Berberine Improves Glucose Homeostasis in Streptozotocin-Induced Diabetic Rats in Association with Multiple Factors of Insulin Resistance

The present study was carried out to determine the effect of berberine on glucose homeostasis and several biomarkers associated with insulin sensitivity in male Wistar rats with intraperitoneal injection of streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes. Rats with fasting blood glucose 16.7 mmol/L after 2 weeks of STZ injection were divided into two groups. One group was used as the diabetic control and another treated by gavage feeding with 100 mg/kg/d of berberine in water containing 0.5% carboxymethyl cellulose. A group of rats without receiving STZ was used as the normal control. After 7 weeks, berberine supplementation moderately but significantly lowered fasting blood glucose levels and improved oral glucose tolerance. Berberine lowered plasma free fatty acids and C-reactive protein levels without affecting plasma insulin levels. Diabetic rats treated with berberine showed significantly lower plasma triacylglycerol and cholesterol levels. Furthermore, berberine inhibited dipeptidyl peptidase-4 and protein tyrosine phosphatase-1B activities. In conclusion, berberine showed a dramatic effect of lowering blood cholesterol and triacylglycerols and improved moderately glucose homeostasis in STZ-induced diabetic rats in association with multiple factors related to insulin resistance

Liuwei Dihuang Lowers Body Weight and Improves Insulin and Leptin Sensitivity in Obese Rats

The present study was aimed at investigating the efficacy and mechanism(s) of action of a Chinese herbal formulation, Liuwei Dihuang (LWDH), as a prospective natural weight-lowering product. Following a 2-week acclimation period, 48 obesity-prone (OP-CD) rats were divided into 4 groups (n = 12 each). One group served as a positive control for obesity (OP), while the other 3 were challenged twice daily by oral gavage with total daily dosages of 500, 1500, or 3500 mg/kg BW LWDH, respectively, for 10 weeks. One group (n = 12) of obesity-resistant (OR-CD) rats served as the normal control group. All rats were fed the same AIN-93G diet modified to contain 60% energy from fat. The highest LWDH dose significantly reduced body weight during the last 4 weeks of treatment. Food intake was reduced beginning in week 2. The high LWDH dose lowered serum triglyceride (TG) and nonesterified fatty acid (NEFA) levels and body fat. Both the high and medium doses also lowered serum leptin and insulin levels. Liver function testing revealed no adverse side effects under the current experimental conditions. The results of the present study suggest that LWDH has potential as a preventive or therapeutic natural product against overweight and obesity

Key Frame Mechanism For Efficient Conformer Based End-to-end Speech Recognition

Recently, Conformer as a backbone network for end-to-end automatic speech recognition achieved state-of-the-art performance. The Conformer block leverages a self-attention mechanism to capture global information, along with a convolutional neural network to capture local information, resulting in improved performance. However, the Conformer-based model encounters an issue with the self-attention mechanism, as computational complexity grows quadratically with the length of the input sequence. Inspired by previous Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) guided blank skipping during decoding, we introduce intermediate CTC outputs as guidance into the downsampling procedure of the Conformer encoder. We define the frame with non-blank output as key frame. Specifically, we introduce the key frame-based self-attention (KFSA) mechanism, a novel method to reduce the computation of the self-attention mechanism using key frames. The structure of our proposed approach comprises two encoders. Following the initial encoder, we introduce an intermediate CTC loss function to compute the label frame, enabling us to extract the key frames and blank frames for KFSA. Furthermore, we introduce the key frame-based downsampling (KFDS) mechanism to operate on high-dimensional acoustic features directly and drop the frames corresponding to blank labels, which results in new acoustic feature sequences as input to the second encoder. By using the proposed method, which achieves comparable or higher performance than vanilla Conformer and other similar work such as Efficient Conformer. Meantime, our proposed method can discard more than 60\% useless frames during model training and inference, which will accelerate the inference speed significantly. This work code is available in {https://github.com/scufan1990/Key-Frame-Mechanism-For-Efficient-Conformer}Comment: This manuscript has been accepted by IEEE Signal Processing Letters for publicatio

The Structure and Morphology of Galaxies during the Epoch of Reionization Revealed by JWST

We analyze 347 galaxies at redshift $4<z<9.5$ using JWST observations from the CEERS program by fitting a two-dimensional parametric model simultaneously to the seven-filter NIRCam images to measure the overall structural parameters and quantify the global properties of the galaxies in the rest-frame optical band. Particular attention is devoted to deriving robust uncertainties that include, among other factors, the influence of cosmological surface brightness dimming and resolution effects. Using the global S\'ersic index ($n < 1.5$) and observed axial ratio ($q < 0.6$) as a guide, we place a conservative lower limit of $\sim 45\%$ on the incidence of galactic disks. Galaxies follow a relation between rest-frame optical luminosity and effective radius in the redshift range $4<z<9.5$, as well as separately over the intervals $4 < z < 5$ and $5 \leq z < 9.5$, with a very similar slope but a marginally lower zero point in the higher redshift bin ($R_e = 0.49 \pm 0.07$ kpc) compared to the lower redshift bin ($R_e = 0.65 \pm 0.12$ kpc). Within the limitations of the current sample size, we find no significant redshift evolution of $n$ or $R_e$ at these early epochs.Comment: 23 pages, 17 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Effects of acute administration of different doses of methylphenidate on cognition in healthy young

