TNF-α和HSP70-2基因多态性与急性胰腺炎的相关性研究

目的探讨肿瘤坏死因子(TNF)-α和热休克蛋白(HSP)70-2基因多态性与急性胰腺炎(AP)的相关性。方法运用聚合酶链式反应-限制性片段长度多态性(PCR-RLFP)检测72例AP患者(AP组)和71例正常人(对照组)的TNF-α及HSP70-2基因多态性。结果 AP组与对照组的TNF-α基因型和等位基因比例间差异无统计学意义;AP组中,重型胰腺炎(SAP)和轻型胰腺炎(MAP)的TNF-α基因型和等位基因间差异无统计学意义。TNF-α和HSP70-2基因AA型与GA+GG型患者的白细胞、C反应蛋白(CRP)、淀粉酶、三酰甘油、血糖差异均无统计学意义;AP组的HSP70-2基因GA+GG型患者比例高于对照组(69.4%vs 49.3%),AP组携带的G等位基因比例高于对照组(46.5%vs 31.7%),差异均有统计学意义。AP组中,SAP的GA+GG型比例高于MAP(81.0%vs 53.3%),差异有统计学意义;而G等位基因在SAP和MAP间无明显差异(P>0.05)。结论 TNF-α基因多态性与AP不相关,HSP70-2基因多态性与AP相关,携带G等位基因发生重症AP的可能性增大,可能是重症AP的易感因素之一。     

Considerations Before Establishing an Environmental Health Registry

Public health registries can provide valuable information when health consequences of environmental exposures are uncertain or will likely take long to develop. They can also aid research on diseases that may have environmental causes that are not completely well defined.We discuss factors to consider when deciding whether to create an environmental health registry. Those factors include public health significance, purpose and outcomes, duration and scope of data collection and availability of alternative data sources, timeliness, availability of funding and administrative capabilities, and whether the establishment of a registry can adequately address specific health concerns.We also discuss difficulties, limitations, and benefits of exposure and disease registries, based on the experience of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.The use of public health registries has become increasingly common in the past 2 decades.1,2 Although they are widespread in the context of immunizations, cancer epidemiology, and drug development research,3 the field of environmental health has also benefited from the establishment of a number of disease and exposure registries.A registry is generally defined as a set of records containing systematically collected, standardized data about individual people.4 These data are typically acquired, maintained, and updated over a prolonged period, usually years. Registries range from only a listing of exposed individuals with associated contact information to a research repository of information that includes demographics, exposure data, and health information. A public health registry is set up to accomplish a public health goal or activity. It might be used to obtain information on people who have a particular disease, a condition or a risk factor that predisposes them to illness from a health-related event, or previous exposure to substances or circumstances known or suspected to cause adverse health effects. The particular data assembled are a function of the purpose of the registry. The variables might be chosen to help study or detect specific health problems or to study treatments in specific individuals or disorders. In the context of environmental health, registries include information regarding individual exposures to chemical or physical environmental agents or the known or potential consequences of such exposures.The central purpose of a registry is to facilitate epidemiological research or provide information to registrants about a certain disease, exposure, or event. Registries are also used to generate relevant statistics about the group of registered people. We discuss the main factors to consider when deciding whether to create an environmental health registry. We also discuss some of the difficulties, limitations, and benefits of registries, based on the experience of their use by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) in the United States.     

Genome-wide evidence of Austronesian–Bantu admixture and cultural reversion in a hunter-gatherer group of Madagascar

