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Background: There are accumulating studies investigating the association between vitamin D status and the risk of atrial fibrillation (AF). However, the results in these studies were inconsistent in regard to the role of vitamin D deficiency in predicting the development of AF. Hypothesis: Vitamin D deficiency is associated increased risk of AF. Methods: Using PubMed and Embase databases, we searched for records published before March 2016. Additionally, a manual search was conducted using all review articles on this topic. Of the 587 initially identified records, 8 studies with a total of 27 307 patients were finally analyzed. Results: In the categorical variable analysis, vitamin D deficiency was associated with the occurrence of AF (odds ratio: 1.31, 95% confidence interval: 1.06-1.62, P = 0.01). In the continuous variable analysis, higher vitamin D levels appear to protect against the development of AF (odds ratio: 0.92, 95% confidence interval: 0.87-0.97, P = 0.002). However, the association is weak on the pooled analysis of prospective cohort studies focused on new-onset AF (P = 0.07 and 0.04), whereas the pooled analysis of case-control studies mainly assessing for chronic AF strongly support such an association (both P < 0.0001). Conclusions: Vitamin D deficiency modestly increases the risk of AF. Further studies are needed to determine the if there is a direct causal relationship between vitamin D levels and AF and whether vitamin D supplements will prevent new-onset AF.

The emergence of antibiotic resistance has resulted in an increasing difficulty treating clinical infections associated with biofilms formation, one of the key processes contributed to enhance antibiotic resistance in return. With the rapid development of nanotechnology, a new way to overcome antibiotic resistance was opened up. Based on multiple properties especially antibacterial potential of MoS₂ nanosheets that have aroused wide attention, herein, a novel antimicrobial agent to combat resistant gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and gram-negative Salmonella was prepared using chitosan functionalized MoS₂ nanosheets loading tetracycline hydrochloride drugs (abbreviated to CM-TH). The antibacterial and anti-biofilm activities of CM-TH nanocomposites expressed a synergy effect that the combination of nanomaterials and antibiotics were more efficient than both alone did. Particularly, the MIC values were generally decreased by a factor of dozens, suggesting CM-TH may become a possible alternative to traditional antibiotics in disrupting the biofilms and further to overcome antibiotic resistance in treating medical diseases.

measurements and have recently attracted considerable interest in food safety, medical diagnosis, and environmental monitoring. [1] Among the available diagnostic tools, lateral flow immunoassays (LFIAs) dominated POC field during the past decades due to they are arguably the simplest, cheapest, and user-friendly paper-based POC tests. [2] Thanks to the enhanced Raman scattering of reporters adsorbed on noble metal substrate, the fusion of LFIAs with surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) allow the narrow bandwidth, satisfactory photostability, and signal-readout enormously amplified that permit ultrasensitive analysis. [3] Nevertheless, both conventional Raman reporters, biological species, and nitrocellulose (NC) membrane display multiple spectral bands in the fingerprint region (<1800 cm −1 ), which are generally overlapped and difficult to separate (particularly at weakly test-line), thus compromising the performance and increasing analysis difficulty. [4] To efficiently eliminate interference in the fingerprint region, several chemical groups including nitrile, deuterium, and alkyne have been synthesized as backgroundfree Raman reporters with distinctive signals in the biologically silent region (1800-2800 cm −1 , where neither conventional Raman reporters nor biomolecules do not possess any Raman signal). [5] However, the complicated chemosynthesis and Stimulated surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in combination with engineered nano-tracer offers extraordinary potential in lateral flow immunoassays (LFIAs). Nonetheless, the investigation execution of SERS-LFIA is often compromised by the intricacy and overlap of the Raman fingerprint spectrum as well as the affinity-interference of nano-tracer to antibody. To circumvent these critical issues, an engineered core-shell multifunctional nano-tracer (named APNPs) with precise control of the size of nano-core (AuNPs) and coating of the nano-shell (Prussian blue nanomaterials) is prepared for SERS-LFIA via a modified enlarging particle size and coating modification strategy. Importantly, this nano-tracer exhibits enhanced coupling efficiency, highly retained affinity, reinforced colloid stability, and unique SERS signal (2156 cm −1 ) in the silent region (1800-2800 cm −1 ) with high signal-tobackground ratio simultaneously, all of which are beneficial to the enhancement of the analysis performance. With a proof-of-concept demonstration for detection of ractopamine (RAC), a dual-pattern LFIA that synergizes both the enlarged particle size and coating modification supported colorimetric/biological silence Raman dual-response (coined as the ECCRD assay) is demonstrated by integrating APNPs with the competitive-type immunoreaction. This research may contribute to the rational design of multifunctional nano-tracer, and the ECCRD assay can be expanded for a wide spectrum of applications in environmental monitoring and biomedical diagnosis.

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