Resveratrol attenuates ischemic brain damage in the delayed phase after stroke and induces messenger RNA and protein express for angiogenic factors

BackgroundIt has been reported recently that resveratrol preconditioning can protect the brain from ischemia–reperfusion injury. However, it was unclear whether resveratrol administration after stroke was beneficial to the delayed phases after focal cerebral ischemia injury. This study investigated the effects and possible protective mechanism of resveratrol on the delayed phase after focal cerebral ischemia injury in mice.MethodsMice were randomly assigned to five groups according to the time of administration of resveratrol. Control group mice received a corresponding volume of saline solution (0.9% NaCl) containing 20% hydroxypropyl h-cyclodextrin by gavage and were exposed to middle cerebral artery (MCA) occlusion and reperfusion injury. The treatment groups received resveratrol (50 mg/kg/d, gavage) until day 7. Ischemia group mice received their first dose 5 minutes before MCA ischemia, reperfusion group mice received their first dose 5 minutes before MCA reperfusion, first-day, group mice received their first dose 24 hours after MCA reperfusion, and third-day group mice received their first dose at 72 hours after MCA reperfusion. Brain injury was evaluated by triphenyltetrazolium chloride staining and neurologic examination 7 days after reperfusion. The microvascular cell number was examined with immunohistochemistry staining. Effect of resveratrol on matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) gene expression was investigated with reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction and Western blot.ResultsThe mean neurologic scores and infarct volumes of the ischemia and reperfusion groups were lower than that of the control group at 7 days after MCA reperfusion (P < .05). Immunohistochemistry staining showed significantly less reduction in the number of microvessels in the cortical area of mice of the ischemia and reperfusion groups compared with controls. The ischemic hemispheres of the ischemia and reperfusion groups showed significantly (P < .05) elevated levels of protein of MMP-2 and VEGF.ConclusionsResveratrol administration by gavage provided an important neuroprotective effect on focal cerebral ischemic injury in the delayed phase. The elevated MMP-2 and VEGF levels might be important in the neuroprotective effect of resveratrol administration by inducing angiogenesis.Clinical RelevanceStrokes can induce infarction size or neurologic disability and cause brain injury in millions of people world wide each year. However, there is no approved therapy currently, and so it is necessary to develop new treatments in the field of primary and secondary stroke to improve the prognosis. This study identified the benefits of early administration of resveratrol by gavage in the delayed phases after focal cerebral ischemic injury and further supports the possible use of resveratrol as a therapeutic agent to ameliorate ischemic infarction. Resveratrol may thus be considered as a potential candidate in the armamentarium of drugs for the early treatment in patients who sustain a stroke

On XACML\u27s adequacy to specify and to enforce HIPAA

In the medical sphere, personal and medical informa-tion is collected, stored, and transmitted for various pur-poses, such as, continuity of care, rapid formulationof diagnoses, and billing. Many of these operationsmust comply with federal regulations like the HealthInsurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).To this end, we need a specification language that canprecisely capture the requirements of HIPAA. We alsoneed an enforcement engine that can enforce the pri-vacy policies specified in the language. In the currentwork, we evaluate eXtensible Access Control MarkupLanguage (XACML) as a candidate specification lan-guage for HIPAA privacy rules. We evaluate XACMLbased on the set of features required to sufficiently ex-press HIPAA, proposed by a prior work. We also discusswhich of the features necessary for expressing HIPAAare missing in XACML. We then present high level de-signs of how to enhance XACM

A Bayesian localised conditional auto-regressive model for estimating the health effects of air pollution

Estimation of the long-term health effects of air pollution is a challenging task, especially when modeling spatial small-area disease incidence data in an ecological study design. The challenge comes from the unobserved underlying spatial autocorrelation structure in these data, which is accounted for using random effects modeled by a globally smooth conditional autoregressive model. These smooth random effects confound the effects of air pollution, which are also globally smooth. To avoid this collinearity a Bayesian localized conditional autoregressive model is developed for the random effects. This localized model is flexible spatially, in the sense that it is not only able to model areas of spatial smoothness, but also it is able to capture step changes in the random effects surface. This methodological development allows us to improve the estimation performance of the covariate effects, compared to using traditional conditional auto-regressive models. These results are established using a simulation study, and are then illustrated with our motivating study on air pollution and respiratory ill health in Greater Glasgow, Scotland in 2011. The model shows substantial health effects of particulate matter air pollution and nitrogen dioxide, whose effects have been consistently attenuated by the currently available globally smooth models

Metal-poor stars observed with the automated planet finder telescope. I. Discovery of five carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars from LAMOST

We report on the discovery of five carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars in the metallicity range of $-3.3<$ [Fe/H] $<-2.4$. These stars were selected from the LAMOST DR3 low-resolution (R$\sim$ 2,000) spectroscopic database as metal-poor candidates and followed-up with high-resolution spectroscopy (R$\sim$110,000) with the LICK/APF. Stellar parameters and individual abundances for 25 chemical elements (from Li to Eu) are presented for the first time. These stars exhibit chemical abundance patterns that are similar to those reported in other literature studies of very and extremely metal-poor stars. One of our targets, J2114$-$0616, shows high enhancement in carbon ([C/Fe]=1.37), nitrogen ([N/Fe]= 1.88), barium ([Ba/Fe]=1.00), and europium ([Eu/Fe]=0.84). Such chemical abundance pattern suggests that J2114$-$0616 can be classified as CEMP-r/s star. In addition, the star J1054+0528 can be classified as a CEMP-rI star, with [Eu/Fe]=0.44 and [Ba/Fe]=$-$0.52. The other stars in our sample show no enhancements in neutron-capture elements and can be classified as CEMP-no stars. We also performed a kinematic and dynamical analysis of the sample stars based on Gaia DR2 data. The kinematic parameters, orbits, and binding energy of these stars, show that J2114$-$0616 is member of the outer halo population, while the remaining stars belong to the inner halo population but with an accreted origin. Collectively, these results add important constraints on the origin and evolution of CEMP stars as well as on their possible formation scenarios

Arbitrating Traffic Contention for Power Saving with Multiple PSM Clients

Data transmission over WiFi quickly drains the batteries of mobile devices. Although the IEEE 802.11 standards provide power save mode (PSM) to help mobile devices conserve energy, PSM fails to bring expected benefits in many real scenarios. In particular, when multiple PSM mobile devices associate to a single access point (AP), PSM does not work well under transmission contention. Optimizing power saving of multiple PSM clients is a challenging task, because each PSM client expects to complete data transmission early so that it can turn to low power mode. In this paper, we define an energy conserving model to describe the general PSM traffic contention problem. We prove that the optimization of energy saving for multiple PSM clients under constraint is an NPcomplete problem. Following this direction, we propose a solution called harmonious power saving mechanism (HPSM) to address one specific case, in which multiple PSM clients associate to a single AP. In HPSM, we first use a basic sociological concept to define the richness of a PSM client based on the link resource it consumes. Then, we separate these poor PSM clients from rich PSM clients in terms of link resource consumption and favor the former to save power when they face PSM transmission contention. We implement prototypes of HPSM based on the open source projects Mad-wifi and NS-2. Our evaluations show that HPSM can help the poor PSM clients effectively save power while only slightly degrading the rich PSM clients\u27 performance in comparison with the existing PSM solutions