No abstract

Qixue-Shuangbu Prescription (QSP) is an efficacious prescription for treating heart failure, myocardial ischemia and other diseases. It is composed of nine Chinese herbs.This study investigated and compared the pharmacokinetics of QSP in rats by UPLC-MS/MS between two dosage forms of traditional decoction (TD) and compound tincture (CT). Owing to the complexity of the chemicals in QSP, ginsenoside Rg1, ginsenoside Re, ferulic acid, astragaloside IV, rhein and calycosin were chosen for the pharmacokinetics study. The method established for detecting serum specimens was shown to have acceptable selectivity, linearity, lower limit of quantitation, precision, accuracy, recovery, matrix effect and stability. The peak concentration, AUC 0-t and AUC 0-∞ of ginsenoside Re, ginsenoside Rg1, ferulic acid and rhein were significantly increased after oral administration of CT (P < 0.05), the half-life of ferulic acid in the CT group was lower than that in the TD group (P < 0.05) and the half-life and AUC 0-∞ of astragaloside IV in the CT group were significantly increased (P < 0.05), which revealed that wine-processing could influence the bioavailability and the elimination of these compounds. For better clinical efficacy, we suggest that the CT dosage form of QSP should be selected.

Qixue Shuangbu Prescription (QSP) is a famous traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formula widely used for the treatment of chronic heart failure (CHF). Previous clinical studies have found that the efficacy of processed QSP has been significantly enhanced in the treatment of CHF. However, the synergistic mechanisms of processed QSP to enhance the treatment of CHF are still unclear. Generally, the changes in clinical effects mainly result from the variations of inside chemical basis caused by the TCM processing procedure. In this study, we developed a network pharmacology-integrated metabolomics strategy to clarify the difference of the effective compounds between crude and processed QSP, and further explain the mechanism of processed QSP to produce a synergistic effects. As a result, 69 different compounds were successfully screened, identified, quantified and verified as the most potential marker compounds. These different chemical components may play an anti-CHF and enhance the therapeutic effect through 52 action pathways such as estrogen signaling pathway, ubiquitin mediated proteolysis, protein processing in endoplasmic reticulum, etc. This study revealed that the proposed network pharmacology-integrated metabolomics strategy was a powerful tool for explaining the mechanism of synergistic action in the processing of QSP, further controlling the quality and understanding the processing mechanism of TCM formulae.

The impacts of global climate change on food systems will be broad, complex, and profoundly affected by urban context. Food-related urbanism has been investigated for decades to explore how food access influences placemaking and urban forms. With global climate change, foodscapes within urban spaces are an important consideration in urban design and planning for food security and community health. The distribution of catering businesses (restaurants and cafés), one critical method of access to food, is highly associated with urban spaces because of their high impact on diet patterns, human physical activities, travel behaviors, and the use of public spaces. This research explores the spatial associations that exist between the distribution of catering businesses and the design and planning of urban spaces in London. This quantitative research includes three parts: (1) uses Open Street Map data and the GIS spatial analysis method to study the distribution of catering businesses; (2) uses the imagery segmentation method in machine learning to categorize urban spaces into open, landscape, and conflict spaces; and (3) establishes the association between the distribution of catering businesses and the categories of urban spaces through Spearman’s correlation and a linear regression model. The results indicate that the spatial distributions of catering businesses are highly correlated with urban spaces. Conflict and landscape spaces have a significant positive influence on the distribution of catering businesses, while open space has a significant negative influence. Based on the context of global climate change, this research contributes a quantitative urban design and planning approach to promote access to food increase food options and advocate active lifestyles.

Qixue Shuangbu Prescription (QSP) has been widely applied in the treatment of chronic heart failure (CHF). Previous clinical studies have found that the efficacy of processed QSP was significantly enhanced in the treatment of CHF. We have identified and analyzed the nonvolatile components before and after processing of QSP, and predicted the mechanism of synergistic effect after processing in the treatment of CHF. However, the synergistic mechanism of processed QSP caused by the difference of volatile components was still unclear. In this study, we developed a method of needle trap device coupled with gas chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry to elucidate the difference of volatile components between crude and processed QSP. The established method has been used to identify 104 volatile compounds in crude and processed QSP. The results of multivariate data showed 38 differential compounds were screened as potential markers, which would further explain the mechanism of processing synergistic effect of processed QSP. This study successfully developed the method to elucidate its processing mechanism based on the difference of volatile compositions between crude and processed QSP for the first time, and it would provide a novel analytical strategy for the impacts of different processing methods on main volatile compounds in traditional Chinese medicine.