The aim of this study was to compare clinical characteristics, electroneurography (ENoG) results, and functional outcomes of patients with Bell's palsy (BP) and Ramsay Hunt syndrome (RHS).Around 57 patients with BP and 23 patients with RHS were enrolled in this study from January 2010 and September 2015. Both clinical characteristics and ENoG results were recorded at hospital admission. The evaluations of functional outcomes were conducted with House–Brackmann (H-B) grading system at 6-month follow-up.There were no significant differences in age, gender proportion, initial H-B grades, time before commencement of treatment and the presence of comorbid disease in 2 groups. However, the final H-B grades at 6-month follow-up were significantly better in BP patients than RHS patients. The results of ENoG showed that degeneration index (DI) was significantly higher in the RHS group than the BP group. But no significant difference was found in the value of prolonged latency time (PLT) between the 2 groups. In multivariate analysis, age and ENoG DI were independently associated with functional outcome of recovery in the BP group (OR 0.167, 95% CI 0.038–0.622, P = 0.009 and OR 0.289 95% CI 0.107–0.998, P = 0.050, respectively). However, in the RHS group, only ENoG DI was related to the final H-B grades (OR 0.067, 95% CI 0.005–0.882, P = 0.040). Spearman's rank correlation analysis showed that higher age and ENoG DI were related to poorer prognosis in 2 groups (P < 0.05). PLT was related to functional outcomes only in the BP group (rs = 0.460, P < 0.001). The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of ENoG DI analysis revealed that the cutoff value was 67.0% for BP prognosis and 64.5% for RHS prognosis. What's more, patients with hypertension or diabetes mellitus had both higher final H-B grade and ENoG DI than those without the same comorbidity.Patients with RHS had poorer prognosis than those with BP. Some factors including age, ENoG DI, and the presence of disease influenced recovery from BP and RHS. The present study demonstrated that BP patients with ENoG DI < 67.0% and RHS patients with ENoG DI < 65.5% had a greater opportunity for recovery within half a year.

Previous studies have demonstrated the highly specific expression of circular RNAs (circRNAs) in different tissues and organisms, but the cellular architecture of circRNA has never been fully characterized. Here, we present a collection of 171 full-length single-cell RNA-seq datasets to explore the cellular landscape of circRNAs in human and mouse tissues. Through large-scale integrative analysis, we identify a total of 139,643 human and 214,747 mouse circRNAs in these scRNA-seq libraries. We validate the detected circRNAs with the integration of 11 bulk RNA-seq based resources, where 216,602 high-confidence circRNAs are uniquely detected in the single-cell cohort. We reveal the cell-type-specific expression pattern of circRNAs in brain samples, developing embryos, and breast tumors. We identify the uniquely expressed circRNAs in different cell types and validate their performance in tumor-infiltrating immune cell composition deconvolution. This study expands our knowledge of circRNA expression to the single-cell level and provides a useful resource for exploring circRNAs at this unprecedented resolution.

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Objectives The aim of this study was to assess and compare the diagnostic utility of a new diagnostic criteria for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), abbreviated as the ‘Gold Coast Criteria’, with the revised El Escorial (rEEC) and Awaji criteria. Methods Clinical and electrophysiological data of 1185 patients from January 2014 to December 2019 in the Peking Union Medical College Hospital ALS database were reviewed. The sensitivity of the Gold Coast criteria was compared to that of the possible rEEC and Awaji criteria (defined by the proportion of patients categorized as definite, probable, or possible ALS). Results A final diagnosis of ALS was recorded in 1162 patients. The sensitivity of the Gold Coast criteria (96.6%, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 95.3%–97.5%) was greater than that of the rEEC (85.1%, 95%CI = 82.9%–87.1%) and Awaji (85.3%, 95%CI = 83.2%–87.3%). In addition, the sensitivity of the novel criteria maintained robust across subgroups, and the advantage was more prominent in limb-onset ALS patients and those who completed electromyographic tests. In those who did not achieve any of the rEEC diagnostic categories, the sensitivity of Gold Coast criteria was 84.4%. Conclusions The current study demonstrated that the Gold Coast criteria exhibited greater diagnostic sensitivity than the rEEC and Awaji criteria in a Chinese ALS population. The application of the Gold Coast criteria should be considered in clinical practice and future therapeutic trials.