children aged 12-23 months had the highest hospitalization rates (3,594/100,000 person-years), followed by those aged 24-35 months (1,828/100,000 person-years) and 6-11 months (1,572/100,000 person-years). Compared with other serotypes, CV-A6-associated hospitalizations were evident at younger ages.\n\nConclusionsOur study indicates a substantial hospitalization burden associated with non-severe HFMD in a rural county in southern China. Future mitigation policies should take into account the disease burden identified, and optimize interventions for HFMD.

epidemiology↗

bioRxiv2018

Altered Bacteria-Fungi Inter-Kingdom Network in Gut of Ankylosing Spondylitis Patients

Intestinal bacterial dysbiosis has been increasingly linked to Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), which is a prototypic and best studied subtype of Spondyloarthritis (SpA). Fungi and bacteria coexist in human gut and interact with each other, although they have been shown to contribute actively to health or diseases, no studies have investigated whether fungal microbiota in AS patients is perturbed. In this study, fecal samples of 22 AS patients, with clinical and radiographic assessments, and 16 healthy controls (HCs) were collected to systematically characterize the gut microbiota and mycobiota in AS patients by 16S rDNA and ITS2-based DNA sequencing. The relationships between therapeutic regimens, disease activity, radiographic damage of AS and gut micro/mycobiome were investigated. Our results showed a distinct mycobiota pattern in AS in addition to microbiota dysbiosis. The gut mycobiome of AS patients was characterized by higher taxonomic levels of Ascomycota, especially the class of Dothideomycetes, and decreased abundance of Basidiomycota, which was mainly contributed by the decease of Agaricales. Compared to HCs, changing of the ITS2/16S biodiversity ratio, and bacteria-fungi interkingdom network were observed in AS patients. Alteration of gut mycobiota was associated with different therapeutic regimens, disease activity, as well as different degrees of radiographic damage. Moreover, we unraveled a disease-specific interkingdom network alteration in AS. Finally, we also identified some trends suggesting that different therapeutic regimens may induce changing of both bacterial and fungal microbiota in AS.\n\nIMPORTANCEHuman gut is colonized by diverse fungi (mycobiome), and they have long been suspected in the pathogenesis of Spondyloarthritis (SpA). Our study unraveled a disease-specific interkingdom network alteration in AS, suggesting that fungi, or the interkingdom interactions between bacteria and fungi, may play an essential role in AS development. However, limited by sample size and indeep mechanism studies, further large scale investigations on the characterization of gut mycobiome in AS patients are needed to form a foundation for research into the relationship between mycobiota dysbiosis and AS development.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2018

Distracting linguistic information impairs neural entrainment to attended speech

Listening to speech is difficult in noisy environments, and is even harder when the interfering noise consists of intelligible speech as compared to unintelligible sounds. This suggests that the competing linguistic information interferes with the neural processing of target speech. Interference could either arise from a degradation of the neural representation of the target speech, or from increased representation of distracting speech that enters in competition with the target speech. We tested these alternative hypotheses using magnetoencephalography (MEG) while participants listened to a target clear speech in the presence of distracting noise-vocoded speech. Crucially, the distractors were initially unintelligible but became more intelligible after a short training session. Results showed that the comprehension of the target speech was poorer after training than before training. The neural tracking of target speech in the delta range (1-4 Hz) reduced in strength in the presence of a more intelligible distractor. In contrast, the neural tracking of distracting signals was not significantly modulated by intelligibility. These results suggest that the presence of distracting speech signals degrades the linguistic representation of target speech carried by delta oscillations.

neuroscience↗