It was demonstrated that ginsenosides exert anti-convulsive potentials and interleukin-6 (IL-6) is protective from excitotoxicity induced by kainate (KA), a model of temporal lobe epilepsy. Ginsenosides-mediated mitochondrial recovery is essential for attenuating KA-induced neurotoxicity, however, little is known about the effects of ginsenoside Re (GRe), one of the major ginsenosides. In this study, GRe significantly attenuated KA-induced seizures in mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Prior research on the effects of social media promotion of tobacco products has predominantly relied on survey-based self-report measures of marketing exposure, which potentially introduce endogeneity, recall, and selection biases. New approaches can enhance measurement and help better understand the effects of exposure to tobacco-related messages in a dynamic social media marketing environment. We used geolocation-specific tweet rate as an exogenous indicator of exposure to smokeless tobacco (ST)-related content and employed this measure to examine the influence of social media marketing on ST sales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA woman in her 40s went to the hospital due to persistent headaches. On physical examination, a diastolic murmur in the third sternal intercostal space was the only finding. Echocardiograms were performed, revealing moderate aortic regurgitation and heterogeneously echoreflectant masses of variable shape with no independent mobility, mainly located on the ventricular side of the coaptation point of the three aortic cusps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough the anticonvulsant effects of ginsenosides are recognized, little is known about their effects on the convulsive behaviors induced by the activation of L-type Ca channels. Here, we investigated whether ginsenoside Re (GRe) modulates excitotoxicity induced by the L-type Ca channel activator Bay k-8644. GRe significantly attenuated Bay k-8644-induced convulsive behaviors and hippocampal oxidative stress in mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial media are an important marketing platform for emerging tobacco products. Heated tobacco products (HTPs) have been introduced in a limited number of local test markets in the United States as potentially reduced-exposure tobacco products. HTPs can be used to heat tobacco as well as marijuana.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Social media discussion tends to follow news about proposed or enacted government policies. Thus, digital discourse surveillance may be an effective and unobtrusive way of understanding industry and public response to policies and regulations, including in the domain of tobacco control. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration restricted sales of flavoured cartridge and disposable vape products.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is a lot of misinformation about a potential protective role of nicotine against COVID-19 spread on Twitter despite significant evidence to the contrary. We need to examine the role of vape advocates in the dissemination of such information through the lens of the gatewatching framework, which posits that top users can amplify and exert a disproportionate influence over the dissemination of certain content through curating, sharing, or, in the case of Twitter, retweeting it, serving more as a vector for misinformation rather than the source.
Objective: This research examines the Twitter discourse at the intersection of COVID-19 and tobacco (1) to identify the extent to which the most outspoken contributors to this conversation self-identify as vaping advocates and (2) to understand how and to what extent these vape advocates serve as gatewatchers through disseminating content about a therapeutic role of tobacco, nicotine, or vaping against COVID-19.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
June 2022
Objective: To examine conversations among JUUL users on Reddit related to restrictions on flavored ENDS and the shifting policy landscape.
Methods: Posts and comments ( = 166,169) between May 2019 and May 2020 on the subreddit r/JUUL were scraped using pushshift.io API.
In today's complex media environment, does media coverage influence youth and young adults' (YYA) tobacco use and intentions? We conceptualize the "public communication environment" and effect mediators, then ask whether over time variation in exogenously measured tobacco media coverage from mass and social media sources predicts daily YYA cigarette smoking intentions measured in a rolling nationally representative phone survey (N = 11,847 on 1,147 days between May 2014 and June 2017). Past week anti-tobacco and pro-tobacco content from Twitter, newspapers, broadcast news, Associated Press, and web blogs made coherent scales (thetas = 0.77 and 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: E-cigarette promotion on social media coincided with the rapid growth of e-cigarette use among American youth, particularly with the increased JUUL pod vaporiser use. We examined commercial JUUL-related messages on Instagram to identify marketing appeals used to target users along the continuum of e-cigarette use; we mapped the appeals to existing theoretical marketing frameworks to better understand industry strategies.
Methods: Hashtag-based keyword rules were used to collect JUUL-related posts from the Instagram application programming interface, 1 March-13 November 2018.
