Meng-Jiang Lu, Zhi Yu, Yan He, Yin Yin, Bin Xu, Key Laboratory of Acupuncture and Medicine Research of Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing 210023, Jiangsu Province, China
Author contributions: Yu Z and Lu MJ contributed equally to this work; Yu Z and Xu B conceived and designed the experiments; Lu MJ performed the experiments and wrote the paper; Yan H and Yin Y performed the experiments; Lu MJ and Yu Z analyzed the data; all authors read and approved the final version of the article to be published.
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 81373749; No. 81574071, and No. 81673883.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine.
Institutional animal care and use committee statement: All experimental manipulations were undertaken in accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (National Institutes of Health), and the study was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine (No. 201805A017).
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Data sharing statement: No additional unpublished data are available.
ARRIVE guidelines statement: The authors have read the ARRIVE guidelines, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the ARRIVE guidelines.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Bin Xu, PhD, Professor, Key Laboratory of Integrated Acupuncture and Drugs, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, No. 138, Xianlin Road, Nanjing 210023, Jiangsu Province, China. xubin@njucm.edu.cn
Telephone: +86-132-5529-1963
Received: February 28, 2019
Peer-review started: March 1, 2019
First decision: April 4, 2019
Revised: April 22, 2019
Accepted: May 3, 2019
Article in press: May 3, 2019
Published online: May 21, 2019
