Up-regulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the dorsal root ganglion of the rat bone cancer pain model

Metastatic bone cancer causes severe pain, but current treatments often provide insufficient pain relief. One of the reasons is that mechanisms underlying bone cancer pain are not solved completely. Our previous studies have shown that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), known as a member of the neurotrophic family, is an important molecule in the pathological pain state in some pain models. We hypothesized that expression changes of BDNF may be one of the factors related to bone cancer pain; in this study, we investigated changes of BDNF expression in dorsal root ganglia in a rat bone cancer pain model. As we expected, BDNF mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) and protein were significantly increased in L3 dorsal root ganglia after intra-tibial inoculation of MRMT-1 rat breast cancer cells. Among the eleven splice-variants of BDNF mRNA, exon 1–9 variant increased predominantly. Interestingly, the up-regulation of BDNF is localized in small neurons (mostly nociceptive neurons) but not in medium or large neurons (non-nociceptive neurons). Further, expression of nerve growth factor (NGF), which is known as a specific promoter of BDNF exon 1–9 variant, was significantly increased in tibial bone marrow. Our findings suggest that BDNF is a key molecule in bone cancer pain, and NGF-BDNF cascade possibly develops bone cancer pain

Thymic Alterations in GM2 Gangliosidoses Model Mice

BACKGROUND: Sandhoff disease is a lysosomal storage disorder characterized by the absence of β-hexosaminidase and storage of GM2 ganglioside and related glycolipids. We have previously found that the progressive neurologic disease induced in Hexb(-/-) mice, an animal model for Sandhoff disease, is associated with the production of pathogenic anti-glycolipid autoantibodies. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In our current study, we report on the alterations in the thymus during the development of mild to severe progressive neurologic disease. The thymus from Hexb(-/-) mice of greater than 15 weeks of age showed a marked decrease in the percentage of immature CD4(+)/CD8(+) T cells and a significantly increased number of CD4(+)/CD8(-) T cells. During involution, the levels of both apoptotic thymic cells and IgG deposits to T cells were found to have increased, whilst swollen macrophages were prominently observed, particularly in the cortex. We employed cDNA microarray analysis to monitor gene expression during the involution process and found that genes associated with the immune responses were upregulated, particularly those expressed in macrophages. CXCL13 was one of these upregulated genes and is expressed specifically in the thymus. B1 cells were also found to have increased in the thy mus. It is significant that these alterations in the thymus were reduced in FcRγ additionally disrupted Hexb(-/-) mice. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These results suggest that the FcRγ chain may render the usually poorly immunogenic thymus into an organ prone to autoimmune responses, including the chemotaxis of B1 cells toward CXCL13

擬似生体環境下における水酸アパタイト成長機構の実験及び計算機化学的研究

制度:新 ; 文部省報告番号:甲1530号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2001-03-15 ; 早大学位記番号:新3119 ; 理工学図書館請求番号:2564早稲田大

Improvement of head magnetic resonance image quality

The purpose of this study is to present a method of boundary enhancement algorithms for magnetic resonance images using a V-filter and clinical applications. By iterated V-filtering, the signal-to-noise ratio can be increased with preservation of edge sharpness. This is due to the relationship of the signal-to-noise ratio to the mean-to-variance ratio. These techniques were applied to clinical cases using MRI in the evaluation of the brain tumor. The boundaries of the brain tumor and the edematous region were precisely extracted

Extraction of attribute concepts from Japanese adjectives

We describe various syntactic and semantic conditions for finding abstractnouns which refer to concepts of adjectives from a text, in an attempt to explore the creation of a thesaurus from text. Depending on usages, six kinds of syntactic patterns are shown. In the syntactic and semantic conditions an omission of an abstract noun is mainly used, but in addition, various linguistic clues are needed. We then compare our results with synsets of Japanese WordNet. From a viewpoint of Japanese WordNet, the degree of agreement of "Attribute" between our data and Japanese WordNet was 22%. On the other hand, the total number of differences of obtained abstract nouns was 267. From a viewpoint of our data,the degree of agreement of abstract nouns between our data and Japanese WordNet was 54%.Accepted versio