Studies reporting clinical symptoms related to electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) usage, especially types of devices and e-liquids, are sparse. The sample included 1,432 current ENDS users, ages 18-64, from a nationwide online survey conducted in 2016. ENDS use included device types, nicotine content, flavors, and e-liquid used.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCyanotoxins released by cyanobacteria are currently a concern due to potential impacts on plants, animals, and human health. Many instances of cyanotoxin poisoning have been reported around the world, including acute, chronic, and fatal cases. In recent years, the Tri An Reservoir (TAR) in Vietnam has experienced influxes of cyanotoxins from toxic blue-green algae at levels which exceed the World Health Organization's (WHO) permitted level of 1 μg/L.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe prevalence of e-cigarette use among youth is rising and may be associated with perceptions of health risks for these products. We examined how demographic factors and socioeconomic status (SES) are correlated with the perceived health risks of e-cigarette product contents among youth. .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExposure to media content can shape public opinions about tobacco. Accurately describing content is a first step to showing such effects. Historically, content analyses have hand-coded tobacco-focused texts from a few media sources which ignored passing mention coverage and social media sources, and could not reliably capture over-time variation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: As a remedy to committing fraud and violating civil racketeering laws, in November 2017, four major tobacco companies were court-ordered to develop and disseminate corrective statements regarding smoking health risks using mass media channels. We aimed to describe the nature, timing, reach of and exposure to the court-mandated tobacco industry corrective advertising campaign on social, broadcast and print media.
Methods: Data from social, print and broadcast media were used to measure potential exposure to corrective messages.
Ginseng (Panax ginseng), an herbal medicine, has been used to prevent neurodegenerative disorders. Ginsenosides (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFis the most widely used herbal medicine for improving cognitive functions. The pharmacological activity and underlying mechanisms of mountain-cultivated ginseng, however, have yet to be clearly elucidated, in particular, against trimethyltin-induced cognitive dysfunction. We previously reported that interleukin-6 plays a protective role against trimethyltin-induced cognitive dysfunction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Despite recent increases in little cigar and cigarillo (LCC) use-particularly among urban youth, African-Americans and Latinos-research on targeted strategies for marketing these products is sparse. Little is known about the amount or content of LCC messages users see or share on social media, a popular communication medium among youth and communities of colour.
Methods: Keyword rules were used to collect tweets related to LCCs from the Twitter Firehose posted in October 2014 and March-April 2015.
Exposure to far-infrared ray (FIR) has been shown to exert beneficial effects on cardiovascular and emotional disorders. However, the precise underlying mechanism mediated by FIR remains undetermined. Since restraint stress induces cardiovascular and emotional disorders, the present study investigated whether exposure to FIR affects acute restraint stress (ARS) in mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe previously reported that interleukin (IL)-6 deficiency potentiates trimethyltin (TMT)-induced convulsive neurotoxicity. The purpose in this study was to investigate the molecular mechanism by which cytokines affect TMT-induced cognitive impairment. To accomplish this, we examined hippocampal changes in Janus kinase 2 (JAK2)/signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) signaling in relation to cholinergic parameters after TMT treatment in mice genetically deficient in IL-6 (IL-6(-/-)), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α(-/-)), or interferon-γ (IFN-γ(-/-)).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated the role of cytokines in trimethyltin (TMT)-induced convulsive neurotoxicity. Evaluation of TNF-α, interferon-γ, and interleukin (IL)-6 knockout (-/-) mice showed that the IL-6(-/-) mice had the greatest susceptibility to TMT-induced seizures. In both wild-type and IL-6(-/-) mice, TMT treatment increased glutathione oxidation, lipid peroxidation, protein oxidation, and levels of reactive oxygen species in the hippocampus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe phenomenon of intersample contamination in air-segmented continuous-flow assays has been studied for many years, and new uses are being found for these sampling techniques every day. One application that has been developed recently employs a flow cytometer to conduct high-throughput screening assays of biological compounds. We have explored the sources of intersample contamination in the system and shown how methods developed previously can be applied to describe these phenomena.
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