Background In December 2019, a series of pneumonia cases of unknown cause emerged in Wuhan, Hubei, China. In this study, we investigate the clinical and laboratory features and short-term outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Methods All patients with COVID-19 admitted to Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan, China, between 3 January and 1 February 2020 were included. All those patients were with laboratory-confirmed infections. Epidemiological, clinical, and radiological characteristics; underlying diseases; laboratory tests; treatments; complications; and outcomes data were collected. Outcomes were followed up at discharge until 15 February 2020. Results The study cohort included 102 adult patients. The median age was 54 years (interquartile ranger, 37–67 years), and 48.0% were female. A total of 34 patients (33.3%) were exposed to a source of transmission in the hospital setting (as health-care workers, patients, or visitors) and 10 patients (9.8%) had a familial cluster. There were 18 patients (17.6%) who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU), and 17 patients died (mortality, 16.7%; 95% confidence interval, 9.4–23.9%). Those patients who survived were younger, were more likely to be health-care workers, and were less likely to suffer from comorbidities. They were also less likely to suffer from complications. There was no difference in drug treatment rates between the survival and nonsurvival groups. Those patients who survived were less likely to require admission to the ICU (14.1% vs 35.3% of those admitted). Chest imaging examinations showed that patients who died were more likely to have ground-glass opacity (41.2% vs 12.9% in survivors). Conclusions The mortality rate was high among the COVID-19 patients described in our cohort who met our criteria for inclusion in this analysis. The patient characteristics seen more frequently in those who died were the development of systemic complications following onset of the illness and a severity of disease requiring admission to the ICU. Our data support those described by others indicating that COVID-19 infection results from human-to-human transmission, including familial clustering of cases, and from nosocomial transmission. There were no differences in mortality among those who did or did not receive antimicrobial or glucocorticoid drug treatments.

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Gastric cancer is the fourth most common cancer worldwide, with a low 5-year survival rate. Epigenetic modification plays pivotal roles in gastric cancer development. However, the role of histone-modifying enzymes in gastric cancer remains largely unknown. Here we report that Sirt7, a NAD+-dependent class III histone deacetylase, is over-expressed in human gastric cancer tissues. Sirt7 level is significantly correlated with disease stage, metastasis, and survival. Knockdown of Sirt7 in gastric cancer cells inhibits cell proliferation and colony formation in vitro. In vivo subcutaneous xenograft results also show that Sirt7 knockdown can markedly repress gastric cancer cell growth. In addition, Sirt7 depletion induces apoptosis in gastric cancer cells via up-regulating expression of pro-apoptotic proteins and down-regulating anti-apoptotic proteins. Mechanically, Sirt7 binds to the promoter of miR-34a and deacetylases the H3K18ac, thus represses miR-34a expression. Reversely, depletion of miR-34a inhibits gastric cancer apoptosis induced by Sirt7 knockdown, and restores cellular capacity of proliferation and colony formation. miR-34a depletion reduces Sirt7-knockdown-induced arrest of gastric growth. Finally, miR-34a is tightly associated with survival of patients with gastric cancer.

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