User blogs
Global trading platform S.A.M. Trade today unveils a new logo, mission, and identity to reflect the platform's transformation since its founding in 2015.To get more news about cointrader, you can visit wikifx.com official website.
"S.A.M.," as showcased in the brand new logo, stands for Synergy, Adaptability and Motivation, and represents the guiding principles behind the platform's success. Synergy, as the platform's cross-business teams' effective communication and teamwork has allowed it to leverage its diversity to create a unified organisation greater than the sum of its parts. Adaptability, as the platform has kept pace with the changing times. Last but not least, Motivation, as the platform's purpose to grow, as individuals and as a team, has empowered its team of like-minded, determined professionals to continue to enable clients' success as well as each other's success.
In addition to that, S.A.M. Trade reaffirms its strong commitment to its clients in this rebrand with its new mission, "A Brokerage That Makes Your Priorities Ours". Being traders themselves, the founders and partners of S.A.M. Trade understand the importance of safe, easy and low-cost access to financial markets for its users.
Chief Executive Officer of S.A.M. Trade, Mr Sam Goh said, "We are very excited to unveil our new refreshed visual and platform identity. This marks a significant milestone for S.A.M. Trade, with our new identity signifying the successes that S.A.M. Trade has achieved over the last few years, through continuously developing and innovating our technology and suite of services. Synergy, Adaptability, and Motivation will continue to drive S.A.M. Trade onward, as we strive to serve our clients with ever-better seamless trading experiences."
The rebrand of S.A.M. Trade follows several new developments by the platform to enhance its product offerings and brand presence globally. This includes SamAideTM, which provides robust fund security for traders. The platform's signature technology, CopySamTM that allows its clients to trade like top traders, also won "Best Forex Copy Trading Platform - Asia" at the Global Forex Awards 2021. In addition, S.A.M. Trade has also strengthened its brand with its strategic expansion into the wider European market, having signed sponsorships with two football clubs, Cardiff City FC and Valencia Club de Fútbol.
Next World of Warcraft expansion leaks
Historically, World of Warcraft expansions are released every two years, so after 2020’s Shadowlands players are due for another big story DLC this year – however, disruption from the pandemic and the lawsuit over alleged discrimination and harassment at Activision Blizzard may put back the new expansion to 2023.To get more news about Buy WoW WLK Items, you can visit lootwow.com official website.
We’ll likely find out the World of Warcraft: Dragonflight release date on April 19 for the proper reveal, but the game’s website (via Wowhead) accidentally leaked the first details of the expansion. The source code was recently updated to show “WoW Dragonflight” Base, Heroic, and Epic pre-purchases – suggesting multiple tiers for the expansion, much like Shadowlands got.Most of these point to a new URL, which, of course, is currently inactive. Wowhead also spotted that several dragon-related items were datamined earlier this year, including a pet and what seems to be a Green Dragon mount. It’s speculated that these could be bonuses for the Epic or Heroic edition of the Dragonflight expansion. We’ll find out for sure in a couple of weeks.
From military to sci-fi to fantasy, from MMOs to block-builders to card battlers, it turns out that zero can buy you quite a lot in the F2P game world – and that some classics are available at the steepest possible discount. From cultural phenomenons like Fortnite, to all-time classics like Team Fortress 2, there are good games for free that suit literally every type of PC player.
To get started in your journey to playing the top free PC games for 2022, you need just look at this very extensive list we’ve put together. Finding these free download PC games reminded us just how far the world has come; you really can get triple-A quality games without spending a penny. Here are the best free games on PC, in no particular order!
You don’t have to find a group of like-minded aviation enthusiasts on a message board and join their virtual squadron to enjoy War Thunder. You don’t have to choose between realism or accessibility, either. You just download it, and then you’re flying – or driving, or shooting, or even both at the same time. This massively-multiplayer WW2 combat game effortlessly encompasses all of the explosions and excitement that planes and tanks are capable of generating. Not sure where to start? Our War Thunder tips will help point your tank’s cannon in the right direction. If you’re looking for war games that put you in the thick of it then War Thunder is for you.
