Genetic changes linked to two different syndromic forms of autism enhance reinforcement learning in adolescent male but not female mice.

Unlabelled: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by restricted and repetitive behaviors and social differences, both of which may manifest, in part, from underlying differences in corticostriatal circuits and reinforcement learning. Here, we investigated reinforcement learning in mice with mutations in either or , both high-confidence ASD risk genes associated with major syndromic forms of ASD. Using an odor-based two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task, we tested adolescent mice of both sexes and found male and heterozygote (Het) mice showed enhanced learning performance compared to their wild type (WT) siblings.

Polydopamine-assisted ion-mediated hyaluronic acid grafting for effective construction of hemocompatible platform with cancer cell recognition.

Surfaces capable of specific biomolecule recognition are essential for cancer theranostics, biosensing, and tissue engineering. However, current grafting methods, critical for dictating the recognition efficiency and biocompatibility of biomaterials, especially hydrophilic polymers, struggle to balance high grafting density with ease of implementation. In pursuit of a simple, effective, and versatile solution, we introduced a polydopamine (PDA)-assisted Ca-mediated grafting strategy using hyaluronic acid (HA) as a model material.

Ambient PM exposure and tuberculosis reactivation: a cross-sectional study in an intermediate burden city.

Hong Kong is an intermediate tuberculosis (TB) endemicity city dominated by reactivation diseases. A cross-sectional study on the clinical and epidemiologic data of newly diagnosed TB cases was conducted in such a setting, to examine the association between ambient PM and TB reactivation. After the exclusion of cases most likely resulting from recent infection, four distinct TB population phenotypes were delineated by latent class analysis based on their reactivation risk and clinical profiles ( = 2,153): '' (26%), '' (34%), '' (19%) and '' (21%).

Adolescent and adult mice use both incremental reinforcement learning and short term memory when learning concurrent stimulus-action associations.

Computational modeling has revealed that human research participants use both rapid working memory (WM) and incremental reinforcement learning (RL) (RL+WM) to solve a simple instrumental learning task, relying on WM when the number of stimuli is small and supplementing with RL when the number of stimuli exceeds WM capacity. Inspired by this work, we examined which learning systems and strategies are used by adolescent and adult mice when they first acquire a conditional associative learning task. In a version of the human RL+WM task translated for rodents, mice were required to associate odor stimuli (from a set of 2 or 4 odors) with a left or right port to receive reward.

Single-point ultrasound-guided iliohypogastric-ilioinguinal-genitofemoral nerve block for inguinal hernia surgery in older adult patients: a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Ultrasound-guided nerve block can be used for perioperative analgesia and can potentially improve the course of recovery. Although iliohypogastric-ilioinguinal nerve block has been successfully used for inguinal hernia surgery, the poor blocking effect of intraoperative traction reflex remains a major drawback of this technique. The main objective of this study was to investigate the feasibility of single-point ultrasound-guided iliohypogastric-ilioinguinal-genitofemoral nerve (GFN) blockage for open anterior inguinal hernia repair in older adults.