Influence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease on the therapeutic effect of nucleoside(acid)analogs for hepatitis B virus

BACKGROUND The effect of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease(NAFLD)on the efficacy of nucleoside analogues(NAs)in antiviral therapy for patients with chronic hepatitis B(CHB)remains controversial.AIM To investigate the influence of NAFLD on virological response in CHB patients undergoing NAs treatment.METHODS Logistic regression analysis was conducted on a cohort of 465 CHB patients from two hospitals to determine whether NAFLD was a risk factor for adverse reactions to NAs.CHB patients were followed up for more than 28 months after initial antiviral treatment,and further validation was performed using different viral load populations.RESULTS NAFLD was identified as an independent risk factor for partial virological response following antiviral therapy with NAs(odds ratio=1.777,P=0.017).In our subsequent analysis focusing on CHB patients with high viral load,the NAFLD group exhibited significantly longer virus shedding time and lower proportion of the complete virological response compared with the non-NAFLD group(16.8±6.1 vs 13.0±6.8,P<0.05).During the 24-month period of antiviral treatment with NAs,hepatitis B virus(HBV)DNA levels decreased slowly in the NAFLD group,and the negative conversion rate of HBV was notably lower than that observed in non-NAFLD group(P=0.001).Similar results were obtained when analyzing patients with low baseline HBV viral load within the NAFLD group.CONCLUSION Coexistence of NAFLD may diminish virological response among CHB patients receiving antiviral treatment with NAs.

Sensitivity study of anomalous HZZ couplings at a future Higgs factory

We study the sensitivity of constraining the model independent HZZ coupling based on the effective theory up to dimension-6 operators at a future Higgs factory. Using the current conceptual design parameters of the Circular Electron Positron Collider, we give the experimental limits for the model independent operators given by the total Higgsstrahlung cross-section and the angular distribution of Z boson decays. In particular, we give the very small sensitivity limit for the CP violation parameter g, which will be a clear window to test the Standard Model and look for new physics signals.

D^*Dρ and B^*Bρ strong couplings in light-cone sum rules

We present an improved calculation of the strong coupling constants gD*Dp and gB*Bp in light-cone sum rules,including one-loop QCD corrections of leading power with meson distribution amplitudes.We further compute subleading-power corrections from two-particle and three-particle higher-twist contributions at leading order up to twist-4 accuracy.The next-to-leading order corrections to the leading power contribution numerically offset the subleading-power corrections to a certain extent,and our numerical results are consistent with those of previous studies on sum rules.A comparison between our results and existing model-dependent estimations is also made.