You can now play one of the best-known mobile RPGs for free on PC. Raid’s turn-based combat and squad management require some strategic thinking, even from veterans of the genre. The game features over 300 heroes for you to collect, each with their own stats and unique abilities, meaning you’ll have to tweak and optimise your squad to make the most of your characters’ strengths. You can also take the fight online by either teaming up with other players in co-op, err, raids, or defeating their squad in battle to gain valuable rewards.
If you like the idea of World of Tanks but the battlefields just are not wet enough, then you need World of Warships. Introducing the navy to the concept of deathmatch, the controls are simple and welcoming, but allow for interesting tactics. World of Warships is more fun than Total War’s pondering naval engagements, definitely more approachable than Silent Hunter, and far, far deeper than the Pirates games. Surprisingly deep, if you’ll excuse the submariner humour. The World of Warships esports scene is also far more exciting than it has any right to be.
This Battlefield-esque tactical shooter prides itself on its historical accuracy, providing you with era-appropriate weapons and equipment as you lead your squad of AI soldiers through some of the most famous campaigns of WWII.
As in War Thunder (developer Gaijin’s F2P hit), you’ll also have access to a range of aircraft, tanks, and vehicles to help you on your way to victory, which are unlocked through the distinct skill sets of each of your squad members.
World of Warcraft prepares for the future as 9.2 launches
World of Warcraft‘s new big patch, 9.2 — Shadows of Eternity, launched today. This is the last chapter for the Shadowlands expansion, and it represents something of a crossroads (or maybe bridge) for Blizzard.To get more news about Buy WoW Gold Classic, you can visit lootwow.com official website.
The MMO and its team have been through hectic times. Accusations of workplace problems and investigations into those issues surfaced last year. In January, Microsoft shocked the world by announcing its plan to purchase World of Warcraft’s parent company, Activision Blizzard.Even outside all of that madness, World of Warcraft has been dealing with an increasingly discontent fanbase. Many players disliked Shadowlands’ story and its over-reliance on convoluted progression systems. Blizzard has been taking steps to win fans back, including making plans to finally allow players from the two games opposing factions — Alliance and Horde — to play together.
I had a chance to talk with World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas and senior level designer Sara Wons. We discussed what’s new in today’s update, as well as what’s coming in the MMO’s future.Ion Hazzikostas: First off, we’re adding a ton of new content. But in a lot of ways it’s carrying forward the philosophies that we pivoted to, in many cases, in 9.1.5 in response to player feedback over the course of Shadowlands. Building a whole new ecosystem, a whole new piece of content from the ground up with those in mind. As players are experiencing the thrilling conclusion to Shadowlands, as we’re going to this mysterious amazing high concept land of Zereth Mortis, and taking the fight to the Jailer, going through the raid and the dungeons, throughout that process we’ve asked ourselves on the system side, what are the things, traditionally, that are going to be pain points two or three months down the line?
We’re bringing back class sets. How will players feel two months into the patch when they want to switch characters or their friends are coming back and they feel like they’re behind with no way to catch up on getting their set pieces? Okay, let’s add a system, the sort of thing we previously patched in down the line, from the start. We have this creation catalyst that players will be able to unlock using currency a couple months in to target and specifically accelerate their acquisition of set pieces, build their own sets in a deterministic, non-RNG way. We’ve made most of our unlocks account-wide, whether it’s flying in the zone or access to content. In general, just trying to get ahead of what we have been hearing from players in recent years and taking those lessons to heart and building them into the content from the ground up.
Sara Wons: Zereth Mortis is an opportunity for us to dig even deeper into the crazy universe that we’ve already seen with Shadowlands, but then really take it to the next level. We were intrigued by the idea of keeping this place mysterious, while also giving some breadcrumbs and things for players to figure out. We dove into, who were the Progenitors? How would they have functioned? How would they have built anything here? We ended up focusing on the building blocks of the universe and sacred geometry. You’ll see that woven into the landscape here, in the denizens, in the creatures. That’s one thing that we focused in on, that recurring theme of this sacred geometry, as well as mystery and things to explore.
