Case report: Self-restraint in a patient with alien hand syndrome following cerebral infarction involving the anterior cerebral artery territory.

Frontal alien hand syndrome (AHS) presents as impulsive grasping and groping and compulsive manipulation of environmental objects that can affect the dominant or nondominant hand. A few reports have shown improvements in neuropsychological scores over time when self-restraint of the right hand AHS was enforced. A 72-year-old woman presented with right-handed involuntary instinctive grasping reactions and compulsive manipulation of tools after an infarction of the frontal lobe and corpus callosum (CC). She was diagnosed with cerebral infarction involving the anterior cerebral artery territory and a frontal variant of AHS. At AHS onset, the patient was unaware that her right hand was moving against her will; she was only aware that her right hand was moving when the therapist pointed it out to her. Later, she began to recognize that her right hand was involuntarily moving, and she could restrain the movement of her right hand with her left hand. Approximately 5 months following AHS onset, the patient could voluntarily restrain her AHS symptoms by telling her right hand not to move against her will in her head. Most neuropsychological scores improved by 5 months following AHS onset. However, the patient showed disruptions in the genu and midbody of the left cingulate cortex, as shown via diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and the sensation of the "right hand moving by itself" remained even 5 months after AHS onset. Although damage to the CC fibers was evident on DTI at 5 months following onset, the patient exhibited no sensory deficits and demonstrated good hand ownership as well as early improvement in attention and cognitive dysfunction. Therefore, the patient recognized her AHS symptoms, which included her hand moving against her will, and was able to consciously restrain her hand movement.

Information retrieval on oncology knowledge base using recursive paraphrase lattice.

For annotation in cancer genomic medicine, oncologists have to refer to various knowledge bases worldwide and retrieve all information (e.g., drugs, clinical trials, and academic papers) related to a gene variant. However, oncologists find it difficult to search these knowledge bases comprehensively because there are multiple paraphrases containing abbreviations and foreign languages in their terminologies including diseases, drugs, and genes. In this paper, we propose a novel search method considering deep paraphrases, which helps oncologists retrieve essential annotation resources swiftly and effortlessly. Our method recursively finds paraphrases based on paraphrase corpora, expands a source document, and finally generates a paraphrase lattice. The proposed method also feedbacks beneficial information regarding the paraphrases applied for a search, which is useful for selecting search results and considering a query for the succeeding search. The results of an experiment demonstrated that our method could retrieve important annotation information that could not be retrieved using a conventional search system and simple paraphrasing. Additionally, annotation experts evaluated our method and found it to be practical.

Kaempferia parviflora Ethanol Extract, a Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor γ Ligand-binding Agonist, Improves Glucose Tolerance and Suppresses Fat Accumulation in Diabetic NSY Mice.

This study assessed the effect of Kaempferia parviflora, also known as black ginger (BG), and its ethanol extract (BGE) on peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) γ agonistic activity, glucose tolerance, fat accumulation, and lipids-induced hypertriglyceridemia in mice. PPARγ ligand-binding capacity in vitro and polymethoxy flavone contents were highly observed in organic solvent extracts. In an animal experiment A, male diabetic Nagoya-Shibata-Yasuda mice were divided into five dietary groups and fed each diet for 8 weeks: AIN-93G diet (low-fat [LF] diet), high-fat (HF) diet, HF diet supplemented with 1% BG, HF diet supplemented with 0.19% BGE, and HF diet supplemented with pioglitazone (PPARγ agonist, 3 mg/kg/day) as a PPARγ agonistic positive control. As determined from glucose and insulin tolerance tests, plasma glucose levels were improved in the BG and BGE groups. The BGE extract suppressed fat accumulation in adipose tissues, liver, and muscles without changing the plasma adiponectin level. In an animal experiment B, in order to investigate the effect of BG and BGE on lipid-induced hypertriglyceridemia, male ddY mice were divided into three test groups: control, BG-administered group (500 mg/kg), and BGE-administered group (100 mg/kg). The plasma triacylglycerol level was not different among the groups during the lipids administration test. These results conclude that the BGE extract containing several kinds of polymethoxy flavones showed PPARγ ligand-binding capacity in vitro and prevented obesity and insulin resistance independent of adiponectin secretion in mice. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: Kaempferia parviflora, also known as black ginger (BG), is often used as a folk medicine and a functional food material to prevent metabolic syndrome mainly in Asian regions. Here, we have clarified that ethanol extract from BG (BGE) contains several kinds of polymethoxy flavones to show PPARγ ligand-binding capacity and is an active extract for the improvement of obesity and insulin resistance. The BGE is expected to be applied for functional food materials in health food markets. Also, polymethoxy flavones to show PPARγ ligand-binding capacity can be generally applied as a physiological active compound of functional food supplements.

