Anti-inflammatory and anti-coagulatory activities of caffeic acid and ellagic acid in cardiac tissue of diabetic mice

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Caffeic acid (CA) and ellagic acid (EA) are phenolic acids naturally occurring in many plant foods. Cardiac protective effects of these compounds against dyslipidemia, hypercoagulability, oxidative stress and inflammation in diabetic mice were examined.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Diabetic mice were divided into three groups (15 mice per group): diabetic mice with normal diet, 2% CA treatment, or 2% EA treatment. One group of non-diabetic mice with normal diet was used for comparison. After 12 weeks supplement, mice were sacrificed, and the variation of biomarkers for hypercoagulability, oxidative stress and inflammation in cardiac tissue of diabetic mice were measured.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The intake of CA or EA significantly increased cardiac content of these compounds, alleviated body weight loss, elevated plasma insulin and decreased plasma glucose levels in diabetic mice (<it>p </it>< 0.05). These treatments also significantly enhanced plasma antithrombin-III and protein C activities (<it>p </it>< 0.05); and decreased triglyceride content in cardiac tissue and plasma (<it>p </it>< 0.05), in which the hypolipidemic effects of EA were significantly greater than that of CA (<it>p </it>< 0.05). CA or EA significantly lowered cardiac levels of malondialdehyde, reactive oxygen species, interleukin (IL)-beta, IL-6, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha and monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1 (<it>p </it>< 0.05); and retained cardiac activity of glutathione peroxidase (GPX), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (<it>p </it>< 0.05). These compounds also significantly up-regulated cardiac mRNA expression of GPX1, SOD and catalase; and down-regulated IL-1beta, IL-6, TNF-alpha and MCP-1 mRNA expression in diabetic mice (<it>p </it>< 0.05).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results support that CA and EA could provide triglyceride-lowering, anti-coagulatory, anti-oxidative, and anti-inflammatory protection in cardiac tissue of diabetic mice. Thus, the supplement of these agents might be helpful for the prevention or attenuation of diabetic cardiomyopathy.</p

Effects of orthographic consistency and homophone density on Chinese spoken word recognition

Studies of alphabetic language have shown that orthographic knowledge influences phonological processing during spoken word recognition. This study utilized the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to differentiate two types of phonology-to-orthography (P-to-O) mapping consistencies in Chinese, namely homophone density and orthographic consistency. The ERP data revealed an orthographic consistency effect in the frontal-centrally distributed N400, and a homophone density effect in central-posteriorly distributed late positive component (LPC). Further source analyses using the standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) demonstrated that the orthographic effect was not only localized in the frontal and temporal-parietal regions for phonological processing, but also in the posterior visual cortex for orthographic processing, while the homophone density effect was found in middle temporal gyrus for lexical-semantic selection, and in the temporal-occipital junction for orthographic processing. These results suggest that orthographic information not only shapes the nature of phonological representations, but may also be activated during on-line spoken word recognition

The feedback consistency effect in Chinese character recognition:evidence from a psycholinguistic norm

Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition

ガッカイシ ノ ヨウシ ノ コウサツ : ニホン ト タイワン ニオケル ニホンゴガク ニホンゴ キョウイク ノ ロンブン ノ バアイ

Abstract is used to expressed the most important content of the paper (日本国語大辞典(2001(2nd edition) )) . Paper abstract，as the “must" of all published papers，should clearly and concisely present the important issues addressed in the paper. This work studied the 131 paper abstracts published during 2006-2008 in two Japanese Associations of Japan and two Japanese Associations of Taiwan that summarized the compositions，paragraphs，and titles used by Japanese language and Japanese education disciplines. All abstracts are common in using either one paragraph or two paragraphs with no conjunction. Most commonly the abstract focused on subject，objective， conclusion，and proposition. Each abstract in a paper from Japan was comprised of one paragraph with five sentences，while that from Taiwan was composed of two paragraphs with six sentences. The sequence of description and numbers of purposes，methods， and conclusions differ among the two disciplines. This paper explored how the paper abstracts published by Japanese Associations of Japan and of Taiwan were composed， which should benefit the following compositions in different fields

MicroRNA-221 and microRNA-222 regulate gastric carcinoma cell proliferation and radioresistance by targeting PTEN

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>MicroRNAs (miRNAs) can function as either oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes via regulation of cell proliferation and/or apoptosis. MiR-221 and miR-222 were discovered to induce cell growth and cell cycle progression via direct targeting of p27 and p57 in various human malignancies. However, the roles of miR-221 and miR-222 have not been reported in human gastric cancer. In this study, we examined the impact of miR-221 and miR-222 on human gastric cancer cells, and identified target genes for miR-221 and miR-222 that might mediate their biology.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The human gastric cancer cell line SGC7901 was transfected with AS-miR-221/222 or transduced with pMSCV-miR-221/222 to knockdown or restore expression of miR-221 and miR-222, respectively. The effects of miR-221 and miR-222 were then assessed by cell viability, cell cycle analysis, apoptosis, transwell, and clonogenic assay. Potential target genes were identified by Western blot and luciferase reporter assay.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Upregulation of miR-221 and miR-222 induced the malignant phenotype of SGC7901 cells, whereas knockdown of miR-221 and miR-222 reversed this phenotype via induction of PTEN expression. In addition, knockdonwn of miR-221 and miR-222 inhibited cell growth and invasion and increased the radiosensitivity of SGC7901 cells. Notably, the seed sequence of miR-221 and miR-222 matched the 3'UTR of PTEN, and introducing a PTEN cDNA without the 3'UTR into SGC7901 cells abrogated the miR-221 and miR-222-induced malignant phenotype. PTEN-3'UTR luciferase reporter assay confirmed PTEN as a direct target of miR-221 and miR-222.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results demonstrate that miR-221 and miR-222 regulate radiosensitivity, and cell growth and invasion of SGC7901 cells, possibly via direct modulation of PTEN expression. Our study suggests that inhibition of miR-221 and miR-222 might form a novel therapeutic strategy for human gastric cancer.</p