Hazzikostas: I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a core change. It’s more trying to support parallel paths of progression and different play styles, recognizing that there are a bunch of folks who love outdoor world gameplay. That’s what they do, their entire endgame. We hadn’t necessarily served them as well as dungeon players or competitive PvP players or raiders in the past. We wanted to take steps toward changing that. We set up a system that has a lot of depth, a lot of deep understanding of the zone, thoroughly integrated into the zone’s mechanics, as something for those explorers to really delve into.
But we understand, and we certainly heard loud and clear from the community, that if we put power that will increase your damage in a dungeon or damage in a raid behind a system, it now becomes mandatory, whether that’s gameplay you enjoy or not. And so having this as something that is, for hardcore power gamers, optional, but still deep in something they can take at their own pace, it’s something we’re trying to do to offer a range of options without pressuring people to play the game in a way they’d rather not.
Robots are learning to think like humans
In a lab at the University of Washington, robots are playing air hockey.Or they’re solving Rubik’s Cubes, mastering chess or painting the next Mona Lisa with a single laser beam.To get more news about Robots on Demand, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.
As the robots play, the researchers who built them are learning more about how they work, how they think and where they have room to grow, said Xu Chen, one of those researchers and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at UW.
“From a robot’s viewpoint, artificial intelligence is getting more and more mature,” Chen said, referring to the software and algorithms that help a robot take in its surroundings and make decisions. “But if we want a full-scale robot to be able to think very quickly and cleverly, and then be able to do things in the physical space, I don’t think we’re there yet.”The games are a way to get one step closer to taking the robots out of the air hockey arena and into the workforce, asking machines to shoulder tasks like lifting and moving heavy boxes for hours at a time. Robots are already working in warehouses, helping Amazon and Walmart customers get their orders faster, but e-commerce and retail leaders want them to do more. The jobs have already been assigned but some of the technology still needs to catch up.
In Chen’s lab, the games can fill in some of those gaps, mirroring how a robot might operate in an ever-changing workplace. The laser painting is a scaled-down version of a 3D printer, which can be used to test and manufacture parts for the aerospace industry. Watching an air hockey puck fly down the table helps researchers understand how to “clean” the data the machine is processing from the environment around it.
Already, there’s growing demand for that type of technology. The market for automated solutions for warehouses — solutions that range from conveyor belts to robotic arms to autonomous carts that ferry packages around a facility without direction from a human — could reach $51 billion by 2030, based on an estimate from ABI Research, a New York-based firm that studies technology.
In a warehouse, automation and robotics can help businesses speed up operations. That can be good for a company’s bottom line but hard for workers, who push to keep pace with the machines. Concerns about that desire for speed are, in part, driving a growing union swell, particularly at Amazon warehouses, seen as one of the fastest e-commerce leaders.
“The acceleration of technology in all kinds of workplaces in new ways is actually a whole new set of reasons for people to get together and form a union,” said Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, a progressive economic research firm.
“I’m not surprised that technology is a factor in what would motivate workers to want a union,” added Lisa Kresge, who studies the intersection of tech and work at the University of California, Berkeley. “Because it’s increasingly a factor that’s affecting their lives.”Venture capital interest in automation saw a spike starting in 2016, when investors handed off more than $2 billion to companies working on automated solutions. In the first half of last year, investors had pledged $1.4 billion to the industry, according to data from research firm Crunchbase.
“There’s a lot of tasks that need to be solved,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation. “One of the exciting things now is companies are popping up who are only focusing on specific areas.”Autonomous robots at Amazon sites covered more than 1 billion miles last year, moving packages alongside human co-workers. When a bin arrives at a worker’s stowing station, a software system will shine a light on spots to avoid, helping to calculate the most efficient way to fit items in and around one another. An algorithm later determines — and delivers — the right amount of tape needed to seal up each order.
Amazon says its robots allowed the company to store 40% more inventory in its fulfillment centers. With the product easily on hand, it can shorten the time between when a customer orders, and when the package arrives at their doorstep.
