Meta-analyses of the functional neural alterations in subjects with Internet gaming disorder: similarities and differences across different paradigms

Internet gaming disorder (IGD) has become a global public health concern due to its increasing prevalence and potential negative consequences. Researchers have sought to identify which brain regions are associated with this disorder. However, inconsistent results have been reported among studies due to the heterogeneity of paradigms and subjects. The present research aimed to combine the results of individual studies to provide a more coherent and powerful explanation. By selecting 40 studies utilizing a qualified whole-brain analysis, we performed a comprehensive series of meta-analyses that employed seed-based d mapping. We divided the existing experimental paradigms into 3 categories: game-related cue-reactivity, executive control, and risk-reward-related decision-making tasks. We divided all studies into three subgroups according to their paradigms. In cue-reactivity tasks, patients with IGD exhibited significant hyperactivation in the bilateral precuneus and bilateral cingulate and significant hypoactivation in the insula, but there were no differences in the striatum. In executive control tasks, patients with IGD displayed significant hyperactivation in the right superior temporal gyrus, bilateral precuneus, bilateral cingulate, and insula and hypoactivation in the left inferior frontal gyrus. In risky decision-making paradigms, IGD patients exhibited significant hyperactivation in the left striatum, right inferior frontal gyrus, and insula and hypoactivation in the left superior frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, and right precentral gyrus. Our study aimed to discover the similarities among all studies and to explore the uniqueness of the different paradigms. This study further confirmed the critical role of reward circuitry and executive control circuitry in IGD but not under all conditions

[2,9-Bis(3,5-dimethyl-1H-pyrazol-1-yl-κN 2)-1,10-phenanthroline-κ2 N,N′](methanol-κO)(nitrito-κ2 O,O′)cadmium(II) perchlorate

In the title complex, [Cd(NO2)(C22H20N6)(CH3OH)]ClO4, the CdII ion is in a distorted penta­gonal–bipyramidal CdN4O3 coordination geometry. The dihedral angles formed between the mean planes of the pyrazole rings and the phenanthroline ring system are 4.37 (19) and 5.84 (21)°. In the crystal, the anions and cations are connected by inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonding, while pairs of weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds connect the cations into centrosymmetric dimers. In addition, there is a π–π stacking inter­action involving two symmetry-related benzene rings, with a centroid–centroid distance of 3.437 (3) Å

N-(5-Amino-1H-tetra­zol-1-yl)formamide

In the title compound, C2H4N6O, the planar [maximum deviation = 0.006 (2) Å] amino­tetra­zole group makes a dihedral angle of 83.65 (8)° with the formamide unit. In the crystal structure, inter­molecular N—H⋯N, N—H⋯O and C—H⋯N hydrogen bonds are responsible for the formation of a three-dimensional network

The oil price-inflation nexus: The exchange rate pass-through effect

Crude oil prices have been considered one of the key drivers of inflation worldwide, reaching a peak in 2022. Inflation targeting plays a pivotal role in such a high inflation episode. In this vein, the exchange rate is a key channel in transmitting the high commodity price into the domestic price level, known as the exchange rate pass-through effect. On this basis, this paper scrutinizes the connection between oil prices and inflation through RMB exchange rates. We verify that the covariance between exchange rates and oil prices are sound factors in explaining and predicting inflation in China. We advocate that policymakers can use the exchange rate as an inflation stabilizer by reducing the covariance between the exchange rate and oil price, especially for emerging economies and during the turmoil periods. This could be extremely helpful to frustrate the exchange rate pass-through effect of high commodity prices globally, which sheds new insights into stabilizing inflation and assisting inflation targeting for emerging economies

Radiosynthesis of carbon-11 labeled PDE5 inhibitors as new potential PET radiotracers for imaging of Alzheimer's disease

To develop PET tracers for imaging of Alzheimer's disease, new carbon-11 labeled potent and selective PDE5 inhibitors have been synthesized. The reference standards (5) and (12), and their corresponding desmethylated precursors (6) and (13) were synthesized from methyl 2-amino-5-bromobenzoate and (4-methoxyphenyl)methanamine in multiple steps with 2%, 1%, 1% and 0.2% overall chemical yield, respectively. The radiotracers ([11C]5) and ([11C]12) were prepared from their corresponding precursors 6 and 13 with [11C]CH3OTf through O–11C-methylation and isolated by HPLC combined with SPE in 40–50% radiochemical yield, based on [11C]CO2 and decay corrected to EOB. The radiochemical purity was >99%, and the molar activity (Am) at EOB was in a range of 370–740 GBq/μmol

Learning Enhanced Resolution-wise features for Human Pose Estimation

Recently, multi-resolution networks (such as Hourglass, CPN, HRNet, etc.) have achieved significant performance on pose estimation by combining feature maps of various resolutions. In this paper, we propose a Resolution-wise Attention Module (RAM) and Gradual Pyramid Refinement (GPR), to learn enhanced resolution-wise feature maps for precise pose estimation. Specifically, RAM learns a group of weights to represent the different importance of feature maps across resolutions, and the GPR gradually merges every two feature maps from low to high resolutions to regress final human keypoint heatmaps. With the enhanced resolution-wise features learnt by CNN, we obtain more accurate human keypoint locations. The efficacies of our proposed methods are demonstrated on MS-COCO dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance with average precision of 77.7 on COCO val2017 set and 77.0 on test-dev2017 set without using extra human keypoint training dataset.Comment: Published on ICIP 202

Decreased expression of long non-coding RNA WT1-AS promotes cell proliferation and invasion in gastric cancer

AbstractTumor recurrence and metastasis remain the major obstacles for the successful treatment of patients diagnosed with gastric cancer. In recent years, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been considered as key regulators of tumor behavior. In this study, we investigated the expression and biological role of a newly-identified cancer-related lncRNA, WT1-AS. We found that WT1-AS expression was significantly down-regulated in tumor tissues compared to matched adjacent non-tumor tissues. The WT1-AS expression level was also associated with tumor size and the clinicopathological stage. Cell proliferation, migration, and invasion were inhibited, and the proportion of G0/G1 cells increased when WT1-AS was ectopically-expressed in gastric cancer cells. Furthermore, ectopic expression of WT1-AS was demonstrated to inhibit tumor growth and metastasis in vivo. Finally, we found that WT1-AS overexpression could decrease ERK protein phosphorylation. Our study indicates that WT1-AS is significantly down-regulated in gastric cancers and may be correlated with tumor progression