Genomic and Clinical Effects Associated with a Relaxation Response Mind-Body Intervention in Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Introduction: Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) can profoundly affect quality of life and are influenced by stress and resiliency. The impact of mind-body interventions (MBIs) on IBS and IBD patients has not previously been examined. Methods: Nineteen IBS and 29 IBD patients were enrolled in a 9-week relaxation response based mind-body group intervention (RR-MBI), focusing on elicitation of the RR and cognitive skill building. Symptom questionnaires and inflammatory markers were assessed pre- and post-intervention, and at short-term follow-up. Peripheral blood transcriptome analysis was performed to identify genomic correlates of the RR-MBI. Results: Pain Catastrophizing Scale scores improved significantly post-intervention for IBD and at short-term follow-up for IBS and IBD. Trait Anxiety scores, IBS Quality of Life, IBS Symptom Severity Index, and IBD Questionnaire scores improved significantly post-intervention and at short-term follow-up for IBS and IBD, respectively. RR-MBI altered expression of more genes in IBD (1059 genes) than in IBS (119 genes). In IBD, reduced expression of RR-MBI response genes was most significantly linked to inflammatory response, cell growth, proliferation, and oxidative stress-related pathways. In IBS, cell cycle regulation and DNA damage related gene sets were significantly upregulated after RR-MBI. Interactive network analysis of RR-affected pathways identified TNF, AKT and NF-κB as top focus molecules in IBS, while in IBD kinases (e.g. MAPK, P38 MAPK), inflammation (e.g. VEGF-C, NF-κB) and cell cycle and proliferation (e.g. UBC, APP) related genes emerged as top focus molecules. Conclusions: In this uncontrolled pilot study, participation in an RR-MBI was associated with improvements in disease-specific measures, trait anxiety, and pain catastrophizing in IBS and IBD patients. Moreover, observed gene expression changes suggest that NF-κB is a target focus molecule in both IBS and IBD—and that its regulation may contribute to counteracting the harmful effects of stress in both diseases. Larger, controlled studies are needed to confirm this preliminary finding. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.Gov NCT0213674

High Performance Channel Model Hardware Emulator for 802.11n"

In this paper, the design and implementation of a new high performance hardware channel emulator is presented. The purpose of the developed emulator is to efficiently reproduce in a laboratory environment the accurate behaviour of several effects of the radio channel over a multiple antennas wireless communication system, including AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise), multipath, attenuation and Doppler shift. The main application target is the test and the performance evaluation of a new 802.11n transceiver. The prototype has been implemented on a board including both an ARM processor and a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and it supports the simulation of a 40 MHz radio frequency bandwidth

A reconfigurable, power-scalable Rake receiver IP for W-CDMA

During the last few years, the wireless market has experienced an exponential growth. 2G systems are essentially voice-oriented: the main innovation expected from 3G ones is the ubiquitous Internet and multimedia fruition. The transition from 2G to 3G provides both opportunities and challenges: one way to make this migration as smooth as possible relies on the employment of reconfigurable architectures. In this paper, a reconfigurable Rake receiver for W-CDMA is proposed. Very promising results from the physical implementation on a XCV300E have been obtained