Egg White Hydrolysate Can Be a Low-Allergenic Food Material to Suppress Ectopic Fat Accumulation in Rats Fed an Equicaloric Diet.

Egg white (EW) is known as a nutritional protein but can induce allergic reactions in humans. We investigated the dietary effects of EW and its hydrolysate (EWH), which contains less allergen, on body fat accumulation in Wistar rats fed an equicaloric high-fat and high-sucrose diet for 8 wk (Exp A). The pair-feeding of EW and equicaloric-feeding of EWH increased fecal fat excretion and suppressed lipid accumulation in the liver and muscles but not in the abdominal adipose tissues, carcass, or total body. Dietary EWH also suppressed the serum glucose level and alkaline phosphatase activity. Further, we showed a higher dispersibility of EW and EWH in physicochemical assay (Exp B). Next, we investigated the suppressive effects of a single administration of EW and EWH on lipid-induced hypertriglyceridemia and small intestinal meal transit in ddY mice (Exp C). However, a single administration of EW or EWH did not suppress the lipid-induced hypertriglyceridemia nor did it delay the rate of small intestinal transit. These findings indicated that dietary EW and EWH reduce hepatic and muscular (ectopic) fat accumulation mainly by suppressing fat absorption and supplying fat to the liver and muscles. Therefore, the low-allergenic EWH can be effective for the prevention of high-fat-diet-induced obesity.

cljam: a library for handling DNA sequence alignment/map (SAM) with parallel processing.

BACKGROUND: Next-generation sequencing can determine DNA bases and the results of sequence alignments are generally stored in files in the Sequence Alignment/Map (SAM) format and the compressed binary version (BAM) of it. SAMtools is a typical tool for dealing with files in the SAM/BAM format. SAMtools has various functions, including detection of variants, visualization of alignments, indexing, extraction of parts of the data and loci, and conversion of file formats. It is written in C and can execute fast. However, SAMtools requires an additional implementation to be used in parallel with, for example, OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) libraries. For the accumulation of next-generation sequencing data, a simple parallelization program, which can support cloud and PC cluster environments, is required. RESULTS: We have developed cljam using the Clojure programming language, which simplifies parallel programming, to handle SAM/BAM data. Cljam can run in a Java runtime environment (e.g., Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) with Clojure. CONCLUSIONS: Cljam can process and analyze SAM/BAM files in parallel and at high speed. The execution time with cljam is almost the same as with SAMtools. The cljam code is written in Clojure and has fewer lines than other similar tools.

Developing population pharmacokinetic parameters for high-dose methotrexate therapy: implication of correlations among developed parameters for individual parameter estimation using the Bayesian least-squares method.

Bayesian estimation enables the individual pharmacokinetic parameters of the medication administrated to be estimated using only a few blood concentrations. Due to wide inter-individual variability in the pharmacokinetics of methotrexate (MTX), the concentration of MTX needs to be frequently determined during high-dose MTX therapy in order to prevent toxic adverse events. To apply the benefits of Bayesian estimation to cases treated with this therapy, we attempted to develop an estimation method using the Bayesian least-squares method, which is commonly used for therapeutic monitoring in a clinical setting. Because this method hypothesizes independency among population pharmacokinetic parameters, we focused on correlations among population pharmacokinetic parameters used to estimate individual parameters. A two-compartment model adequately described the observed concentration of MTX. The individual pharmacokinetic parameters of MTX were estimated in 57 cases using the maximum likelihood method. Among the available parameters accounting for a 2-compartment model, V1, k10, k12, and k21 were found to be the combination showing the weakest correlations, which indicated that this combination was best suited to the Bayesian least-squares method. Using this combination of population pharmacokinetic parameters, Bayesian estimation provided an accurate estimation of individual parameters. In addition, we demonstrated that the degree of correlation among population pharmacokinetic parameters used in the estimation affected the precision of the estimates. This result highlights the necessity of assessing correlations among the population pharmacokinetic parameters used in the Bayesian least-squares method.