Whether mindfulness-guided therapy can be a new direction for the rehabilitation of patients with Parkinson’s disease: a network meta-analysis of non-pharmacological alternative motor-/sensory-based interventions

BackgroundThe treatment for Parkinson’s disease (PD) consumes a lot of manpower and financial resources. Non-pharmacological alternative motor-/sensory-based interventions are optimized for the rehabilitation of PD patients. Mindfulness-based therapy shows ideal efficacy, but the diversity of the therapy brings difficulties to the selection of clinicians and patients.MethodsNetwork meta-analysis in the Bayesian framework was used to evaluate the efficacy of non-pharmacological alternative motor-/sensory-based interventions in improving motor and non-motor symptoms in PD patients.ResultsA total of 58 studies (2,227 patients) were included. Compared with the non-intervention group, qigong was associated with improved outcomes in the Timed Up and Go (TUG) test (mean difference (MD) −5.54, 95% confidence interval (CI) −8.28 to −2.77), and UPDRS-I (MD −15.50, 95% CI −19.93 to −7.63). Differences between non-pharmacological alternative motor-/sensory-based interventions were not significant for PDQ-39, UPDRS-I, or UPDRS-II; however, qigong was superior to dance (MD −3.91, 95% CI −6.90 to −0.95), Tai Chi (MD −3.54, 95% CI −6.53 to −0.69), acupuncture (MD −6.75, 95% CI −10.86 to −2.70), music (MD -3.91, 95% CI −7.49 to −0.48), and exercise (MD −3.91, 95% CI −6.49 to −1.33) in the TUG test.ConclusionThis network meta-analysis supports mindfulness-based therapy (e.g., qigong, yoga, and Tai Chi) as a preferred non-pharmacological alternative motor-/sensory-based intervention for PD rehabilitation.Systematic review registrationhttps://inplasy.com/inplasy-2022-10-0109/, INPLASY2022100109

People in rice-farming cultures perceive emotions more accurately

Are people in interdependent cultures more accurate at perceiving people's emotional expressions? One problem with testing this question is that people tend to be more accurate at perceiving emotions of people of their own ethnic group. That makes it impossible to test East-West cultural differences using the same emotion pictures. We got around this problem by testing for cultural differences between southern and northern China. Southern China traditionally farmed rice, which requires more interdependence than the wheat farming of northern China. Paying more attention to people's emotions may have been useful in rice cultures because farmers had to manage shared irrigation networks and exchange labor more than wheat farmers. In Study 1, students who had grown up in rice-farming provinces guessed people's emotions in the Mind in the Eyes test more accurately than people who had grown up in wheat-farming provinces. In Study 2, we tested students from 13 prefectures (similar to US counties) in a single province along China's rice-wheat border. People from the rice side of the border perceived emotions more accurately than people from the wheat side. These results connect a long-term ecological cause (rice farming) to a modern psychological outcome (emotion perception). These results also offer an explanation for broader cultural differences in emotion perception

Amphiphilic Hyperbranched Polyethoxysiloxane: A Self-Templating Assembled Platform to Fabricate Functionalized Mesostructured Silicas for Aqueous Enantioselective Reactions

Fabrication of amphiphilic mesostructured silica as a heterogeneous catalyst is beneficial to facilitate an aqueous reaction due to its highly dispersed nature in water. In this work, by taking advantage of a self-templating assembled strategy, we construct two types of mesostructured silicas as heterogeneous catalysts, chiral ruthenium/diamine-functionalized and chiral cinchonine-based squaramide-functionalized heterogeneous catalysts, through the use of amphiphilic poly­(ethylene glycol) monomethyl ether-modified hyperbranched polyethoxysiloxane as a silica precursor. As presented in the study, the chiral ruthenium/diamine-functionalized catalyst performs an asymmetric transfer hydrogenation of acyclic α-trifluoromethylimines to chiral α-trifluoromethylamines in water, whereas the chiral squaramide-functionalized catalyst enables efficiently asymmetric Michael addition of acetylacetone to nitroalkenes in brine. Both highly catalytic performances are attributed to the combined multifunctionalities of well-defined single-site chiral active species, highly dispersed catalytic centers, and practical phase-transferred function. Furthermore, both catalysts can also be recovered easily and reused repeatedly for at least seven times without loss of catalytic activity. Such a feature makes this self-templating assembly attractive for construction of various heterogeneous catalysts