Os chamados ampliadores cognitivos têm sido ampla e crescentemente utilizados por indivíduos saudáveis, que apesar de não apresentarem nenhum tipo de patologia, buscam por melhoras no desempenho cognitivo. Um fármaco utilizado para este fim é o metilfenidato, droga de primeira escolha para tratamento do transtorno de déficit de atenção e hiperatividade (TDAH). O presente estudo visou verificar o efeito da administração aguda de diferentes doses de metilfenidato (10, 20 e 40 mg e placebo) sobre uma ampla gama de funções cognitivas em jovens saudáveis. Participaram do estudo 36 jovens universitários ou graduados, tendo sido realizados testes de atenção, memória operacional, episódica e semântica. Não foram observadas diferenças no desempenho dos sujeitos em nenhum dos testes. Houve efeito na auto-avaliação de bem estar, sendo este efeito dose dependente – 40 mg > placebo. De acordo com a literatura recente, medicações psicoestimulantes, como o metilfenidato, produzem melhoras no desempenho quando os processos cognitivos estão abaixo de um nível ótimo o que não era o caso dos sujeitos do presente estudo. Sendo assim, a impressão que o metilfenidato melhora o desempenho cognitivo em pessoas jovens e saudáveis se deve provavelmente ao efeito subjetivo de bem estar.The so called cognitive enhancers have been widely and increasingly used by healthy individuals, who despite not having any kind of pathology, seek improvements in cognitive performance. A drug used for this purpose is methylphenidate, a first choice drug for the treatment of the attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study aimed to evaluate the effect of acute administration of different doses of methylphenidate (10, 20 and 40 mg and placebo) in a wide range of cognitive functions in healthy young subjects. Participated in the study 36 university students or graduates, and were applied tests of attention, working memory, episodic and semantic memory. There were no differences among the groups in any of the tests. Significant effect on self-assessment of well being was observed, and this effect was dose dependent - 40 mg> placebo. According to recent literature, psychostimulant medications such as methylphenidate, produce improvements in performance when cognitive processes are below an optimal level which was not the case of the subjects of this study. Thus, the impression that methylphenidate improves cognitive performance in healthy young people is probably due to the effect of subjective well-being.Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Associação Fundo de Incentivo à Psicofarmacologia (AFIP)BV UNIFESP: Teses e dissertaçõe

Glycine in the prevention of neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis lesions: experimental study in rats

Objetivo: Avaliar o efeito da glicina no intestino e em órgãos à distância num modelo experimental de enterocolite necrosante neonatal em ratos recém-nascidos. Métodos: Foram utilizados ratos Wistar recém-nascidos distribuídos em três grupos: G1: controle, G2: animais submetidos a hipóxia-reoxigenação (H-R), G3: animais submetidos a hipóxia-reoxigenação após uma infusão intraperitoneal de glicina 5%.Segmentos intestinais foram preparados para análise histológica, imunohistoquímica com caspase 3 clivada e lamina A clivada, como marcadores para apoptose e dosagem tecidual de Malondialdeído (MDA). O fígado foi preparado para avaliação imunohistoquímica e dosagem de malondialdeído tecidual, e os rins foram preparados para avaliação imunohistoquímica. Resultados: A dosagem de MDA tecidual mostrou que o grupo de animais submetido a H-R apresentou valores maiores do que o grupo previamente submetido à injeção intraperitoneal de glicina (p < 0,05). O índice apoptótico pela avaliação da caspase 3 clivada e lamina A clivada foi maior nos animais submetidos à H-R do que nos animais que receberam previamente glicina em todos os órgãos examinados, porém nos rins a avaliação pela lamina A clivada não foi significante, quando da avaliação estatística. A análise histológica não mostrou diferença estatística entre o grupo H-R e o previamente submetido à injeção de glicina. Conclusões: A glicina foi capaz de reduzir os efeitos deletérios da hipóxiareoxigenação, quando se considerou como critério de avaliação a dosagem de MDA e os índices de apoptose celular e não influenciou, estatisticamente, as alterações histológicas.Objective: To evaluate the effect of glycine on the intestine and in distant organs, in an experimental model of neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis in rats. Methods: Newborn Wistar rats were utilized, distributed into three groups: G1: control, G2: animals subjected to hypoxia-reoxygenation (H-R), G3: animals subjected to hypoxia-reoxygenation after intraperitoneal infusion of 5% glycine. Intestinal segments were prepared for histological analysis, immunohistochemistry using cleaved caspase-3 and cleaved lamina-A as markers for apoptosis, and tissue assaying for malonaldehyde (MDA). The liver and kidneys were prepared for immunohistochemical evaluation and the liver alone for tissue MDA assaying. Results: Tissue MDA assaying showed that the animals subjected to H-R alone presented higher values than did those previously subjected to glycine infusion (p < 0.05). The apoptosis index from evaluation of cleaved caspase-3 and cleaved lamina-A was greater in the animals subjected to H-R alone than in those previously subjected to glycine infusion, in all the organs examined. However, in the kidneys the findings from cleaved lamina-A did not present any statistical difference. The histological analysis did not show any statistical difference between the group with H-R alone and the group previously subjected to glycine infusion. Conclusions: Glycine was capable of reducing the deleterious effects from hypoxiareoxygenation, when the MDA assay and cell apoptosis index were considered as the evaluation criteria.Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)BV UNIFESP: Teses e dissertaçõe