BackgroundSystematic reviews (SRs) of TCM have become increasingly popular in China and have been published in large numbers. This review provides the first examination of epidemiological characteristics of these SRs as well as compliance with the PRISMA and AMSTAR guidelines.ObjectivesTo examine epidemiological and reporting characteristics as well as methodological quality of SRs of TCM published in Chinese journals.MethodsFour Chinese databases were searched (CBM, CSJD, CJFD and Wanfang Database) for SRs of TCM, from inception through Dec 2009. Data were extracted into Excel spreadsheets. The PRISMA and AMSTAR checklists were used to assess reporting characteristics and methodological quality, respectively.ResultsA total of 369 SRs were identified, most (97.6%) of which used the terms systematic review or meta-analysis in the title. None of the reviews had been updated. Half (49.8%) were written by clinicians and nearly half (47.7%) were reported in specialty journals. The impact factors of 45.8% of the journals published in were zero. The most commonly treated conditions were diseases of the circulatory and digestive disease. Funding sources were not reported for any reviews. Most (68.8%) reported information about quality assessment, while less than half (43.6%) reported assessing for publication bias. Statistical mistakes appeared in one-third (29.3%) of reviews and most (91.9%) did not report on conflict of interest.ConclusionsWhile many SRs of TCM interventions have been published in Chinese journals, the quality of these reviews is troubling. As a potential key source of information for clinicians and researchers, not only were many of these reviews incomplete, some contained mistakes or were misleading. Focusing on improving the quality of SRs of TCM, rather than continuing to publish them in great quantity, is urgently needed in order to increase the value of these studies.

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) one of the most common digestive system tumors, threatens the tens of thousands of people with high morbidity and mortality world widely. The purpose of our study was to investigate the related genes of HCC and discover their potential abilities to predict the prognosis of the patients. Methods: We obtained RNA sequencing data of HCC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and performed analysis on protein coding genes. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were selected. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment were conducted to discover biological functions of DEGs. Protein and protein interaction (PPI) was performed to investigate hub genes. In addition, a method of supervised machine learning, recursive feature elimination (RFE) based on random forest (RF) classifier, was used to screen for significant biomarkers. And the basic experiment was conducted by lab, we constructe a clinical patients' database, and obtained the data and results of immunohistochemistry. Results: We identified five biomarkers with significantly high expression to predict survival risk of the HCC patients. These prognostic biomarkers included SPC25, NUF2, MCM2, BLM and AURKA. We also defined a risk score model with these biomarkers to identify the patients who is in high risk. In our single-center experiment, 95 pairs of clinical samples were used to explore the expression levels of NUF2 and BLM in HCC. Immunohistochemical staining results showed that NUF2 and BLM were significantly up-regulated in immunohistochemical staining. High expression levels of NUF2 and BLM indicated poor prognosis. Conclusion: Our investigation provided novel prognostic biomarkers and model in HCC and aimed to improve the understanding of HCC. In the results obtained, we also conducted a part of experiments to verify the theory described earlier, The experimental results did verify our theory.

As an important regulator of neddylation, neural precursor cell expressed developmentally downregulated 8 (Nedd8)-conjugating enzyme E2M (UBE2M) mediates cullin neddylation. Upregulation of the neddylation pathway is associated with tumor progression in intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC). The present study was designed to assess the effects of Nedd8-conjugating enzyme UBE2M knockdown on intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma cells, and to determine the potential underlying mechanisms. UBE2M and associated protein expression levels were determined via immunohistochemistry and western blotting. ICC cells were transfected with short hairpin RNA to knockdown UBE2M expression. Cell Counting Kit-8 and colony formation assays, and xenograft experiments were used to examine cell viability and colony survival in vitro, and tumor formation in vivo. Survival was evaluated using Kaplan-Meier analysis and log-rank tests. Patients with ICC presenting high expression of UBE2M exhibited worse accumulative recurrence and overall survival compared with patients with low expression. Knockdown of UBE2M expression led to a decrease in the viability and clonogenic survival of QBC939 and HUCCT1 cells, and suppressed tumor formation in vivo. UBE2M silencing caused accumulation of cullin-RING ligase substrates (chromatin-licensing and DNA replication factor 1 and origin recognition complex subunit 1), inducing DNA damage responses and apoptosis. The present findings suggested that UBE2M serves an important role in ICC progression and may present as a novel target for the treatment of ICC.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are recognized as an emerging class of master regulators that regulate human gene expression at the post-transcriptional level and are involved in many normal and pathological cellular processes. Mammalian basic HLH (helix-loop-helix)-PER-ARNT-SIM (bHLH-PAS) proteins are heterodimeric transcriptional regulators that sense and respond to environmental signals (such as chemical pollutants) or to physiological signals (for instance hypoxia). In the normal state, bHLH-PAS proteins are responsible for multiple critical aspects of physiology to ensure the cell accurate homeostasis, but dysregulation of these proteins has been shown to contribute to carcinogenic events such as tumor initiation, promotion, and progression. Increasing epidemiological and experimental studies have shown that bHLH-PAS proteins regulate a panel of miRNAs, whereas some miRNAs also target bHLH-PAS proteins. The interaction between miRNAs and certain bHLH-PAS proteins [hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) and aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR)] is relevant to many vital events associated with tumorigenesis. This review will summarize recent findings on the interesting and complicated underlying mechanisms that miRNAs interact with HIFs or AHR in tumors, hopefully to benefit the discovery of novel drug-interfering targets for cancer therapy.

Available evidence of the relationship between cholelithiasis, cholecystectomy, and risk of liver cancer and hence we conducted a meta-analysis to investigate the relationships. PubMed, EMBASE, and ISI Web of Knowledge were searched to identify all published cohort studies and case-control studies that evaluated the relationships of cholelithiasis, cholecystectomy and risk of liver cancer and single-cohort studies which evaluated the incidence of liver cancer among patients who understood cholecystectomy (up to February 2013). Comprehensive meta-analysis software was used for meta-analysis. A total of 11 observational studies (six cohort studies and five case-control studies) were included in this meta-analysis. The result from meta-analysis showed that cholecystectomy (risk ratio [RR]: 1.59, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.01-2.51, I2=72%) and cholecystolithiasis (RR: 5.40, 95% CI: 3.69-7.89, I2=93%) was associated with more liver cancer, especially for intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) (cholecystectomy: RR: 3.51, 95% CI: 1.84-6.71, I2=26%; cholecystolithiasis: RR: 11.06, 95% CI: 6.99-17.52, I2=0%). The pooled standardized incidence rates (SIR) of liver cancer in patients who understood cholecystectomy showed cholecystectomy might increase the incidence of liver cancer (SIR: 1.57, 95% CI: 1.13-2.20, I2=15%). Based on the results of the meta-analysis, cholecystectomy and cholecystolithiasis seemed to be involved in the development of liver cancer, especially for ICC. However, most available studies were case-control studies and short-term cohort studies, so the future studies should more long-term cohort studies should be well-conducted to evaluate the long-term relationship.