Neurological Dysfunction Associated with Antiphospholipid Syndrome: Histopathological Brain Findings of Thrombotic Changes in a Mouse Model

The aim of this work was to study the pathological processes underlying neurological dysfunctions displayed by BALB/C mice induced with experimental antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), as we have previously reported. Experimental APS was induced in female BALB/C mice by immunization with a pathogenic monoclonal anticardiolipin (aCL) antibody, H-3 (n=10), or an irrelevant immunoglobulin in controls (n=10). Mice immunized with H-3 developed clinical and neurological manifestations of APS, including: embryo resorption, thrombocytopenia neurological defects and behavioral disturbances. In mouse sera, the titer of various autoantibodies were elevated, including: anti-phospholipids (aPLs), anti-2 glycoprotein-I (β2GPI), anti-endothelial cell antibodies (AECA) and low titer of anti-dsDNA antibodies. Five months after APS induction, mice were sacrificed and brain tissue specimens were processed for hematoxylin and eosin (H&E), immunofluorescence staining and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). H&E staining of cortical tissue derived from all APS mice revealed mild inflammation, localized mainly in the meninges. Prominent IgG deposits in the large vessel walls and perivascular IgG leakage were observed by immunofluorescence. No large thrombi were observed in large vessels. However, EM evaluation of cerebral tissue revealed pathological changes in the microvessels. Thrombotic occlusion of capillaries in combination with mild inflammation was the main finding and may underlie the neurological defects displayed by mice with APS

Sesame eliciting and safe doses in a large sesame allergic population

Background: Sesame is a significant food allergen causing severe and even fatal reactions. Given its increasing prevalence in western diet, sesame is listed as an allergenic food requiring labeling in the United States and EU. However, data on the population reaction doses to sesame are limited. Methods: All sesame oral food challenges (OFCs), performed either for diagnosis or for threshold identification before the beginning of sesame oral immunotherapy (OIT) between November 2011 and July 2021 in Shamir medical center were analyzed for reaction threshold distribution. Safe-dose challenges with 90–120 min intervals were also analyzed. Results: Two hundred and fifty patients underwent 338 positive OFCs, and additional 158 safe-dose OFCs were performed. The discrete and cumulative protein amounts estimated to elicit an objective reaction in 1% (ED01) of the entire cohort (n = 250) were 0.8 mg (range 0.3–6.3) and 0.7 mg (range 0.1–7.1), respectively, and those for 5% of the population (ED05) were 3.4 mg (range 1.2–20.6) and 4.5 mg (range 1.2–28.8), respectively. Safe-dose OFCs showed similar values of ED01 (0.8, 0.4–7.5 mg) and ED05 (3.4, 1.2–22.9 mg). While doses of ≤1 mg sesame protein elicited oral pruritus in 11.6% of the patients, no objective reaction was documented to this amount in any of the challenges, including safe-dose OFCs. Conclusions: This study provides data on sesame reaction threshold distribution in the largest population of allergic patients studied, with no right or left censored data, and with validation using a safe-dose OFC. It further supports the current methods for ED determination as appropriate for establishing safety precautions for the food industry

Measurement of action spectra of light-activated processes

We report on a new experimental technique suitable for measurement of light-activated processes, such as fluorophore transport. The usefulness of this technique is derived from its capacity to decouple the imaging and activation processes, allowing fluorescent imaging of fluorophore transport at a convenient activation wavelength. We demonstrate the efficiency of this new technique in determination of the action spectrum of the light mediated transport of rhodamine 123 into the parasitic protozoan Giardia duodenalis. (c) 2006 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g., What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g., Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure, while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty

Phrase Frequency Effects in Language Production

A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., ‘car’, ‘red’), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., ‘red car’) are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words