A prediction model for the walking and balance milestone in Parkinson's disease.

Background: Walking and balance impairments, represented by freezing of gait and falls, are significant contributors to disability in advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. However, the composite measure of the Walking and Balance Milestone (WBMS) has not been thoroughly investigated.

Methods: This study included 606 early-stage PD patients from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) database, with a disease duration of less than 2 years and no WBMS at baseline.

Disease progression subtypes of Parkinson's disease based on milestone events.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) demonstrates considerable heterogeneity in the manifestation of clinical symptoms and disease progression. Recently, six clinical milestones have been proposed to evaluate disease severity in PD. However, the identification of PD progression subtypes based on these milestone events has not yet been performed.

The intra-individual reliability of H-MRS measurement in the anterior cingulate cortex across 1 year.

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is the primary method that can measure the levels of metabolites in the brain in vivo. To achieve its potential in clinical usage, the reliability of the measurement requires further articulation. Although there are many studies that investigate the reliability of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), comparatively few studies have investigated the reliability of other brain metabolites, such as glutamate (Glu), N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA), creatine (Cr), phosphocreatine (PCr), or myo-inositol (mI), which all play a significant role in brain development and functions.

Considerations on brain age predictions from repeatedly sampled data across time.

Introduction: Brain age, the estimation of a person's age from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) parameters, has been used as a general indicator of health. The marker requires however further validation for application in clinical contexts. Here, we show how brain age predictions perform for the same individual at various time points and validate our findings with age-matched healthy controls.

Structure-based discovery of novel α-aminoketone derivatives as dual p53-MDM2/MDMX inhibitors for the treatment of cancer.

The function of the p53 protein is impaired by the overexpression of its negative regulator murine double minute 2 protein (MDM2) and homologous protein MDMX. Disruption of the p53-MDM2/MDMX interaction to restore the transcriptional function of p53 is considered a promising strategy for cancer therapy. To design dual MDM2/MDMX inhibitors, the binding modes of MDM2 or MDMX with their inhibitors are elucidated.

Deep brain imaging of three participants across 1 year: The Bergen breakfast scanning club project.

Our understanding of the cognitive functions of the human brain has tremendously benefited from the population functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies in the last three decades. The reliability and replicability of the fMRI results, however, have been recently questioned, which has been named the replication crisis. Sufficient statistical power is fundamental to alleviate the crisis, by either "going big," leveraging big datasets, or by "going small," densely scanning several participants.

How the brain encodes morphological constraints during Chinese word reading: An EEG-fNIRS study.

Although the role of morphology in alphabetic language processing has been extensively studied, it is still unclear how morphology is enabled and constrained in morpho-syllabic languages like Chinese. This study aims to inspect the time courses and patterns of brain activation associated with Chinese morphological constraint encoding. Chinese native speakers were recruited to perform visual lexical decisions on real Chinese compound words, pseudowords, and nonwords, whilst behavioral, electroencephalographic, and functional near infrared spectroscopy data were simultaneously recorded.

Population Aging and Its Impact on Human Wellbeing in China.

Population aging is getting enlarged in the upcoming decades. Meanwhile, old-aged longevity and dependency are getting large due to improvement in life expectancy. In literature, it is claimed that old-aged dependency affects the wellbeing of society.

The neural dynamics associated with lexicality effect in reading single Chinese words, pseudo-words and non-words.

In previous word reading studies, lexicality has been used as a variable to examine the impacts of word form and meaning information on the many stages of word recognition process. Yet the neural dynamics associated with lexicality effect of various information processing for Chinese visual word recognition has not been well elucidated. In this study, Chinese native speakers were instructed to read Chinese disyllabic compound words, morphological legal (pseudo-words) and illegal non-words with their brain potentials recorded.

EEG Decoding of Dynamic Facial Expressions of Emotion: Evidence from SSVEP and Causal Cortical Network Dynamics.

The neural cognitive mechanism in processing static facial expressions (FEs) has been well documented, whereas the one underlying perceiving dynamic faces remains unclear. In this study, Fourier transformation and time-frequency analysis of Electroencephalography (EEG) data were carried out to detect the brain activation underlying dynamic or static FEs while twenty-one participants were viewing dynamic or static faces flicking at 10 Hz. In particular, steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) were quantified through spectral power analysis of EEG recordings.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy can detect low-frequency hemodynamic oscillations in the prefrontal cortex during steady-state visual evoked potential-inducing periodic facial expression stimuli presentation.

Brain oscillations are vital to cognitive functions, while disrupted oscillatory activity is linked to various brain disorders. Although high-frequency neural oscillations (> 1 Hz) have been extensively studied in cognition, the neural mechanisms underlying low-frequency hemodynamic oscillations (LFHO) < 1 Hz have not yet been fully explored. One way to examine oscillatory neural dynamics is to use a facial expression (FE) paradigm to induce steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), which has been used in electroencephalography studies of high-frequency brain oscillation activity.

Effective Connectivity Study Guiding the Neuromodulation Intervention in Figurative Language Comprehension Using Optical Neuroimaging.

