Effects of different intensity of exercise on tissue injury and gene expression in obese rats.

Weight loss is an important aspect of chronic disease prevention and management, with increasing rates of overweight and obesity worldwide. Drugs and surgery are popular approaches to lose weight. Given their potential harm to the body, exercise is an alternative widely accepted approach. However, participation in high intensity exercise entails an inherent risk of sports-related injuries. In this study, a rat model fed with high fat diet was employed to investigate the effects of different intensity of exercise prescription on both weight loss and tissue injury after exercise and to find a proper exercise prescription for losing weight with minimal tissues injuries. We inferred that 3% weight bearing might be the proper exercise prescription for high fat diet-fed rats in our experimental setting.

Synthesis and biological evaluation of dehydroabietic acid-pyrimidine hybrids as antitumor agents.

A series of novel dehydroabietic acid derivatives containing pyrimidine moieties were designed and synthesized to explore more efficacious and less toxic antitumor agents according to the principle of combination and hybridization. The cytotoxicity against human liver cancer (HepG2) cells, human breast cancer (MCF-7) cells, human colon cancer (HCT-116) cells, human lung cancer (A549) cells, and human normal liver cells (LO2) was estimated by MTT assay in vitro. Cytotoxic activity screening revealed that most of the compounds showed moderate to high levels of cytotoxicity against these four cancer cell lines and that some displayed more potent inhibitory activities compared with 5-FU. In particular, compound 3b exhibited promising cytotoxicity with IC50 values ranging from 7.00 to 11.93 µM against all the tested cell lines and displayed weak cytotoxicity towards normal cells. Besides, cell cycle analysis indicated that compound 3b mainly arrested MCF-7 cells at the S stage and induced cell apoptosis.

The Effect of Preceding Self-Control on Prosocial Behaviors: The Moderating Role of Awe.

The exertion of self-control is known to result in subsequent detrimental effects on prosocial behaviors. Moreover, certain studies have demonstrated that positive emotions could drive people to allocate more attentional resources for conducting prosocial behaviors. However, whether and how awe - one important type of positive incidental emotion - moderates the effect of exerting self-control on subsequent prosocial behaviors remains unclear yet. The anonymous economic dictator game is an effective index of prosocial behaviors. We examined the influence of exerting self-control on prosocial behavior and the moderating role of awe on the effect of exerting self-control on prosocial behaviors in two experiments (N = 280). We adopted the incongruent Stroop task to induce the exertion of self-control and participants were required to allocate money to others in the anonymous dictator game (Experiment 1). We used the narrative recall task paradigm to elicit the emotion of awe during the interval between Stroop tasks and the dictator game (Experiment 2). Results indicated that the exertion of self-control was detrimental to prosocial behaviors and awe weakened the detrimental effects of exerting self-control on prosocial behavior. We interpreted these results in terms of the protective inhibition of self-regulation and motivation (PRISM) model.