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AbstractPrior studies have observed selective neural responses in the adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower‐level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 45 sleeping infants (2.0‐ to 11.9‐weeks‐old) while they listened to monophonic instrumental lullabies and infant‐directed speech produced by a mother. To match acoustic variation between music and speech sounds we (1) recorded music from instruments that had a similar spectral range as female infant‐directed speech, (2) used a novel excitation‐matching algorithm to match the cochleagrams of music and speech stimuli, and (3) synthesized "model‐matched" stimuli that were matched in spectrotemporal modulation statistics to (yet perceptually distinct from) music or speech. Of the 36 infants we collected usable data from, 19 had significant activations to sounds overall compared to scanner noise. From these infants, we observed a set of voxels in non‐primary auditory cortex (NPAC) but not in Heschl's Gyrus that responded significantly more to music than to each of the other three stimulus types (but not significantly more strongly than to the background scanner noise). In contrast, our planned analyses did not reveal voxels in NPAC that responded more to speech than to model‐matched speech, although other unplanned analyses did. These preliminary findings suggest that music selectivity arises within the first month of life. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/c8IGFvzxudk.Research Highlights
Responses to music, speech, and control sounds matched for the spectrotemporal modulation‐statistics of each sound were measured from 2‐ to 11‐week‐old sleeping infants using fMRI.
Auditory cortex was significantly activated by these stimuli in 19 out of 36 sleeping infants.
Selective responses to music compared to the three other stimulus classes were found in non‐primary auditory cortex but not in nearby Heschl's Gyrus.
Selective responses to speech were not observed in planned analyses but were observed in unplanned, exploratory analyses.

Aim: To assist in the long-term health management of residents and evaluate the health impacts after the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in Fukushima Prefecture, the Fukushima prefectural government decided to implement the Fukushima Health Management Survey. This report describes the results for residents aged 15 years or younger who received health checks and evaluates the data obtained from 2011 and 2012.

Abstract Background The Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster forced people to evacuate their hometowns. Many evacuees from the government-designated evacuation zone were forced to change their lifestyle, diet, exercise, and other personal habits. The Comprehensive Health Check (CHC), 1 of 4 detailed surveys of The Fukushima Health Management Survey (FHMS), was implemented to support the prevention of lifestyle-related disease. The aim of this study was to analyze changes in red blood cell count (RBC), hemoglobin (Hb) levels, and hematocrit (Ht) levels by comparing data from the medical health checkup before and after the disaster in individuals who were 40 years old or older. Methods Subjects in this study were Japanese men and women living in the vicinity of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima prefecture. Annual health checkups with a focus on metabolic syndrome for insured persons/dependents aged 40 or older by Health Care Insurers have been conducted since 2008. All analyses in this study were limited to men and women aged 40–90 years. Changes in RBC, Hb levels, Ht levels, and prevalence of polycythemia before and after the disaster were compared. Results First, RBC, Hb, and Ht significantly increased in both men and women evacuees. The evacuation was significantly associated with increased Hb levels after adjustment for age, gender, smoking status, excess ethanol intake, BMI, and baseline Hb level (β = 0.16, p < 0.001). Furthermore, the prevalence of polycythemia stratified by smoking status or obesity also increased in the evacuee group. Conclusions To our knowledge, this is the first report revealing that the evacuation was associated with the risk of polycythemia. This information could be very important for periodic health checkup and lifestyle recommendations for evacuees in the future.

Endometriosis is a heritable hormone-dependent gynecological disorder, associated with severe pelvic pain and reduced fertility; however, its molecular mechanisms remain largely unknown. Here we perform a meta-analysis of 11 genome-wide association case-control data sets, totalling 17,045 endometriosis cases and 191,596 controls. In addition to replicating previously reported loci, we identify five novel loci significantly associated with endometriosis risk (P<5 × 10−8), implicating genes involved in sex steroid hormone pathways (FN1, CCDC170, ESR1, SYNE1 and FSHB). Conditional analysis identified five secondary association signals, including two at the ESR1 locus, resulting in 19 independent single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) robustly associated with endometriosis, which together explain up to 5.19% of variance in endometriosis. These results highlight novel variants in or near specific genes with important roles in sex steroid hormone signalling and function, and offer unique opportunities for more targeted functional research efforts. ; We acknowledge all the study participants in 11 individual endometriosis studies that provided an opportunity for the current study. We also thank many hospital directors and staff, gynaecologists, general practitioners and pathology services in Australia who provided assistance with confirmation of diagnoses. We would like to thank the research participants and employees of 23andMe for making this work possible. We thank the subjects of the Icelandic deCODE study for their participation. We thank research staff and clinicians for providing diagnostic confirmation for the OX data set. We would like to express our gratitude to the staff and members of the Biobank Japan and Laboratory for Statistical Analysis, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences for their outstanding assistance. The QIMR study was supported by grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia (241,944, 339,462, 389,927, 389,875, 389,891, 389,892, 389,938, 443,036, 442,915, 442,981, 496,610, 496,739, 552,485, 552,498, 1,026,033 and 1,050,208), the Cooperative Research Centre for Discovery of Genes for Common Human Diseases (CRC), Cerylid Biosciences (Melbourne) and donations from N. Hawkins and S. Hawkins. Analyses of the QIMRHCS and OX GWAS were supported by the Wellcome Trust (WT084766/Z/08/Z) and makes use of WTCCC2 control data generated by the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium (awards 076113 and 085475). The iPSYCH study was funded by The Lundbeck Foundation, Denmark (R102-A9118, R155-2014-1724 ), and the research has been conducted using the Danish National Biobank resource supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. A full list of the investigators who contributed to the generation of these data is available from http://www.wtccc.org.uk. D.R.N. was supported in part by the NHMRC Fellowship (613674) and ARC Future Fellowship (FT0991022) schemes. E.G.H. (631096) and G.W.M. (339446, 619667) were supported by the NHMRC Fellowships Scheme. S.M. is supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. A.P.M. was supported by a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship (award WT098017). N.R. was supported by funding from the Medical Research Council UK (MR/K011480/1). This study was funded by the BioBank Japan project, which is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Sciences and Technology of Japanese government. ; Peer Reviewed

To access publisher's full text version of this article, please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field or click on the hyperlink at the top of the page marked Files ; Endometriosis is a heritable hormone-dependent gynecological disorder, associated with severe pelvic pain and reduced fertility; however, its molecular mechanisms remain largely unknown. Here we perform a meta-analysis of 11 genome-wide association case-control data sets, totalling 17,045 endometriosis cases and 191,596 controls. In addition to replicating previously reported loci, we identify five novel loci significantly associated with endometriosis risk (P<5 × 10(-8)), implicating genes involved in sex steroid hormone pathways (FN1, CCDC170, ESR1, SYNE1 and FSHB). Conditional analysis identified five secondary association signals, including two at the ESR1 locus, resulting in 19 independent single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) robustly associated with endometriosis, which together explain up to 5.19% of variance in endometriosis. These results highlight novel variants in or near specific genes with important roles in sex steroid hormone signalling and function, and offer unique opportunities for more targeted functional research efforts. ; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia Cooperative Research Centre for Discovery of Genes for Common Human Diseases (CRC), Cerylid Biosciences (Melbourne) Wellcome Trust Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium Lundbeck Foundation, Denmark Novo Nordisk Foundation NHMRC ARC NHMRC Fellowships Scheme Australian Research Council Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship Medical Research Council UK BioBank Japan project - Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Sciences and Technology of Japanese government