Effect of stimuli type on affective memory of patients with different severities of cognitive impairment.

OBJECTIVES: To understand the differences in affective memory performance under different degrees of cognitive impairment, this study recruited older people with different degrees of cognitive impairment, to perform emotion recognition memory tasks. METHODS: Fifty-four elderly participants aged (65-85 years) were recruited. Of these, 18 had mild cognitive impairment, 18 had a mild form of Alzheimer's disease, and the remaining 18 were healthy. Factors such as the different emotional valences (positive, neutral, or negative) and stimulus types (pictures, words, or sounds) were manipulated to explore their influences on the emotion recognition memory of people with different degrees of cognitive impairment. RESULTS: The results showed that people's performance to positive stimuli worsened as their degree of cognitive impairment increased. All participants had difficulty processing memory of affective sound stimuli compared to the other two stimulus types. CONCLUSIONS: The results explain the decline in the cognitive ability process, in affective memory performance, of people with different degrees of cognitive impairment. This abnormal decline on affective memory performance could be an early diagnostic indicator of Alzheimer's disease. The results can hopefully be used as a reference for subsequent research on cognition-related diseases and age-related decline, especially regarding affective memory.

[An Experience Providing Hospice Care to a Terminal Cancer Patient].

This study discusses a case in which corneal-donation care was provided to a 57-year-old patient with terminal salivary gland cancer. Nursing care was provided from June 1 to June 28, 2017. The overall nursing assessment (covering physiological, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects) confirmed that the three main issues faced by the patient were chronic pain, dysfunctional family processes, and spiritual disturbances. Effective pain treatment was applied during the care process in order to stabilize the patient's physical condition. A hospice shared care team then worked together to help the patient mend his relationships with family members, fulfill his wish to donate his cornea, find meaning in his life, affirm his contribution to his family and society, and die a peaceful death. With regard to clinical practice, an explanation of corneal donation should be included in the conventional educational guidelines for hospice care. In addition to referrals to the relevant medical teams, it is recommended that nursing personnel who deal with patients like this participate in organ donation courses and develop positive attitudes and grief counseling skills. These actions will enable them to build up the professionalism, confidence, patience, and organ procurement-related skills required for the provision of care to these patients, which will in turn lead to better-quality palliative care. It is hoped that the nursing experience shared herein provides nursing personnel with a reference for palliative cancer care.

The relationship among serum cytokines, chemokine, nitric oxide, and leptin in children with type 1 diabetes mellitus.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between cytokines, leptin and vascular tone-related chemokine and nitric oxide (NO) in type 1 diabetic children. DESIGN AND METHODS: Serum samples were collected from 58 children with type 1 diabetes and 33 of their healthy siblings. RESULTS: Serum interleukin (IL)-8 was significantly higher and serum nitric oxide was significantly lower in the children with diabetes than in their healthy siblings. Stepwise regression analysis showed that there were significantly positive correlations between IL-1beta and IL-6, IL-1beta and nitric oxide, IL-4 and tumor-necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha, IL-4 and leptin, IL-8 and IL-2, and interferon (IFN)-gamma and IL-6, as well as significantly inversed correlations between IL-6 and IL-2, IL-8 and interferon-gamma, and leptin and TNF-alpha in siblings, not in the children with diabetes. However, there were significantly positive correlations between IL-2 and IL-4, IL-2 and leptin, IL-4 and IL-6, and TNF-alpha and IL-6 in children with diabetes. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that the alterations of circulating IL-8 and nitric oxide levels and cytokine network in children with diabetes may be associated with the cardiovascular disease in their adulthood.

The anti-hyperglycemic activity of the fruiting body of Cordyceps in diabetic rats induced by nicotinamide and streptozotocin.

Little scientific evidence exists to support the numerous herbs used to improve diabetes-related metabolic disorders. Cordyceps, a Chinese herbal medicine with fruiting body and carcass, has been proposed to have multiple medicinal activities. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of fruiting body and carcass of Cordyceps on hyperglycemia. Male Wistar rats administered with placebo (STZ group), 1 g of fruiting body (FB group), 1 g of carcass (CC group), or 1g of fruiting body plus carcass (CF group) of Cordyceps for four weeks (d1 to d28) were injected with nicotinamide (200 mg/kg) and streptozotocin (65 mg/kg) on d15. Animals fed with placebo and injected with saline acted as the controls (CON group). The results showed that water intake (d15 to d29), changes in fasting blood glucose concentration (d15 to d26), and serum concentrations of fructosamine (d29) were significantly greater in the STZ, CC and CF groups than in the CON and FB groups (one-way ANOVA, P < 0.05). The diabetic rats had significantly lower weight gain and higher blood glucose response in oral glucose tolerance test than the control rats; and these changes were significantly reduced by administrating the fruiting body of Cordyceps. Our results revealed that fruiting body, not carcass, of Cordyceps attenuated the diabetes-induced weight loss, polydipsia and hyperglycemia, and these improvements suggest that fruiting body of Cordyceps has a potential to be the functional food for diabetes.

Production of inactivated influenza H5N1 vaccines from MDCK cells in serum-free medium.

