Atypical Anxiety-Related Amygdala Reactivity and Functional Connectivity in Sant Mat Meditation

While meditation has drawn much attention in cognitive neuroscience, the neural mechanisms underlying its emotional processing remains elusive. Sant Mat meditators were recruited, who adopt a loving-kindness mode of meditation along with a vegetarian diet and an alcohol-restricted lifestyle and novices. We assessed their State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and scanned their amygdala reactivity in response to an explicit and implicit (backward masked) perception of fearful and happy faces. In contrast with novices, meditators reported lower STAI scores. Meditators showed stronger amygdala reactivity to explicit happiness than to fear, whereas novices exhibited the opposite pattern. The amygdala reactivity was reduced in meditators regardless of implicit fear or happiness. Those who had more lifetime practice in meditation reported lower STAI and showed a weaker amygdala response to fear. Furthermore, the amygdala in meditators, relative to novices, had a stronger positive functional connectivity with the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) to explicit happiness, but a more negative connectivity with the insula and medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to explicit fear. Mediation analysis indicated the amygdala reactivity as the mediator for the linkage between meditation experience and trait anxiety. The findings demonstrate the neural correlates that underpin the beneficial effects of meditation in Sant Mat. Long-term meditation could be functionally coupled with the amygdala reactivity to explicit and implicit emotional processing, which would help reduce anxiety and potentially enhance well-being

Mutual Balancing in State-Object Components for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen compositions from seen states and objects. The disparity between the manually labeled semantic information and its actual visual features causes a significant imbalance of visual deviation in the distribution of various object classes and state classes, which is ignored by existing methods. To ameliorate these issues, we consider the CZSL task as an unbalanced multi-label classification task and propose a novel method called MUtual balancing in STate-object components (MUST) for CZSL, which provides a balancing inductive bias for the model. In particular, we split the classification of the composition classes into two consecutive processes to analyze the entanglement of the two components to get additional knowledge in advance, which reflects the degree of visual deviation between the two components. We use the knowledge gained to modify the model's training process in order to generate more distinct class borders for classes with significant visual deviations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and C-GQA when combined with the basic CZSL frameworks, and it can improve various CZSL frameworks. Our codes are available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MUST_CGE/

Effects of Moderate Aerobic Exercise Training on Vascular Health and Blood Pressure in African Americans

As healthcare progresses toward individualized medicine, understanding how different racial groups respond to lifestyle interventions is valuable. It is established that African Americans have disproportionate levels of cardiovascular disease and impaired vascular health, and clinical practice guidelines suggest lifestyle interventions as the first line of treatment. Recently, the authors reported that 6 months of aerobic exercise improved inflammatory markers, flow-mediated dilation (FMD), and levels of circulating endothelial microparticles (EMPs) in African American adults. This study is a subgroup analysis of the aerobic exercise–induced changes in vascular health and blood pressure (BP) measures, including carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT), nitroglycerin-mediated dilation (NMD), ambulatory BP, and office BP. Sedentary African American adults (53.4±6.2 years; 21 women and 5 men) showed improved vascular health but no change in BP. Carotid artery IMT decreased 6.4%, plasma nitric oxide levels increased 76.6%, plasma EMP levels decreased, percentage of FMD increased 59.6%, and FMD/NMD ratio increased 36.2% (P<.05 for all). Six months of aerobic exercise training is sufficient to elicit improvements in vascular structure and function in African Americans, even without improvements in BP measures or NMD (ie, smooth muscle function). To our knowledge, this is the first study to report such findings in African Americans

Effects of Moderate Aerobic Exercise Training on Vascular Health and Blood Pressure in African Americans

As healthcare progresses toward individualized medicine, understanding how different racial groups respond to lifestyle interventions is valuable. It is established that African Americans have disproportionate levels of cardiovascular disease and impaired vascular health, and clinical practice guidelines suggest lifestyle interventions as the first line of treatment. Recently, the authors reported that 6 months of aerobic exercise improved inflammatory markers, flow-mediated dilation (FMD), and levels of circulating endothelial microparticles (EMPs) in African American adults. This study is a subgroup analysis of the aerobic exercise–induced changes in vascular health and blood pressure (BP) measures, including carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT), nitroglycerin-mediated dilation (NMD), ambulatory BP, and office BP. Sedentary African American adults (53.4±6.2 years; 21 women and 5 men) showed improved vascular health but no change in BP. Carotid artery IMT decreased 6.4%, plasma nitric oxide levels increased 76.6%, plasma EMP levels decreased, percentage of FMD increased 59.6%, and FMD/NMD ratio increased 36.2% (P<.05 for all). Six months of aerobic exercise training is sufficient to elicit improvements in vascular structure and function in African Americans, even without improvements in BP measures or NMD (ie, smooth muscle function). To our knowledge, this is the first study to report such findings in African Americans

Endothelial Activation Microparticles and Inflammation Status Improve with Exercise Training in African Americans

