ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Memory is an important part of the mental activity. Chattering teeth training practiced in Korean Medicine (known as gochi in Korean), which is a practice of making a sound by touching the upper and the lower teeth, has been accepted as a modality for the dental health. The purpose of this study is to confirm the effect of a specially designed intraoral appliance, the No-Sick Exerciser, on working memory improvement in healthy participants. METHODS: Thirty healthy participants aged between 16 and 30 years will be recruited and randomized into sequence A and B of 15 each, as in a cross-over design (sequence A: chattering teeth training oral appliance)-chewing the gum; sequence B: chewing the gum-chattering teeth training oral appliance with a washout period of one week. The primary outcome will be assessed by the digit span test and secondary outcomes by the symbol digit modality test and the word list recall, which will be conducted before and after each intervention, four times on each participant. DISCUSSION: This protocol proposes the rationale and method for the use of an intraoral appliance for working memory improvement. If the oral appliance demonstrates better feasibility for working memory improvement compared with chewing gum, a large scale study will be needed to investigate the effectiveness of the device on populations who require memory improvement.
ABSTRACT
Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) play critical roles in host antitumor immune responses. It is known that cancer patients with tumor-reactive lymphocyte infiltration in their tumors have better prognoses, while patients with tumors infiltrated by immunosuppressive cells have worse prognoses. We found that administration of 6-gingerol, which is a component of ginger, inhibited tumor growth in several types of murine tumors, such as B16F1 melanomas, Renca renal cell carcinomas and CT26 colon carcinomas, which were established by inoculating tumor cells on the flanks of mice. However, administration of 6-gingerol did not lead to complete eradication of the tumors. 6-Gingerol treatment of tumor-bearing mice caused massive infiltration of CD4 and CD8 T-cells and B220(+) B-cells, but reduced the number of CD4(+) Foxp3(+) regulatory T-cells. The CD8 tumor-infiltrating T lymphocytes in 6-gingerol-treated mice strongly expressed IFN-γ, a marker of activation of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) CD107a and chemokine receptors that are expressed on T(H) 1 cells, such as CXCR3 and CCR5. To test whether 6-gingerol could promote infiltration of tumor antigen-specific CD8 T-cells into tumors, we adoptively transferred CFSE-labeled OT-1 CD8 T-cells into EG7 tumor-bearing mice. We found that CD8 T cells isolated from 6-gingerol pretreated OT-1 mice, but not from control OT-1 mice, massively infiltrated tumors and tumor draining lymph nodes and divided several times. Our results strongly suggest that 6-gingerol can be used in tumor immunotherapy to increase the number of TILs.