How Smart Locks and Bluetooth Work to Keep Your Home Safe
Guest blog by Ralph Goodman, the lead writer on all things locks and security over at the Lock Blog. The Lock Blog is a great resource to learn about keys, locks, safety, and locksmith services. They offer tips, advice and how-to’s for consumers, locksmiths, and security professionals. For more information about United Locksmith, follow them on social media on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.To get more news about electronic safe lock, you can visit securamsys.com official website.
In part one of this how-to series, we covered how home automation is impacting the future of home security and provided some background information about Bluetooth? technology. Now, let’s continue.
Years from now, people are going to look back and view smart locks and home automation as a key part of history, and there is no doubt that Bluetooth will be a huge part of those conversations, just as it is now.
There are many questions that people raise when it comes to smart locks and their use of Bluetooth. Is it safe enough? Will anyone with Bluetooth? capabilities on their phone be able to walk right into my home? Will I be hacked? Each and every one of those questions is supremely valid and they have been addressed by Bluetooth and many smart lock manufacturers.
Every device that has Bluetooth capabilities benefits from the security practices Bluetooth devices have in place. Bluetooth security has standards that authenticate, authorize, encrypt, and keep your data private. This is done in order to make sure that unauthorized persons do not have access to your devices. Bluetooth also encrypts the data that is transferred between paired devices to make it much more difficult for anyone to get a hold of your private information.
It wouldn’t be much help if someone with a Bluetooth enabled device was able to open your door simply by being there, would it? Smart locks are paired with a primary device, which in most cases is a smartphone. Once your smartphone has been set up as a primary device, your lock can only be operated (unless you use a physical key) from your phone and from whomever you grant access to (in the form of temporary keys or additional users).
For further clarification, let us take a look at the Kwikset Kevo. The Kevo is one of the leading smart lock brands that utilize Bluetooth. When homeowners are installing the Kwikset Kevo, the lock has to be paired with the homeowner’s smartphone via the Kevo app. A back section of the lock is removed and the programming button is pressed in order for the lock to be made visible. This is done to allow the lock to communicate with your phone and establish it as the primary device. Once the primary device has been established, the lock will only respond to that device and any other devices that are added to that network through the Kevo app.
The same concept applies to other smart locks, like the August Smart Lock for example. Once the lock has been installed in the door, homeowners will have to download the August App, enable their Bluetooth connectivity, and scan the lock with their phones in order to pair the devices together. Once the lock has been connected to a primary device, it cannot be paired to another device without authorization from the primary device.
Security and convenience need to be balanced and well thought through when it comes to devices that concern our homes and our information. Smart locks manufacturers and developers have looked at ways to provide both, bringing the highest levels of trusted security while also giving you the ability to provide one-off key access with limitations to allow visiting family members or a housekeeper to access your house without you being there but only when you allow it.
The security features of Bluetooth, coupled with the additional security features that these smart locks have, work to keep you safe. This is done mainly by designating the primary devices that are allowed to exchange data with your lock and other smart devices.
Jessica to appear on Chinese entertainment shows
Rumors are spreading that Jessica, a member of Girls' Generation, who is active in Greater China, can make a re-debut as a girl group. According to local media in China on the 10th, it is predicted that Jessica will appear in a survival program with the concept of a re-debut of a five-member girl group of female celebrities in their 30s and older.To get more chinese entertainment news, you can visit shine news official website.
Rumors are spreading that Jessica, a member of Girls' Generation, who is active in Greater China, can make a re-debut as a girl group.
According to local media in China on the 10th, it is predicted that Jessica will appear in a survival program with the concept of a re-debut of a five-member girl group of female celebrities in their 30s and older.
The program 'Seungpoong Blue Jerk' is a program that also appeared in Miss A's Faye and Jia, and is a very popular entertainment program in China.
However, some predict that Jessica's activities in China will be practically difficult because Jessica lost a 2 billion won lawsuit from a Chinese management company in 2019 for violating her contract.
After her departure from Girls' Generation in 2014, Jessica joined her hand with her boyfriend Tyler Kwon and was active in Greater China as a singer, actress and fashion designer.
But she was embroiled in controversy earlier this year when her fashion brand Blanc and Eclair, launched by Jessica, was sued by Hong Kong company Joy King Enterprise for $8 billion.
