ObjectiveTo investigate the effect of expressional chimeric faces on the attentional bias in unilateral spatial neglect (USN) patients.Methods12 USN patients and 30 matched healthy controls (HC) were involved in this study.All of them were performed with happy-neutral and sad-neutral expressional chimeric faces (ECF) and the attentional deviation scores were compared between and within groups.ResultsThere were statistically significant differences of attentional deviation scores ( happy-neutral ECF:t =15.550,P ＜ 0.0l ; sadneutral ECF:t=12.192,P＜0.01 ) between the USN group (happy-neutral ECF:0.78 ±0.22;sad-neutral ECF:0.50 ±0.20) and the HC group (happy-neutral ECF:-0.31 ±0.20;sad-neutral ECF:-0.25 ±0.17),with rightward bias in the USN group and small leftward bias in the HC group.For the USN group,the magnitude of rightward bias in the sad-neutral ECF condition was reduced than in the happy-neutral ECF condition ( t =3.954,P=0.002 ).There were no statistically differences under happy-and sad-neutral ECF conditions within the HC group ( t =- 1.302,P =0.203 ).ConclusionsUSN patients show rightward attentional bias under both happyand sad-neutral ECF conditions.However,the magnitude of rightward bias under the sad-neutral ECF condition are reduced significantly.This might be attributed to the unconscious processing of stimuli in the neglected side and emotion cognition of the brain hemispheres.

Hyperglycemia has been identified as one of the important factors involved in the microvascular complications of diabetes, and has been related to increased cardiovascular mortality. Endothelial damage and dysfunction result from diabetes; therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the response of endothelial cells to stressful stimuli, modelled in normal and high glucose concentrations in vitro. Eahy 926 endothelial cells were cultured in 5 mmol/L or 30 mmol/L glucose conditions for a 24 hour period and oxidative stress was induced by exposure to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) or tumour necrosis factor- α (TNF- α ), following which the protective effect of the glucocorticoid dexamethasone was assessed. Apoptosis, necrosis and cell viability were determined using an ELISA for DNA fragmentation, an enzymatic lactate dehydrogenase assay and an MTT assay, respectively. High glucose significantly increased the susceptibility of Eahy 926 cells to apoptosis in the presence of 500 μmol/L H2O2, above that induced in normal glucose (P<0.02). A reduction of H2O2- and TNF- α -induced apoptosis occurred in both high and low glucose after treatment with dexametha-sone (P<0.05). Conclusion high glucose is effective in significantly augmenting stress caused by H2O2, but not in causing stress alone. These findings suggest a mechanism by which short term hyperglycemia may facilitate and augment endothelial damage.

Objective To analyze neural activity of in rat prefrontal cortex with the use of nonnegative matrix factorization with sparseness constrains (NMFs) as a methodology and to study how to express neural ensemble with higher precision during working memory task.Methods Experiment data were obtained from neural population activity in the period 5 s before and after the working memory event.From the zero point,the neuronal firing times were binned in windows of 200 ms with 50 ms overlapping.The normalized neuronal bin-count matrix is decomposed by NMFs into mixing matrix and source component matrix with sparseness constraints.Meaningful components were extracted to reconstruct the input by an inverse of NMFs transform.Results By analyzing the ten groups of data from 2 rats,with the numbers of the sparse sources of 10 and 15 respectively,explicit neural ensembles with the feature components were obtained in the sparse reconstructed activity.Comparing to rate coding,the spatiotemporal location of neural ensemble was more precisely detected.Conclusion The working memory information is encoded with neural ensemble activity.NMFs could find the sparse firing pattern robustly in neuron population activity.NMFs removes much redundancy and demonstrate the possibility to express neural ensemble with higher precision compared with rate coding,which would be helpful to infer correlations between cortical firing pattern and working memory event.

Objective To investigate how the independent components(ICs)energies of multichannel local field potentials(LFPs) code event base on the analysis of ICA of the cortical LFPs of rats. Methods Taking the event point as the zero point, 15-channel LFPs between the span of ±500ms recorded from the prefrontal cortex of rats were decomposed into 15 ICs. The energies of the ICs were computed in a 50-ms window. By sliding the window with step of 25 ms, a dynamic distribution mapping of the 15 ICs' energies was established. ICs with distinctly increased energies during the span of ±200 ms, which indicating that these ICs energies coded event,were selected as the targets. The corresponding channels of these ICs were determined consequently via the inverse transformation of ICA. Results Considering each trail of the repetitious analysis for the same segment of data, the spatial localization of the dominate function region(s) turned out to be relatively stable in spite of the uncertainty of the number and sequence of the target IC(s) due to the ambiguities of the decomposition of ICA.Meanwhile, the analysis results of a series of data segments showed satisfactory correspondence between data segments and dominate function regions. Conclusion The ICs' energies of multichannel LFPs are able to code events in working memories; It is valid for ICA to identify the coding patterns of multichannel LFPs to events; ICA is capable to localize the dominate function regions of event coding with satisfactory robustness.

Objective The purpose of this study was to observe the effects of bumetanide on elderly type 2 diabetic patients with middle and advanced stages nephropathy. Methods Forty cases with diabetic nephropathy (DN) were divided into two groups:control group (20 cases) and treatment group (20 cases) . The control group accepted furosemide (20 mg, once a day) and the bumetanide was orally administrated at the dose of 1.0 mg, twice a day to the treatment group for 3 months. The assessment of transferrin (TRF) and urine microalbumin (UALB) was performed at the time points at the end of 1, 4, 8, 12 weeks after treatment. Results (1) The levels of BUN, SCr and UA after treatment were lower than before treatment, but there were no significant differences. (2) In the treatment group, the levels of TRF and UALB have decreased after treatment for 1 week, with no statistically significant. But at the end of 4, 8 and 12 weeks,the differences were statistically significant ( <0.05) . Especially, during the three months follow-up,the levels of TRF and UALB at 12 weeks have decreased obviously. Conclusion The therapeutic effect of bumetanide on DN might be better than that of furosemide.

