Hobby engagement and risk of disabling dementia

BACKGROUND: The association between hobby engagement and risk of dementia reported from a short-term follow-up study for individuals aged ≥65 years may be liable to reverse causation. We examined the association between hobby engagement in age of 40-69 years and risk of dementia in a long-term follow-up study among Japanese including individuals in mid-life, when the majority of individuals have normal cognitive function. METHODS: A total of 22,377 individuals aged 40-69 years completed a self-administered questionnaire in 1993-1994. The participants answered whether they had hobbies according to the three following responses: having no hobbies, having a hobby, and having many hobbies. Follow-up for incident disabling dementia was conducted with long-term care insurance data from 2006 to 2016. RESULTS: During 11.0 years of median follow-up, 3,095 participants developed disabling dementia. Adjusting for the demographic, behavioral, and psychosocial factors, the multivariable hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) of incident disabling dementia compared with "having no hobbies" were 0.82 (0.75-0.89) for "having a hobby" and 0.78 (0.67-0.91) for "having many hobbies". The inverse association was similarly observed in both middle (40-64 years) and older ages (65-69 years). For disabling dementia subtypes, hobby engagement was inversely associated with the risk of dementia without a history of stroke (probably non-vascular type dementia), but not with that of post-stroke dementia (probably vascular type dementia). CONCLUSIONS: Hobby engagement in both mid-life and late-life was associated with a lower risk of disabling dementia without a history of stroke

The Shock State of Itokawa Sample

One of the fundamental aspects of any astromaterial is its shock history, since this factor elucidates critical historical events, and also because shock metamorphism can alter primary mineralogical and petrographic features, and reset chronologies [1]. Failure to take shock history into proper account during characterization can result in seriously incorrect conclusions being drawn. Thus the Hayabusa Preliminary Examination Team (HASPET) made shock stage determination of the Itokawa samples a primary goal [2]. However, we faced several difficulties in this particular research. The shock state of ordinary chondrite materials is generally determined by simple optical petrographic observation of standard thin sections. The Itokawa samples available to the analysis team were mounted into plastic blocks, were polished on only one side, and were of non-standard and greatly varying thickness, all of which significantly complicated petrographic analysis but did not prevent it. We made an additional estimation of the sample shock state by a new technique for this analysis - electron back-scattered diffraction (EBSD) in addition to standard petrographic techniques. We are also investigating the crystallinity of Itokawa olivine by Synchrotron X-ray diffraction (SXRD)

High prevalence of non-synonymous substitutions in mtDNA of cichlid fishes from Lake Victoria.

When a population size is reduced, genetic drift may fix slightly deleterious mutations, and an increase in nonsynonymous substitution is expected. It has been suggested that past aridity has seriously affected and decreased the populations of cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria, while geographical studies have shown that the water levels in Lake Tanganyika and Lake Malawi have remained fairly constant. The comparably stable environments in the latter two lakes might have kept the populations of cichlid fishes large enough to remove slightly deleterious mutations. The difference in the stability of cichlid fish population sizes between Lake Victoria and the Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi is expected to have caused differences in the nonsynonymous/synonymous ratio, ω (=dN/dS), of the evolutionary rate. Here, we estimated ω and compared it between the cichlids of the three lakes for 13 mitochondrial protein-coding genes using maximum likelihood methods. We found that the lineages of the cichlids in Lake Victoria had a significantly higher ω for several mitochondrial loci. Moreover, positive selection was indicated for several codons in the mtDNA of the Lake Victoria cichlid lineage. Our results indicate that both adaptive and slightly deleterious molecular evolution has taken place in the Lake Victoria cichlids\u27 mtDNA genes, whose nonsynonymous sites are generally conserved

Amelioration of Insulin Resistance by Whey Protein in a High-Fat Diet-Induced Pediatric Obesity Male Mouse Model

This study examined whey protein’s impact on insulin resistance in a high-fat diet-induced pediatric obesity mouse model. Pregnant mice were fed high-fat diets, and male pups continued this diet until 8 weeks old, then were split into high-fat, whey, and casein diet groups. At 12 weeks old, their body weight, fasting blood glucose (FBG), blood insulin level (IRI), homeostatic model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), liver lipid metabolism gene expression, and liver metabolites were compared. The whey group showed significantly lower body weight than the casein group at 12 weeks old (p = 0.034). FBG was lower in the whey group compared to the high-fat diet group (p p = 0.058); IRI and HOMA-IR were reduced in the whey group compared to the casein group (p = 0.02, p p p p = 0.03). Metabolomic analysis revealed that the levels of taurine and glycine, both known for their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, were upregulated in the whey group in the liver tissue (p p < 0.01). The intake of whey protein was found to improve insulin resistance in a high-fat diet-induced pediatric obesity mouse model

Distinct gene expression signatures induced by viral transactivators of different HTLV-1 subgroups that confer a different risk of HAM/TSP

Abstract Background Among human T cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1)-infected individuals, there is an association between HTLV-1 tax subgroups (subgroup-A or subgroup-B) and the risk of HAM/TSP in the Japanese population. To investigate the role of HTLV-1 subgroups in viral pathogenesis, we studied the functional difference in the subgroup-specific viral transcriptional regulators Tax and HBZ using microarray analysis, reporter gene assays, and evaluation of viral-host protein–protein interaction. Results (1) Transcriptional changes in Jurkat Tet-On human T-cells that express each subgroup of Tax or HBZ protein under the control of an inducible promoter revealed different target gene profiles; (2) the number of differentially regulated genes induced by HBZ was 2–3 times higher than that induced by Tax; (3) Tax and HBZ induced the expression of different classes of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs); (4) the chemokine CXCL10, which has been proposed as a prognostic biomarker for HAM/TSP, was more efficiently induced by subgroup-A Tax (Tax-A) than subgroup-B Tax (Tax-B), in vitro as well as in unmanipulated (ex vivo) PBMCs obtained from HAM/TSP patients; (5) reporter gene assays indicated that although transient Tax expression in an HTLV-1-negative human T-cell line activated the CXCL10 gene promoter through the NF-κB pathway, there was no difference in the ability of each subgroup of Tax to activate the CXCL10 promoter; however, (6) chromatin immunoprecipitation assays showed that the ternary complex containing Tax-A is more efficiently recruited onto the promoter region of CXCL10, which contains two NF-κB binding sites, than that containing Tax-B. Conclusions Our results indicate that different HTLV-1 subgroups are characterized by different patterns of host gene expression. Differential expression of pathogenesis-related genes by subgroup-specific Tax or HBZ may be associated with the onset of HAM/TSP