Linguistic and cultural evidence suggest that Madagascar was the final point of two major dispersals of Austronesian- and Bantu-speaking populations. Today, the Mikea are described as the last-known Malagasy population reported to be still practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It is unclear, however, whether the Mikea descend from a remnant population that existed before the arrival of Austronesian and Bantu agriculturalists or whether it is only their lifestyle that separates them from the other contemporary populations of South Madagascar. To address these questions we have performed a genome-wide analysis of >700,000 SNP markers on 21 Mikea, 24 Vezo, and 24 Temoro individuals, together with 50 individuals from Bajo and Lebbo populations from Indonesia. Our analyses of these data in the context of data available from other Southeast Asian and African populations reveal that all three Malagasy populations are derived from the same admixture event involving Austronesian and Bantu sources. In contrast to the fact that most of the vocabulary of the Malagasy speakers is derived from the Barito group of the Austronesian language family, we observe that only one-third of their genetic ancestry is related to the populations of the Java-Kalimantan-Sulawesi area. Because no additional ancestry components distinctive for the Mikea were found, it is likely that they have adopted their hunter-gatherer way of life through cultural reversion, and selection signals suggest a genetic adaptation to their new lifestyle.Located 400 km of the East African coast, Madagascar has been referred to as “the single most astonishing fact of human geography” (1, 2). Despite its proximity to Africa, less than 10% of the vocabulary of the Malagasy language is from African languages (mainly Sabaki, a branch of Bantu) (3–5). In contrast, 90% of Malagasy vocabulary belongs to the Barito (6) or other subgroups of Austronesian languages of Island Southeast Asia (7–9). Although being less specific, genetic studies have generally confirmed the dual ancestry of the Malagasy population (10–14).Low genetic differentiation of the Malagasy mtDNA and Y chromosome lineages from related lineages observed in present day Bantu and Austronesian populations support a model drawn from linguistic evidence that the Malagasy gene pool has been derived predominantly from these two dispersals of agriculturalist populations. As shown by linguistic and phylogenetic studies on cattle and crop names and their genetic diversity, both agricultural populations have apparently brought their way of life once they had settled in Madagascar (15, 16).Although one archaeological report claims the presence of anthropic artifacts as early as 4,000 y ago (17), most research points to first human impact on the Malagasy environment around 2,400 y ago (18), which would still be before the Bantu expansion reached the East African coast (19). In addition, European traveler reports and putative archaeological artifacts support hunter-gatherers living in the south of the island until the 16th century (20–23). It has been speculated that these hunter-gatherer groups were the remnants of a pre-Bantu settlement of Madagascar (24). The cause of disappearance of the hunter-gatherers after the 16th century is unknown, but the two most likely scenarios that can be contemplated involve either a cultural shift or population replacement.Traditions concerning the dispersal of a sedentary way of life and agriculture in the south of the island relate to the Sakalava expansion (25). These traditions recount that in the 17th century, leaders, soothsayers, and migrants from the arabo-islamized Temoro population from the southeastern coast of Madagascar colonized the southern regions of Madagascar with the intention of creating new cities and kingdoms, such as Maroserana and Andrevola (25, 26). A few decades later, new Sakalava kingdoms emerge on the southeast coast and gradually spread throughout southern Madagascar, which coincides with the disappearance of hunter-gatherer populations (25).The survival in Madagascar of a modern hunter-gatherer population was believed to be a myth (24, 25). However, there are a variety of hunter-gatherer groups scattered across the island that have been studied and mapped since the 1920s, particularly in the Tsiribihina region (southwest Madagascar) under the names Vazimba and Beosi (27). In the Mikea forest (south of the Mangoky River, southern Madagascar) one population, the Mikea, still live as hunter-gatherers. Earlier writers thought the Mikea were descended from ancient forager groups who have maintained their way of life up to the present (24, 25, 27, 28), but most modern scholarship argues the Mikea reverted back to the forest for political or economical reasons, such as Sakalava royalty pressure or French colonization (29–31).We address here the question of whether and to what extent the Mikea share their genetic ancestry with their neighboring Malagasy populations with a sedentary lifestyle. Specifically, we aim to detect in the Mikea patterns of genetic diversity assignable to a population that would predate Austronesian and Bantu incursions. Alternatively, we consider the scenario by which it is only their subsistence strategy that separates the Mikea from other contemporary populations in southern Madagascar.To answer these questions, we performed a genome-wide analysis of 21 Mikea individuals, 24 individuals from a nearby Vezo population, and 24 individuals of the Temoro population, using Illumina HumanOmniExpress BeadChips, and compared the data with Southeast Asian and African populations. Based on this dataset, we have: (i) studied the genetic distance between the three Malagasy populations; (ii) tested the existence and age of admixture patterns; and (iii) tested the Mikea genome for any adaptive signal that may be associated with the hunter-gather way of life.     