The current study is aimed at establishing links between brain network examination and neural plasticity studies measured by optical neuroimaging. Sixteen healthy subjects were recruited from the University of Macau to test the Granger Prediction Estimation (GPE) method to investigate brain network connectivity during figurative language comprehension. The method is aimed at mapping significant causal relationships across language brain networks, captured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy measurements (fNIRS): (i) definition of regions of interest (ROIs) based on significant channels extracted from spatial activation maps; (ii) inspection of significant causal relationships in temporal resolution, exploring the experimental task agreement; and (iii) early identification of stronger causal relationships that guide neuromodulation intervention, targeting impaired connectivity pathways.

Altered Functional Connectivity in the Motor and Prefrontal Cortex for Children With Down's Syndrome: An fNIRS Study.

Children with Down's syndrome (DS) might exhibit disrupted brain functional connectivity in the motor and prefrontal cortex. To inspect the alterations in brain activation and functional connectivity for children with DS, the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) method was applied to examine the brain activation difference in the motor and prefrontal cortex between the DS and typically developing (TD) groups during a fine motor task. In addition, small-world analysis based on graph theory was also carried out to characterize the topological organization of functional brain networks.

Antibacterial stilbenes from the tubers of Bletilla striata.

Three new bibenzyl derivatives (bletstrins A-C, 1-3), including two bibenzyls that have hydroxyl-substituted chiral centers on the aliphatic bibenzyl bridge, along with eighteen known stilbenoids (4-21) were isolated from the tubers of Bletilla striata. The structures of new compounds were elucidated by the use of 1D/2D NMR spectroscopic data. The absolute configurations of bletitrins A and B were determined by optical rotation value.

A novel phase analysis method for examining fNIRS neuroimaging data associated with Chinese/English sight translation.

In this study, a phase method for analyzing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals was developed, which can extract the phase information of fNIRS data by using Hilbert transform. More importantly, the phase analysis method can be further performed to generate the brain phase activation and to construct the brain networks. Meanwhile, the study of translation between Chinese and English has been exciting and interesting from both the language and neuroscience standpoints due to their drastically different linguistic features.

Concurrent mapping of brain activation from multiple subjects during social interaction by hyperscanning: a mini-review.

Social interaction plays an essential role in acquiring knowledge and developing our own personalities in our daily life. Meanwhile, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-, electroencephalograph (EEG)-, and functional near inferred spectroscopy (fNIRS)-hyperscanning, enables us to concurrently map brain activation from two or more participants who are engaged in social interaction simultaneously. In this review, we first highlight the recent technologies advances and the most significant findings towards social interaction by using the hyperscanning method.

Neuroticism and conscientiousness respectively positively and negatively correlated with the network characteristic path length in dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex: A resting-state fNIRS study.

Background: Accumulating evidence shows that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is implicated in personality traits. In this study, resting-state functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) combined with small-world analysis was utilized to examine the relationship between the network properties of dlPFC and personality traits.

Methods: Thirty college students (aged between 20 and 29) were recruited from the University of Macau campus, whose personality scores were accessed with the NEO-FFT questionnaire.

Optical mapping of prefrontal brain connectivity and activation during emotion anticipation.

Accumulated neuroimaging evidence shows that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is activated during emotion anticipation. The aim of this work is to examine the brain connectivity and activation differences in dlPFC between the positive, neutral and negative emotion anticipation by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The hemodynamic responses were first assessed for all subjects during the performance of various emotion anticipation tasks.

An efficient scheme for purification of a novel recombinant immunotoxin, rCCK8PE38, for anti-tumour experiments.

rCCK8PE38 is a novel immunotoxin that targets choleystokinin B receptor, which is over-expressed in some tumor tissues. Although we constructed a prokaryotic expression vector to express rCCK8PE38 in our laboratory, thorough purification was necessary to quantitatively assess its anti-tumor effect. In this study, we established a purification protocol to obtain rCCK8PE38 with high purity from E.

Optical mapping of brain activation during the English to Chinese and Chinese to English sight translation.

Translating from Chinese into another language or vice versa is becoming a widespread phenomenon. However, current neuroimaging studies are insufficient to reveal the neural mechanism underlying translation asymmetry during Chinese/English sight translation. In this study, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to extract the brain activation patterns associated with Chinese/English sight translation.

Functional variants in the low-density lipoprotein receptor gene are associated with clear cell renal cell carcinoma susceptibility.

Recent studies indicate that abnormal levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), which is an important component of dyslipidaemia, are associated with alterations to cancer risk, including that of renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Single nucleotide polymorphisms at microRNA-binding sites contribute to cancer susceptibility and progression by affecting the messenger RNA (mRNA) function of target genes. In this case-control study, we examined the frequency of six potentially functional single nucleotide polymorphisms in the LDL receptor gene (LDLR) in 1004 clear cell RCC (ccRCC) patients and 1065 cancer-free subjects.

Attentional avoidance of threats in obsessive compulsive disorder: An event related potential study.

The neural mechanism underlying attentional bias in OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) remains unclear. The goal of this study was to examine and compare the time course and the event related potential (ERP) components in OCD patients and healthy controls (HC) to reveal the complex brain activation pattern associated with attentional bias in OCD. The behavioural and electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded while the participants performed an emotional Stroop task.