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Emerging evidence has suggested a close correlation between COVID-19 and neurodegenerative disorders. However, whether there exists a causal association and the effect direction remains unknown. To examine the causative role of COVID-19 in the risk of neurodegenerative disorders, we estimated their genetic correlation, and then conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies of susceptibility, hospitalization, and severity of COVID-19, as well as six major neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. We identified a significant and positive genetic correlation between hospitalization of COVID-19 and AD (genetic correlation: 0.23, P  = 8.36E–07). Meanwhile, hospitalization of COVID-19 was significantly associated with a higher risk of AD (OR: 1.02, 95% CI: 1.01–1.03, P : 1.19E–03). Consistently, susceptibility (OR: 1.05, 95% CI: 1.01–1.09, P : 9.30E–03) and severity (OR: 1.01, 95% CI: 1.00–1.02, P : 0.012) of COVID-19 were nominally associated with higher risk of AD. The results were robust under all sensitivity analyses. These results demonstrated that COVID-19 could increase the risk of AD. Future development of preventive or therapeutic interventions could attach importance to this to alleviate the complications of COVID-19.

The recent paper considers a hydrodynamic flow of compressible biaxial nematic liquid crystal in dimension one. For initial density without vacuum states, we obtain both existence and uniqueness of global classical solutions. While for initial density with possible vacuum states, both the existence and uniqueness of global strong solutions are given.

This paper is concerned with a simplified hydrodynamic equation, proposed by Ericksen and Leslie, modeling the flow of nematic liquid crystals. In dimension two, we establish both interior and boundary regularity theorems for such a flow under smallness conditions. As a consequence, we establish the existence of global (in time) weak solutions on a bounded smooth domain in which are smooth everywhere with possible exceptions of finitely many singular times.

BackgroundNeuroimaging studies have reported gray matter changes in patients with idiopathic dystonia but with considerable variations. Here, we aimed to investigate the convergence of dystonia-related gray matter changes across studies.MethodsThe whole brain voxel-based morphometry studies comparing idiopathic dystonia and healthy controls were systematically searched in the PubMed, Web of Science and Embase. Meta-analysis of gray matter changes was performed using the anisotropic effect size-based signed differential mapping.ResultsTwenty-eight studies comparing 701 idiopathic dystonia patients and 712 healthy controls were included in the meta-analysis. Compared to healthy controls, idiopathic dystonia patients showed increased gray matter in bilateral precentral and postcentral gyri, bilateral putamen and pallidum, right insula, and left supramarginal gyrus, while decreased gray matter in bilateral temporal poles, bilateral supplementary motor areas, right angular gyrus, inferior parietal gyrus and precuneus, left insula and inferior frontal gyrus. These findings remained robust in the jackknife sensitivity analysis, and no significant heterogeneity was detected. Subgroup analyses of different phenotypes of dystonia were performed to further confirm the above findings.ConclusionThe meta-analysis showed that consistent widespread gray matter abnormalities were shared in different subtypes of idiopathic dystonia and were not restricted to the corticostriatal circuits.

In recent paper, we will consider two contents on the maximal biaxial nematic liquid crystals. In the first part, we get an orientability issue, that is if Q∈W1,p(Ω,N), p≥2, then there is (n,m)∈M with n,m∈W1,p(Ω), such that Q=r(n⊗n-m⊗m). Unlike S2, the set M is not simple connect. Our orientability result extends to maximal biaxial nematics from earlier conclusions corresponding to uniaxial nematics in Ball and Zarnescu (Arch Rational Mech Anal 202:493–535, 2011). In the second part, we study an asymptotic convergence of approximate solutions Qϵ of the Q-tensor flow in R3 as the parameter ϵ goes to zero. The limiting direction map (n, m) satisfies a gradient flow, which is different from the heat flow of harmonic map that takes value into S2 or M. A partial regularity of this gradient flow is also derived. We extend the works in Ball and Zarnescu (Arch Rational Mech Anal 202:493–535, 2011) and Wang et al. (Arch Rational Mech Anal 225:663–683, 2017) to the maximal biaxial nematic liquid crystals.

Background Epidemiological and clinical studies have suggested comorbidity between frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and psychiatric disorders. FTD patients carrying specific mutations were at higher risk for some psychiatric disorders, and vice versa, implying potential shared genetic etiology, which is still less explored. Methods We examined the genetic correlation using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies and analyzed their genetic enrichment leveraging the conditional false discovery rate method. Furthermore, we explored the causal association between FTD and psychiatric disorders with Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis. Results We identified a significant genetic correlation between FTD and schizophrenia at both genetic and transcriptomic levels. Meanwhile, robust genetic enrichment was observed between FTD and schizophrenia and alcohol use disorder. Seven shared genetic loci were identified, which were mainly involved in interleukin-induced signaling, synaptic vesicle, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor signaling pathways. By integrating cis-expression quantitative trait loci analysis, we identified MAPT and CADM2 as shared risk genes. MR analysis showed mutual causation between FTD and schizophrenia with nominal association. Conclusions Our findings provide evidence of shared etiology between FTD and schizophrenia and indicate potential common molecular mechanisms contributing to the overlapping pathophysiological and clinical characteristics. Our results also demonstrate the essential role of autoimmunity in these diseases. These findings provide a better understanding of the pleiotropy between FTD and psychiatric disorders and have implications for therapeutic trials. Graphical abstract