BACKGROUND: Highly pathogenic influenza viruses pose a constant threat which could lead to a global pandemic. Vaccination remains the principal measure to reduce morbidity and mortality from such pandemics. The availability and surging demand for pandemic vaccines needs to be addressed in the preparedness plans. This study presents an improved high-yield manufacturing process for the inactivated influenza H5N1 vaccines using Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells grown in a serum-free (SF) medium microcarrier cell culture system. PRINCIPAL FINDING: The current study has evaluated the performance of cell adaptation switched from serum-containing (SC) medium to several commercial SF media. The selected SF medium was further evaluated in various bioreactor culture systems for process scale-up evaluation. No significant difference was found in the cell growth in different sizes of bioreactors studied. In the 7.5 L bioreactor runs, the cell concentration reached to 2.3 × 10(6) cells/mL after 5 days. The maximum virus titers of 1024 Hemagglutinin (HA) units/50 µL and 7.1 ± 0.3 × 10(8) pfu/mL were obtained after 3 days infection. The concentration of HA antigen as determined by SRID was found to be 14.1 µg/mL which was higher than those obtained from the SC medium. A mouse immunogenicity study showed that the formalin-inactivated purified SF vaccine candidate formulated with alum adjuvant could induce protective level of virus neutralization titers similar to those obtained from the SC medium. In addition, the H5N1 viruses produced from either SC or SF media showed the same antigenic reactivity with the NIBRG14 standard antisera. CONCLUSIONS: The advantages of this SF cell-based manufacturing process could reduce the animal serum contamination, the cost and lot-to-lot variation of SC medium production. This study provides useful information to manufacturers that are planning to use SF medium for cell-based influenza vaccine production.

Emulsified nanoparticles containing inactivated influenza virus and CpG oligodeoxynucleotides critically influences the host immune responses in mice.

BACKGROUND: Antigen sparing and cross-protective immunity are regarded as crucial in pandemic influenza vaccine development. Both targets can be achieved by adjuvantation strategy to elicit a robust and broadened immune response. We assessed the immunogenicity of an inactivated H5N1 whole-virion vaccine (A/Vietnam/1194/2004 NIBRG-14, clade 1) formulated with emulsified nanoparticles and investigated whether it can induce cross-clade protecting immunity. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: After formulation with PELC, a proprietary water-in-oil-in-water nanoemulsion comprising of bioresorbable polymer/Span(R)85/squalene, inactivated virus was intramuscularly administered to mice in either one-dose or two-dose schedule. We found that the antigen-specific serum antibody responses elicited after two doses of non-adjuvanted vaccine were lower than those observed after a single dose of adjuvanted vaccine, PELC and the conventional alum adjuvant as well. Moreover, 5 microg HA of PELC-formulated inactivated virus were capable of inducing higher antibodies than those obtained from alum-adjuvanted vaccine. In single-dose study, we found that encapsulating inactivated virus into emulsified PELC nanoparticles could induce better antibody responses than those formulated with PELC-adsorbed vaccine. However, the potency was rather reduced when the inactivated virus and CpG (an immunostimulatory oligodeoxynucleotide containing unmethylated cytosine-guanosine motifs) were co-encapsulated within the emulsion. Finally, the mice who received PELC/CpG(adsorption)-vaccine could easily and quickly reach 100% of seroprotection against a homologous virus strain and effective cross-protection against a heterologous virus strain (A/Whooper swan/Mongolia/244/2005, clade 2.2). CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Encapsulating inactivated H5N1 influenza virus and CpG into emulsified nanoparticles critically influences the humoral responses against pandemic influenza. These results demonstrated that the use of PELC could be as antigen-sparing in preparation for a potential shortage of prophylactic vaccines against local infectious diseases, in particular pandemic influenza. Moreover, the cross-clade neutralizing antibody responses data verify the potential of such adjuvanted H5N1 candidate vaccine as an effective tool in pre-pandemic preparedness.

Enhancement of potent antibody and T-cell responses by a single-dose, novel nanoemulsion-formulated pandemic influenza vaccine.

Vaccine shortages are a major obstacle to influenza pandemic preparedness. Increasing vaccine efficiency provides a potentially effective way to overcome this problem. Specifically, using single-dose immunization to induce protective immunity is an attractive approach to emergency/massive vaccination. In this report, we propose a novel nanoemulsion comprised of the bioresorbable polymer, Span 85, and squalene forming a ready-to-use adjuvant, called PELC. After formulation with PELC, inactivated H5N1 virus was intramuscularly administered to mice via a single injection. The data demonstrate that inactivated virus containing 0.5microg hemagglutinin (HA) and formulated with PELC induced more potent antigen-specific antibodies, hemagglutination inhibition, and virus neutralization than non-adjuvanted inactivated virus containing 5microg HA. In addition, T-cell proliferative responses, as well as interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) and interleukin-4 (IL-4) secretion were significantly enhanced after immunization with PELC-adjuvanted inactivated virus. These results indicate that PELC can be used for effective single-dose immunization and could thus play an important role in influenza pandemic preparedness.