Get to know authentic Szechuan-style Chinese food
Part of the fun of the Winter Olympics is getting to know the country it's being hosted in. Food says so much about culture, geography, history and socio-economics. To get more news about taste of shanghai, you can visit shine news official website.
KGW Sunrise's Nina Mehlhaf sat down for a traditional Sichuan-style meal with restaurant owner Daniel Chen, who moved to Portland from China when he was 26 years old. He owns Szechuan Garden restaurant on Walker Road in Beaverton.When I bring the food to the table, up to the whole family, and they enjoy the food and are talking, I'm so happy about that," he said.
Chen is marking his 10th year in the restaurant industry in the United States and his third year as an owner.
"Portland is the first place I come in United States and the only one place I live here," Chen said. "I live in Portland for a long time. It's over 13 years already."Chen is Cantonese. It's both the dialect and the food of southern China's Guangdong province where Hong Kong is located. China has 23 provinces. It's land mass is only 2% larger than the U.S., but there are 1.1 billion more people. Where you are in the country determines what kind of food and tastes you discover.
There are eight cuisines; from light, fresh and healthy on the coast with seafood, to hot, spicy and salty with more animal proteins farther north and inland.Chen fell in love with the spicy, mouth-numbing flavors of the Sichuan province to the north of him.
"They had the particular flavor of the spice and the pungency because they are using a lot of garlic and some dried pepper. As well as the unique flavor of the numbing because they use the Szechuan peppercorn," Chen said.During the interview with KGW, Chen's chef made four traditional dishes to try and talk about."This one we call the mixed beef. It's a cold dish and the other is Chong Qing Hot Chicken."
The mixed beef is shaved thin with strips of tendon and stomach, brined then mixed with chili oil, celery, onions, ginger and peanuts. It's fresh, but savory and crunchy; a good temperature and texture compliment to the hot chicken."You can see the chicken dice and then we deep fry the chicken. Then we cook it with the dry pepper and also with Szechuan peppercorns. So we taste spicy, a bit numbing. It'll be crispy outside. We sell this a lot every day. A lot of people like this one," Chen said of the Chong Qing Hot Chicken.
KGW asked Chen about his take on the Americanized version of Chinese food that a lot of people think about when they think of the cuisine or certain dishes.
"I think in America, a lot of the cooking skills are just pan fry, toast and deep fry. A lot of the ingredients [Americanized Chinese restaurants] are using are maybe ketchup, sugar, vinegar or onions, pineapple, whatever they put in there. It's really simple flavors, but [in] Szechuan food, we use a lot of the Szechuan peppercorn. It tastes so different between the authentic Szechuan food and the regular American Chinese food."The next dish his chef brought out is called Mapo Tofu. It's one of China's most famous dishes and it has a very interesting back story.
'Ma' literally translates to 'pockmarked face'. 'Po' means 'old woman' or 'grandma'. There are slight variations to the story, but they go back to the 1860s. A woman named Mrs. Chen had a restaurant or food cart in the Sichuan city of Chengdu at the base of a bridge. One version of the story has laborers bringing her ingredients to cook up so they could save money. Others have said she was left with a few things at the end of the day and whipped up a dish so good, they came back for more and more only to, not so nicely, name it for her.
The dish is made up of firm tofu, ground beef or pork, black bean paste, garlic, ginger, onion, peppercorns and chili oil cooked fast in a hot wok. It tastes smooth and you feel a bit of the numbing feeling in your mouth depending on the spice level. Chen's restaurant, like many Chinese restaurants, lets the customer decide what spice level they want. Szechuan Garden does a scale of 1-5 and recommends medium. Spicier than that, and that's all you'll taste and you'll miss the point of the dish.
The last dish is called Hot and Spicy Dry Pot with pork spare ribs, green beans, peppers and chilis. Ten ingredients go into making the sauce, which is kept hot at the table by a lit flame underneath, carrying the aromatics around the room. You use a combination of your fingers and chopsticks to hold the ribs and pull the meat off with your teeth. It's more of a restaurant dish than a home meal in China.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have a new jersey patch sponsorship. The NBA franchise agreed to terms with hometown steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs, the parties announced Tuesday.To get more news about customized nfl jerseys, you can visit custom-nfljersey.com official website.