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to achieve pixel-level object segmentation guided by arbitrary natural language descriptions. Although pre-trained vision–language models (VLMs) have significantly advanced the development of OVSS, their reliance on the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture imposes a fundamental constraint on dense prediction. Specifically, the absence of hierarchical downsampling in ViT-based VLM results in single-scale representations that trade spatial localization for global semantics. To address these issues, this paper proposes a hierarchical boundary-constrained decoding network for OVSS, called CLIP-HBD. Our approach leverages VLM semantic priors to reconstruct multi-scale features and introduces a boundary-constrained decoding strategy to refine edge details. Specifically, CLIP-HBD leverages a ConvNeXt-based backbone alongside a hierarchical adaptation mechanism to fuse multi-layer VLM features, generating a comprehensive multi-scale representation. To address the issue of boundary inaccuracy, we perform explicit boundary prediction based on multi-scale representations, where the resulting boundary maps are subsequently transformed into structural constraints to steer the decoder’s focus toward boundary regions. By integrating structural constraints with hierarchical features, the decoding process effectively maintains semantic consistency and restores precise object boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLIP-HBD achieves superior performance in both segmentation precision and boundary quality across multiple benchmarks.

Ketogenic diet (KD) has been shown to be beneficial in a range of neurological disorders, with ketone metabolite β-hydroxybutyrate (βOHB) reported to block the nucleotide oligomerization domain-like receptor family, pyrin domain containing 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome in bone marrow-derived macrophages. In this study, we show that pretreatment with KD or in situ βOHB suppressed macrophages/microglia activation and the overproduction of inflammatory cytokines, while KD downregulated the expression of NLRP3 inflammasome. Moreover, KD promoted macrophages/microglia transformation from the M1 phenotype to the M2a phenotype following spinal cord injury (SCI) in the in vivo study. Rats in the KD group demonstrated improved behavioral and electrophysiological recovery after SCI when compared to those rats in the standard diet group. The in vitro study performed on BV2 cells indicated that βOHB inhibited an LPS+ATP-induced inflammatory response and decreased NLRP3 protein levels. Our data demonstrated that pretreatment with KD attenuated neuroinflammation following SCI, probably by inhibiting NLRP3 inflammasome and shifting the activation state of macrophages/microglia from the M1 to the M2a phenotype. Therefore, the ketone metabolite βOHB might provide a potential future therapeutic strategy for SCI.

Background Reactive astrogliosis has been demonstrated to have a role in Parkinson’s disease (PD); however, astrocyte-specific plasma glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP)’s correlation with PD progression remains unknown. We aimed to determine whether plasma GFAP can monitor and predict PD progression. Methods A total of 184 patients with PD and 95 healthy controls (HCs) were included in this prospective cohort study and followed-up for 5 years. Plasma GFAP, amyloid-beta (Aβ), p-tau181, and neurofilament light chain (NfL) were measured at baseline and at 1- and 2-year follow-ups. Motor and non-motor symptoms, activities of daily living, global cognitive function, executive function, and disease stage were evaluated using the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) part III, UPDRS-I, UPDRS-II, Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB), and Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) scales at each visit, respectively. Results Plasma GFAP levels were higher in patients with PD (mean [SD]: 69.80 [36.18], pg/mL) compared to HCs (mean [SD]: 57.89 [23.54], pg/mL). Higher levels of GFAP were observed in female and older PD patients. The adjusted linear mixed-effects models showed that plasma GFAP levels were significantly associated with UPDRS-I scores ( β : 0.006, 95% CI [0.001–0.011], p = 0.027). Higher baseline plasma GFAP correlated with faster increase in UPDRS-I ( β : 0.237, 95% CI [0.055–0.419], p = 0.011) and UPDRS-III ( β : 0.676, 95% CI [0.023–1.330], p = 0.043) scores and H&Y stage ( β : 0.098, 95% CI [0.047–0.149], p < 0.001) and faster decrease in MoCA ( β : − 0.501, 95% CI [− 0.768 to − 0.234], p < 0.001) and FAB scores ( β : − 0.358, 95% CI [− 0.587 to − 0.129], p = 0.002). Higher baseline plasma GFAP predicted a more rapid progression to postural instability (hazard ratio: 1.009, 95% CI [1.001–1.017], p = 0.033). Conclusions Plasma GFAP might be a potential biomarker for monitoring and predicting disease progression in PD.

Starting from an ultracold sample of ground-state 23Na87Rb molecules, we investigate the lowest ro-vibrational level of the b 3Π state with high resolution laser spectroscopy. This electronic spin-forbidden X 1Σ+ ↔ b 3Π transition features a nearly diagonal Franck–Condon factor and has been proposed useful for probing and manipulating the ultracold molecular gas. We measure the transition strength directly by probing the ac Stark shift induced by near resonance light and determine the total excited-state spontaneous emission rate by observing the loss of molecules. From the extracted branching ratio and the theoretical modeling, we find that the leakage to the continuum of the a 3Σ+ state plays the dominant role in the total transition linewidth. Based on these results, we show that it is feasible to create optical trapping potentials for maximizing the rotational coherence with laser light tuned close to this transition.