Lei Zhang

Mar 30, 2025 | mdpi.com | Chunheng Liu |Fang Zhang |Lei Zhang |Jun Peng

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Mar 27, 2025 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Zhimin Gao |Lei Zhang |Zhen Li |Xu Qin

1 Introduction There is an increasing variety of treatment options regarding locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma (UC), such as immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) [1], antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) [2], and fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) inhibitors [3]. Nevertheless, the standard initial therapeutic approach for advanced bladder cancer (BC) still involves combination chemotherapy based on cisplatin [4].

Mar 13, 2025 | nature.com | Maximilian O. Steininger |Mathew White |Lei Zhang |Simone Kühn |Claus Lamm |Lukas Lengersdorff | +1 more

Nature exposure has numerous health benefits and might reduce self-reported acute pain. Given the multi-faceted and subjective quality of pain and methodological limitations of prior research, it is unclear whether the evidence indicates genuine analgesic effects or results from domain-general effects and subjective reporting biases. This preregistered neuroimaging study investigates how nature modulates nociception-related and domain-general brain responses to acute pain. Healthy participants (N = 49) receiving electrical shocks report lower pain when exposed to virtual nature compared to matched urban or indoor control settings. Multi-voxel signatures of pain-related brain activation patterns demonstrate that this subjective analgesic effect is associated with reductions in nociception-related rather than domain-general cognitive-emotional neural pain processing. Preregistered region-of-interest analyses corroborate these results, highlighting reduced activation of areas connected to somatosensory aspects of pain processing (thalamus, secondary somatosensory cortex, and posterior insula). These findings demonstrate that virtual nature exposure enables genuine analgesic effects through changes in nociceptive and somatosensory processing, advancing our understanding of how nature may be used to complement non-pharmacological pain treatment. That this analgesic effect can be achieved with easy-to-administer virtual nature exposure has important practical implications and opens novel avenues for research on the precise mechanisms by which nature impacts our mind and brain. Virtual nature exposure reduces self-reported pain and is associated with decreased brain responses linked to somatosensory and nociceptive processing, providing new insights into the underlying mechanisms of nature-induced analgesia.

Feb 5, 2025 | science.org | Brynna G. Downey |Lu Shen |Xin Yao |Ying Qu |Ashok Mishra |Michael E. Mann | +13 more

AbstractThe elderly face elevated mortality risk due to rising temperature. Previous assessments of temperature-related mortality, however, lack a comprehensive analysis of distinct impacts of temperature change across different timescales and characteristics.

Jan 28, 2025 | mdpi.com | Meixuan Li |Zhiguo Huo |Qianchuan Mi |Lei Zhang

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.