Terms of the deal were not publicly made available, but according to people familiar with the agreement, it matches the Cavs' previous sponsorship agreement with tire manufacturer Goodyear. That pact was valued at a reported $10 million per season.
The people declined to be named because the deal terms are private.
The agreement comes at a good time for Cleveland-Cliffs. The Cavs are one of the surprise teams in the NBA this season, and they appear headed to the postseason. The team is seventh in the NBA's Eastern Conference. The last time the team made the playoffs was when LeBron James led them to a fourth-consecutive NBA Finals in 2018, losing to the Golden State Warriors.
Cleveland-Cliffs would get increased national exposure if the Cavaliers make the playoffs, as postseason berths mean more television impressions for jersey patch partners.
Cleveland-Cliffs is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CLF." It has a market cap of over $16 billion.In a statement announcing the partnership, Cavs CEO Len Komoroski called the company "the fabric of life here in Northeast Ohio." Komoroski added the agreement is "very appropriate and relevant for Cliffs to be represented, literally, on the fabric of the Cavs player jerseys."
In this new agreement, Cleveland-Cliffs will get in-arena signage at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, building off its current sponsorship deal with the team, which features an arena entrance naming rights slot. However, Cleveland-Cliffs will not obtain the Cavs' practice jersey patch asset or virtual floor signage for local broadcast games. Teams can package those assets in jersey patch deals to increase value.
NBA jersey patches have grown in popularity in the sports sponsorship marketplace. Since the NBA started its jersey patch program in 2017, team deals made the league roughly $150 million annually. That figure is expected to increase to more than $200 million for the 2021-22 season.
To date, the Brooklyn Nets have the most expensive patch deal. In September 2021, CNBC reported the Nets make $30 million per year from online trading platform WeBull. That agreement eclipsed the Golden State Warriors' $20 million per season deal with Japan-based e-commerce company Rakuten. That deal was extended last year and expires after the 2022-23 season.
Newer NBA team patch agreements should increase the league's sponsorship revenue, which reached a record $1.46 billion for the 2020-21 regular season, according to estimates by IEG, a sports partnerships consultancy firm.
The NFL's new uniform number rules mean some NFL players are probably chomping at the bit to get into new unis for the 2021 season. While players changing numbers is definitely a possibility, sticker shock may drive players away.To get more news about replica custom nfl jerseys, you can visit custom-nfljersey.com official website.
Per NFL rules, a player has to buy out the existing inventory of uniforms in order to change his number for the 2021 season. According to Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio, Vikings running back Dalvin Cook is deterred from wanting to change his uniform number, because the cost sits at around $1.5 million.
PFT reports that players will have to not only buy out the existing uniforms, but buy them out at retail price - not the cost of production, which would be much cheaper. While Nike uniforms run at several different price points, that's still a hefty number to pay.
Of course, the more popular the player, the more uniforms will be in circulation, so that won't be the same price for any and every player. Players with less uniforms in circulation might not to pay as much, while some of the league's top jersey sellers might be in for Cook's price or higher.
If a player chooses to give notice to change his number for the 2022 NFL season, he won't have to pay anything, however.Several players, including Cook, Jalen Ramsey and Robert Woods have considered changing numbers for the upcoming season, but that price tag is a deterrent.
While the NFL approved a rule change that allows players to wear single-digit numbers, Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady believes that change will be tough for offensive linemen protecting quarterbacks.Brady posted a photo to his Instagram story saying, "Good luck trying to block the right people now, going to make for a lot of bad football."
Under the new guidelines, which were proposed by the Chiefs, running backs, tight ends and wide receivers to wear jersey numbers from 1 to 49 as well as 80 to 89. Defensive lineman can wear numbers from 50 to 79 and 90 to 99.
Linebackers are also permitted to wear numbers from 1 to 59 and 90 to 99. Defensive backs can wear numbers from 1 to 49. The league's rule change stemmed from Kansas City having a shortage of numbers in the 20 to 49 range during the 2020 season due to several jersey numbers retired in the franchise. Like the Chiefs, other teams could face similar issues in the seasons to come.
