An Alternative to Current Therapies of Functional Dyspepsia: Self-Administrated Transcutaneous Electroacupuncture Improves Dyspeptic Symptoms

Functional dyspepsia is of high prevalence with little treatment options. The aim of this study was to develop a new treatment method using self-management transcutaneous electroacupuncture (TEA) for functional dyspepsia (FD). Twenty-eight patients with FD were enrolled and underwent a crossover clinical trial with 2-week TEA at ST36 and PC6 and 2-week sham-TEA at nonacupuncture sham-points. Questionnaires were used to assess symptoms of dyspepsia and quality of life. Physiological testing included gastric emptying and electrogastrography. It was found that (1) TEA but not sham-TEA significantly improved dyspeptic symptoms and 4 domains in quality of life; improvement was also noted in self-rated anxiety and depression scores; (2) gastric emptying was significantly and substantially increased with 2-week TEA but not sham-TEA; and (3) gastric accommodation was also improved with TEA but not sham-TEA, reflected as increased ingested nutrient volumes at the levels of satiety and maximum tolerance. These findings suggest a therapeutic potential of self-administrated TEA method for functional dyspepsia, possibly attributed to improvement in gastric motility

Second Order Perturbations in the Randall-Sundrum Infinite Brane-World Model

We discuss the non-linear gravitational interactions in the Randall-Sundrum single brane model. If we naively write down the 4-dimensional effective action integrating over the fifth dimension with the aid of the decomposition with respect to eigen modes of 4-dimensional d'Alembertian, the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling seems to be ill-defined. We carefully analyze second order perturbations of the gravitational field induced on the 3-brane under the assumption of the static and axial-symmetric 5-dimensional metric. It is shown that there remains no pathological feature in the Kaluza-Klein mode coupling after the summation over all different mass modes. Furthermore, the leading Kaluza-Klein corrections are shown to be sufficiently suppressed in comparison with the leading order term which is obtained by the zero mode truncation. We confirm that the 4-dimensional Einstein gravity is approximately recovered on the 3-brane up to second order perturbations.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, comment and reference added, typos correcte

Crystal Structures of the ATPase Domains of Four Human Hsp70 Isoforms: HSPA1L/Hsp70-hom, HSPA2/Hsp70-2, HSPA6/Hsp70B', and HSPA5/BiP/GRP78

The 70-kDa heat shock proteins (Hsp70) are chaperones with central roles in processes that involve polypeptide remodeling events. Hsp70 proteins consist of two major functional domains: an N-terminal nucleotide binding domain (NBD) with ATPase activity, and a C-terminal substrate binding domain (SBD). We present the first crystal structures of four human Hsp70 isoforms, those of the NBDs of HSPA1L, HSPA2, HSPA5 and HSPA6. As previously with Hsp70 family members, all four proteins crystallized in a closed cleft conformation, although a slight cleft opening through rotation of subdomain IIB was observed for the HSPA5-ADP complex. The structures presented here support the view that the NBDs of human Hsp70 function by conserved mechanisms and contribute little to isoform specificity, which instead is brought about by the SBDs and by accessory proteins.This article can also be viewed as an enhanced version in which the text of the article is integrated with interactive 3D representations and animated transitions. Please note that a web plugin is required to access this enhanced functionality. Instructions for the installation and use of the web plugin are available in Text S1