Goreisan Prevents Brain Edema after Cerebral Ischemic Stroke by Inhibiting Aquaporin 4 Upregulation in Mice.

BACKGROUND: Aquaporin 4 (AQP4) is a water-selective transport protein expressed in astrocytes throughout the central nervous system. AQP4 level increases after cerebral ischemia and results in ischemic brain edema. Brain edema markedly influences mortality and motor function by elevating intracranial pressure that leads to secondary brain damage. Therefore, AQP4 is an important target to improve brain edema after cerebral ischemia. The Japanese herbal Kampo medicine, goreisan, is known to inhibit AQP4 activity. Here, we investigated whether goreisan prevents induction of brain edema by cerebral ischemia via AQP4 using 4-hour middle cerebral artery occlusion (4h MCAO) mice. METHODS: Goreisan was orally administered at a dose of 500 mg/kg twice a day for 5 days before MCAO. AQP4 expression and motor coordination were measured by Western blotting and rotarod test, respectively. RESULTS: Brain water content of 4h MCAO mice was significantly increased at 24 hours after MCAO. Treatment with goreisan significantly decreased both brain water content and AQP4 expression in the ischemic brain at 24 hours after MCAO. In addition, treatment with goreisan alleviated motor coordination deficits at 24 hours after MCAO. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study suggested that goreisan may be a useful new therapeutic option for ischemic brain edema.

[Case of law-evading herbs poisoning that induced shock and myocardial damage].

Law-evading herbs may induce poisoning symptoms, especially when they contain synthetic cannabinoids. However, their detailed pharmacological effects have not yet been clarified. Some reports have previously described symptoms of poisoning, but only a few reports have so far described shock and myocardial damage (MD). We experienced a case of shock and MD in a patient who had smoked law-evading herbs. A 61-year-old male presented at an emergency department 8 hours after smoking law-evading herbs (Rush Trip, High Men Monster) with chest pain. A vasopressor agent was administered to treat shock and antiarrhythmic drugs were administered due to ventricular arrhythmia. The contents of the law-evading herbs were unknown, so an in-hospital follow-up was conducted to treat the patient's symptoms. The follow-up blood test showed an increased level of cardiac enzymes, which thereafter demonstrated a spontaneous remission. The systemic conditions tended to improve and the patient was discharged from the hospital on the 5th hospital day. The contents of the law-evading herbs in question were thereafter,analyzed, and synthetic cannabinoids (JWH-210, JWH-081 and JWH-122) as well as caffeine were detected. The cause for the poisoning symptoms were suspected to be the presence of synthetic cannabinoids and caffeine. Such law-evading herbs may contain synthetic cannabinoids and caffeine which both may induce shock and MD.

Computationally fast estimation of muscle tension for realtime bio-feedback.

In this paper, we propose a method for realtime estimation of whole-body muscle tensions. The main problem of muscle tension estimation is that there are infinite number of solutions to realize a particular joint torque due to the actuation redundancy. Numerical optimization techniques, e.g. quadratic programming, are often employed to obtain a unique solution, but they are usually computationally expensive. For example, our implementation of quadratic programming takes about 0.17 sec per frame on the musculoskeletal model with 274 elements, which is far from realtime computation. Here, we propose to reduce the computational cost by using EMG data and by reducing the number of unknowns in the optimization. First, we compute the tensions of muscles with surface EMG data based on a biological muscle data, which is a very efficient process. We also assume that their synergists have the same activity levels and compute their tensions with the same model. Tensions of the remaining muscles are then computed using quadratic programming, but the number of unknowns is significantly reduced by assuming that the muscles in the same heteronymous group have the same activity level. The proposed method realizes realtime estimation and visualization of the whole-body muscle tensions that can be applied to sports training and rehabilitation.