Traditional Chinese medicine on treating epididymitis
Epididymitis is a common disease in nonspecific infections of the male reproductive system according to the clinical incidence of acute epididymitis and chronic epididymitis. Many clinical trials have proven that Chinese medicine has a significant effect in the treatment of epididymitis. In this systematic review, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for epididymitis.To get more news about Epididymitis natural treatment, you can visit our official website.
We will search for PubMed, Cochrane Library, AMED, Embase, WorldSciNet, Nature, Science online, China Journal Full-text Database (CNKI), China Biomedical Literature CD-ROM Database (CBM), and related randomized controlled trials included in the China Resources Database. The time is limited from the construction of the library to November 2018. We will use the criteria provided by Cochrane 5.1.0 for quality assessment and risk assessment of the included studies, and use the Revman 5.3 and Stata13.0 software for meta-analysis of the effectiveness, recurrence rate, and symptom scores of epididymitis.
This systematic review will evaluate the efficacy and safety of TCM for treating epididymitis. Because all of the data used in this systematic review and meta-analysis has been published, this review does not require ethical approval. Furthermore, all data will be analyzed anonymously during the review process.
Epididymitis, which is a common disease in nonspecific infections of the male reproductive system, is found in male of all ages, but most of them are young adults aged 20 to 40 years, which accounting for 70% of all the patients who suffer from it.It is, according to the clinical incidents, classified into 2 types such as acute epididymitis and chronic epididymitis, and the chronic type is more common. The main clinical manifestations contain referred pain in hypogastrium and groin, enlarged scrotum, increased pain when standing or walking.During acute phase, the clinical features such as local redness and pain, sudden rise in temperature, and leukocytosis will be manifested. Besides, nodules or lumps or turning hard could be detected through physical examination, accompanied with mild or moderate tenderness, and the vasodilatation of vas deferens could also be detected on the pathologic side.The cause of epididymitis is complicated and varied, but the pathogenesis of the disease is usually identified as secondary to prostatitis or urinary tract infections. The disease has been seriously affecting patients’ mental health and quality of life.[5] Meanwhile, it could also reduce the production and development of sperm because of the various degree of the inflammation in the epididymis, which resulting in a significant increase in sperm deformity; therefore, the risk of suffering from infertility is increased.
Currently, definite therapy for epididymitis has not been settled, and the use of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs are still the mainly treatment.[9] But for the recurrent chronic epididymitis, the drugs could not be easily effective because of the susceptibility of nodules.Besides, the chronic type could suffer from varicocele easily and the local congestion would be formed naturally, which lessens the local immunity and leads to the lingering disease more easily.Aiming at this situation, a few patients accept the therapy of epididymectomy which, however, does not enhance the overall efficacy because of the deficiency of the quality of sexual life.
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely used in clinical trials in recent years. It has been undoubted that TCM has obvious curative effect in reducing chronic pain in the epididymis, reducing scrotal swelling and anti-tissue fibrosis, which have been shown by recent studies.[16] The studies also have shown that a specific ingredient in Chinese herbal medicine could achieve the desired results of peripheral analgesia, which mainly by the means of adjusting body function to accelerate the production of endogenous opioid peptides in the central nervous system and activate the analgesic system in the body of the patient.[17,18] Besides, it could also achieve anti-inflammatory effects by increasing the levels of β-Ep in inflammatory tissues and serum.[19,20] According to the theory of TCM, we believe that it could regulate the balance of qi and blood in human body, which ameliorates the function of the human body by stimulating the regulated acupoints. This kind of therapy has been increasingly popular among doctors and patients because of the unique advantages of simplicity, convenience, efficacy, and low cost.
In the preliminary searches of the electronic databases, we found that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of TCM for epididymitis are on the rise.[21,22] However, due to the limitation of the size and number of clinical centers, most clinical trials are small samples with low quality and lack of evidence-based exploration. Besides, the publication of the similar systematic review has not been retrieved in the database. Therefore, this review of epididymitis adopts meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy and safety of TCM in the treatment of epididymitis and provides evidence for its application in clinical practice.