The neural oscillations of conflict adaptation in the human frontal region

Incongruency between print color and the semantic meaning of a word in a classical Stroop task activates the human conflict monitoring system and triggers a behavioral conflict. Conflict adaptation has been suggested to mediate the cortical processing of neural oscillations in such a conflict situation. However, the basic mechanisms that underlie the influence of conflict adaptation on the changes of neural oscillations are not clear. In the present study, electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded from sixteen healthy human participants while they were performing a color-word Stroop task within a novel look-to-do transition design that included two response modalities. In the ‘look’ condition, participants were informed to look at the color of presented words but no responses were required; in the ‘do’ condition, they were informed to make arranged responses to the color of presented words. Behaviorally, a reliable conflict adaptation was observed. Time–frequency analysis revealed that (1) in the ‘look’ condition, theta-band activity in the left- and right-frontal regions reflected a conflict-related process at a response inhibition level; and (2) in the ‘do’ condition, both theta-band activity in the left-frontal region and alpha-band activity in the left-, right-, and centro-frontal regions reflected a process of conflict control, which triggered neural and behavioral adaptation. Taken together, these results suggest that there are frontal mechanisms involving neural oscillations that can mediate response inhibition processes and control behavioral conflict.     

Pelviureteric junction disruption as a complication of chemical lumbar sympathectomy

Chemical lumbar sympathectomy is a commonly performed procedure in vascular surgery and pain management. This case report discusses the management of a patient who suffered pelviureteric junction disruption following phenol injection for ischaemic leg pain despite radiological evidence of correct placement.The authors suspect this is an underreported complication, which could be relevant in obtaining informed consent.     

K-Bayes Reconstruction for Perfusion MRI I: Concepts and Application

Despite the continued spread of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods in scientific studies and clinical diagnosis, MRI applications are mostly restricted to high-resolution modalities, such as structural MRI. While perfusion MRI gives complementary information on blood flow in the brain, its reduced resolution limits its power for detecting specific disease effects on perfusion patterns. This reduced resolution is compounded by artifacts such as partial volume effects, Gibbs ringing, and aliasing, which are caused by necessarily limited k-space sampling and the subsequent use of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) reconstruction. In this study, a Bayesian modeling procedure (K-Bayes) is developed for the reconstruction of perfusion MRI. The K-Bayes approach (described in detail in Part II: Modeling and Technical Development) combines a process model for the MRI signal in k-space with a Markov random field prior distribution that incorporates high-resolution segmented structural MRI information. A simulation study was performed to determine qualitative and quantitative improvements in K-Bayes reconstructed images compared with those obtained via DFT. The improvements were validated using in vivo perfusion MRI data of the human brain. The K-Bayes reconstructed images were demonstrated to provide reduced bias, increased precision, greater effect sizes, and higher resolution than those obtained using DFT.     

广西特色壮药金边蚂蟥抗痛风活性成分研究

目的：研究金边蚂蟥中具有抗痛风作用的活性成分。方法：采用次黄嘌呤复制小鼠高尿酸血症模型,二甲苯诱导小鼠耳郭肿胀模型,热板法、扭体法筛选金边蚂蟥的活性部位,筛选金边蚂蟥活性成分,观察金边蚂蟥抗抗痛风作用的物质基础。结果：金边蚂蟥水溶性部位是其抗痛风的活性部位,可降低次黄嘌呤诱导的高尿酸血症小鼠的血清尿酸水平,可抑制二甲苯诱导的小鼠耳郭肿胀,可减少醋酸诱导的小鼠扭体反应和增加小鼠热板痛阈;水溶性部位中水蛭素是主要活性成分。金边蚂蟥活性成分（水蛭素）0.8 g/kg和0.4 g/kg及金边 蚂蟥续滤粉2.0 g/kg 可显著降低血清尿酸水平,血清尿酸水平由模型组的232.73±50.93 umol/L 分别下降到140.70±25.97 umol/L、149.07±39.28 umol/L、176.45±44.33 umol/L（P ＜ 0.01）;金边蚂蟥活性成分（水蛭素）0.8 g/kg、0.4 g/kg和0.2 g/kg及金边蚂蟥续滤粉2.0 g/kg可明显抑制二甲苯引起小鼠耳郭肿胀,肿胀度由22.80±2.86 mg分别抑制到20.10±2.18 mg、19.80±2.57 mg、20.10±1.66 mg、20.85±1.60 mg（P ＜ 0.05）;金边蚂蟥活性成分（水蛭素）0.8 g/kg,可明显降低醋酸引起的小鼠扭体次数,次数由22.80±2.86次降到20.10±2.18次（P ＜ 0.05）。结论：金边蚂蟥抗痛风的活性部位是水溶性部分,其中水蛭素是其主要活性成分。