Objective To explore neglect dyslexia in unilateral spatial neglect patients,the error type and whether there exists word length and semantic effect.Methods Ten left spatial neglect patients were investigated by Chinese characters reading material.Results Unilateral spatial patients showed neglect dyslexia (202 neglect errors,94.0％ of the total 215 errors) when reading.The most common errors were omissions (148 errors,73.3％ of the total 202 neglect errors),followed by substitutions and additions.The error rate of two words was 9.9％ ± 8.4％,while the rate of three words was 18.8％ ± 16.2％.Performance was worse with the increase of word length (T =-55,P ＜ 0.05).The error rate of words was 8.3％ ± 7.5％,while the rate of non-words was 18.9％ ± 16.6％,and the rate of non-words was worse than that of words (T =-55,P ＜ 0.05).Conclusions Our study has shown that omissions are the most common error type of neglect dyslexia in Chinese unilateral spatial neglect patients,and the impairment include word length effect.The patients with unilateral spatial neglect show preserved semantic processing in the neglect side.

Objective To study the protective effect of fluvastatin,one of the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins),against oxygen radical-induced oxidative damages in human aortic endothelial cell,and the role of Bcl-2 in this protection.Methods Human aortic endothelial cells with or without Bcl-2 siRNA transfection were subjected to 1-100 nM of fluvastatin and 100 la hydrogen peroxide for 24 hours.Bcl-2 mRNA and protein expression were measured by Taqman quantitative PCR and Western blotting.Cell apoptosis was measured by normal and fluorescent microscopy and Cell Death Detection ELISA.Results In the Bcl-2-expressed cells,fluvastatin significantly reversed hydrogen peroxide-induced microscopic apoptosis and apoptotic DNA fragmentation,which were accompanied by a markedly upregulation of Bcl-2 expression by fluvastatin.However,the endothelial protection by fluvastatin was completely lost in Bcl-2 siRNA transfected cells.Conclusion Fluvastatin protects human endothelial cells against oxygen radical-induced cell apoptosis in vitro,and this protection seemed to be mediated in a Bcl-2 dependent pathway.(J Geriatr Cardil 12008;5:33-38)

Objective The aim of this study was to determine if isoflavone genistien has protective effects against high glucose-induced cell apoptosis in human aortic endlthelial cells,and investigate the possible mechanism for this protection.Methods Human aortic endothelial cells subjected to normal (5mmol/L) or high glucose (25mmol/L) were treated with genistein at 0,50,100nmol/L.Parallel experiments were performed with 100nM 17b-estradiol,and also in the presence and absence of the pure anti-estrogen ICI-182,780 (100nmol/L).The effects on cell apoptotic DNA fragmentation were determined using cell death ELISA,and the effects on cellular proliferation were determined using tritiated thymidine incorporation assay.Estrogen receptor expression was detected by Taqman quantitative PCR.Results Genistein at 100nmol/L significantly reduced high glucose-induced DNA fragmentation,and reversed cell DNA synthesis inhibition (P＜0.001) after 24 hours' incubation.The effect of genistein was completely blocked by ICI-182,780administration.Estrogen receptor beta,but not alpha was found to be expressed in these cells.Conclusion Isoflavone genistein shows protection against high glucose-induced cell damage through estrogen receptor beta,reducing apoptotic DNA damage and protecting from the inhibition of cell proliferation.

Objective Toinvestigatetheentropyoflocalfieldpotentials(LFPs)recordedinratmedialprefrontal cortex during a Y-maze working memory (WM) task, to provide computing support for neural coding mechanism.Methods Sixteen-channel LFPs were recorded from SD rats while they performed a Y-maze WM task.The data came from 4 rats, 20 trials (10 correct trials and 10 incorrect trials) per rat provided by laboratory of neurobiology in medicine,Tianjin Medical University.Original LFPs were preprocessed to remove 50 Hz power line noise and baseline drift.Multi-taper Fourier transform was applied to calculate spatial distributions of LFPs and band pass filter were used to extract characteristic signal.The entroy coding of 16 channel LFPs was as follows: the physiological window was set to be 500 ms, the step length of physiological window was set to be 125 ms, windows were added to LFPs data, and then LFPs entropy of each sliding window was computed and averaged to get the trend of multichannel entropy values duringthe WM task.Results The power of θ band (4-12 Hz) in LFPs increased.The averaged entropy value ofmultichannel θ band LFPs in correct trials was 0.939±-0.020, which were larger than those in the resting state, 0.795±0.031 (P＜0.05).Those during wrong WM task had no significant difference, which didn't encode the WM task.Conclusions The principal frequency band related to WM is the θ band and LFPs entropy encodes the WM effectively.

Objective The changes of CECs,EPCs and CPCs in the old type 2 diabetes mellitus retinopathy(DR)patients and the clinical purpose were discussed.Methods 30 cases of T2DM(including 10 DM cases without complications and 20 DM cases with retinopathy)and 10 cases of health controls were enrolled in this study.Results(1)The changes of CECs in DR Patients were significantly higher while the levels of EPCs and CPCs were significantly lower than those in the patients of the control group.(2)There were some corrlation beteen the level of CECs,EPCs and CPCs and the degree of diabetic retinopathy.(3)The serum EPCs levels in type 2 diabetics were negativey associated with body mass index,waist-hip ratio,abdominal circumference,FPG,triglyceride,UAER,creatinine.Conclusion The levels of EPCs and CPCs in T2DM-DR patients may be the important detected targets for early discovery and monitoring of DR.