African Americans have the highest prevalence of hypertension in the world which may emanate from their predisposition to heightened endothelial inflammation. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a 6-month aerobic exercise training (AEXT) intervention on the inflammatory biomarkers interleukin-10 (IL-10), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and endothelial microparticle (EMP) CD62E+ and endothelial function assessed by flow-mediated dilation (FMD) in African Americans. A secondary purpose was to evaluate whether changes in IL-10, IL-6, or CD62E+ EMPs predicted the change in FMD following the 6-month AEXT intervention. A pre-post design was employed with baseline evaluation including office blood pressure, FMD, fasting blood sampling, and graded exercise testing. Participants engaged in 6 months of AEXT. Following the AEXT intervention, all baseline tests were repeated. FMD significantly increased, CD62E+ EMPs and IL-6 significantly decreased, and IL-10 increased but not significantly following AEXT. Changes in inflammatory biomarkers did not significantly predict the change in FMD. The change in significantly predicted the change in IL-10. Based on these results, AEXT may be a viable, nonpharmacological method to improve inflammation status and endothelial function and thereby contribute to risk reduction for cardiovascular disease in African Americans

Adherence to Exercise Prescription and Improvements in the Clinical and Vascular Health of African Americans

Improvements in indices of vascular health and endothelial function have been inversely associated with hypertension, a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (e.g., myocardial infarction, stroke, and heart failure), renal failure, and mortality. Aerobic exercise training (AEXT) has been positively associated with improvements in clinical health values, as well as vascular health biomarkers, and endothelial function. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether measures of exercise adherence were related to clinical outcome measures and indices of vascular health subsequent to a 6-month AEXT intervention in a middle-to-older aged African American cohort. Following dietary stabilization, sedentary, apparently healthy, African American adults (40 - 71 y/o) underwent baseline testing including blood pressure, flow-mediated dilation (FMD) studies, fasting blood sampling, and graded exercise testing. Upon completion of a supervised 6-month AEXT intervention, participants repeated all baseline tests. Exercise adherence was measured three ways: exercise percentage, exercise volume, and exercise score. There were no significant correlations between the changes in the vascular health biomarkers of the participants and any of the adherence measures. In addition, there were no significant correlations between any of the adherence measures and the clinical values of the participants that had been significantly changed pre-post-AEXT. Participants improved their clinical and vascular health and decreased risk factors for hypertension and cardiovascular disease regardless of their level of adherence to AEXT. Future studies should continue to accurately quantify adherence in order to assess the exercise dose for improvements in vascular and clinical health

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals &lt;1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Racial Differences in Fc gamma Receptor Expression and Shear Stress Response to CRP in Endothelial Cells

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a robust and independent marker of inflammation. It also decreases endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) expression and bioactivity, increases vasoconstrictor release, and increases adhesion molecule expression. African Americans (AA) have higher levels of CRP than Caucasians (CA), and CRP was found to cause a greater reduction in eNOS expression and bioactivity in the AA endothelial cells (ECs) compared with CA. In addition, AA ECs have shown larger improvements in EC health in response to the exercise mimetic, high levels of laminar shear stress (HiLSS). CRP mediates the biological effects in ECs via Fcγ receptors. CRP binding to Fcγ receptors inhibits eNOS activation via Protein Phosphatase 2A (PP2A), a down-stream protein that dephosphorylates eNOS rendering it inactive. Preliminary data from the doctoral candidate shows racial differences in the expression of PP2A with CRP incubation. The current study used an in vitro cell model to investigate how CRP may differentially affect ECs from AA and CA donors and whether HiLSS eliminates racial differences in CRP-induced proinflammatory and proatherogenic effects. Major findings of this study are: 1) CRP induced racial differences in eNOS expression and activity, NO bioavailability, ET-1 release, and expression of adhesion molecules; 2) CRP receptors (FcγRIIB) have higher levels of expression in AA ECs than in CA ECs under basal conditions and after CRP incubation, which partially contributed to the CRP-induced racial differences; 3) The exercise mimetic, HiLSS, counterbalanced the antagonistic effects of CRP, eliminated racial differences in suppressed eNOS expression and bioactivity, reduced NO bioavailability, and increased ET-1 release and adhesion molecules after CRP pre-incubation. The significance of this current study provides a better understanding of the cellular mechanism of racial differences in endothelial dysfunction. This study provides evidence that HiLSS is effective in reversing the proinflammatory and proatherogenic effects induced by CRP and thereby eliminating the racial differences. Most importantly, this study is targeted to a high-risk population and provides evidence that exercise is particularly beneficial to the vascular function of AA

Midpoint method and accuracy of variability forecasting

Variability forecasting, Midpoint method, Interval computing, Symmetric data, C82, E17,

Impacts of interval measurement on studies of economic variability: Evidence from stock market variability forecasting

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of interval measured data, rather than traditional point data, on economic variability studies. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses interval measured data to forecast the variability of future stock market changes. The variability (interval) forecasts are then compared with point data-based confidence interval forecasts. Findings – Using interval measured data in stock market variability forecasting can significantly increase forecasting accuracy, compared with using traditional point data. Originality/value – An interval forecast for stock prices essentially consists of predicted levels and a predicted variability which can reduce perceived uncertainty or risk embedded in future investments, and therefore, may influence required returns and capital asset prices.Economic forecasting, Stock markets