Plos One
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Obesity is a major health issue. Obesity started from teenagers has become a major health concern in recent years. Intermittent fasting increases the life span. ⋯ They also had poorer exercise tolerance. However, these obese mice did not present significant learning and memory impairment or changes in brain structures or oxidative stress compared with control mice. These results suggest that intermittent fasting improves brain functions and structures and that high fat diet feeding started early in life does not cause significant changes in brain functions and structures in obese middle-aged animals.
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A high incidence of orofacial clefts is reported in China, but no data has shown the relation between cleft types and the incidence of other defects so far. The aim of this study is to assess the incidence of congenital heart diseases and other organic defects associated with different types of orofacial clefts. ⋯ As the high incidence of heart defects and other organic abnormalities in the children with cleft palate in Eastern China, special attention should be paid to them and echocardiography should be a proposed examination in the evaluation of children with cleft palate before any surgical correction being executed.
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Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a common therapy for treating movement disorders, such as Parkinson's disease (PD), and provides a unique opportunity to study the neural activity of various subcortical structures in human patients. Local field potential (LFP) recordings are often performed with either intraoperative microelectrodes or DBS leads and reflect oscillatory activity within nuclei of the basal ganglia. These LFP recordings have numerous clinical implications and might someday be used to optimize DBS outcomes in closed-loop systems. ⋯ The results of the study suggest that the spatial reach of the LFP can extend several millimeters. Model analysis also showed that variables such as electrode geometry and recording configuration can have a significant effect on LFP amplitude and spatial reach, while the effects of other variables, such as electrode impedance, are often negligible. The results of this study provide insight into the origin of the LFP and identify variables that need to be considered when analyzing LFP recordings in clinical DBS applications.
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Bacterial chondroitinase ABC (ChaseABC) has been used to remove the inhibitory chondroitin sulfate chains from chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans to improve regeneration after rodent spinal cord injury. We hypothesized that the mammalian enzyme arylsulfatase B (ARSB) would also enhance recovery after mouse spinal cord injury. Application of the mammalian enzyme would be an attractive alternative to ChaseABC because of its more robust chemical stability and reduced immunogenicity. ⋯ Serotonin and tyrosine hydroxylase immunoreactive axons were more extensively present in mouse spinal cords treated with ARSB and ChaseABC, and the immunoreactive axons penetrated further beyond the injury site in ARSB or ChaseABC treated mice than in control mice. These results indicate that mammalian ARSB improves functional recovery after CNS injury. The structural/molecular mechanisms underlying the observed functional improvement remain to be elucidated.
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Current treatments for idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (collectively called myositis) focus on the suppression of an autoimmune inflammatory response within the skeletal muscle. However, it has been observed that there is a poor correlation between the successful suppression of muscle inflammation and an improvement in muscle function. Some evidence in the literature suggests that metabolic abnormalities in the skeletal muscle underlie the weakness that continues despite successful immunosuppression. We have previously shown that decreased expression of a purine nucleotide cycle enzyme, adenosine monophosphate deaminase (AMPD1), leads to muscle weakness in a mouse model of myositis and may provide a mechanistic basis for muscle weakness. One of the downstream metabolites of this pathway, D-ribose, has been reported to alleviate symptoms of myalgia in patients with a congenital loss of AMPD1. Therefore, we hypothesized that supplementing exogenous D-ribose would improve muscle function in the mouse model of myositis. We treated normal and myositis mice with daily doses of D-ribose (4 mg/kg) over a 6-week time period and assessed its effects using a battery of behavioral, functional, histological and molecular measures. ⋯ Treatment with daily oral doses of D-ribose showed no significant effect on either disease progression or muscle function in the mouse model of myositis.