Currieemborg0922

okines, cytokines, and other factors such as NGF, as well as oxidative mediators.Oddballs, rare or novel stimuli, appear to last longer than non-oddballs. This illusion is often attributed to the perceived time that an oddball occupies being longer than that of a non-oddball. However, it is also possible that oddball stimuli are perceived to onset earlier than non-oddballs; they are "gated" earlier in time and thus the perceived duration of those stimuli are longer. In the current article, we directly investigate this proposal by asking participants to react to, produce durations initiated with, and tap along to either oddball or standard stimuli. Tapping provided some support for earlier perceived onset of an oddball in the visual modality. However, both reaction time and duration production experiments provided evidence against an oddball being gated earlier than a standard stimulus. Contrarily, these experiments showed an oddball resulted in longer reaction times and productions, respectively. Taken together, these three experiments indicate it is unlikely that the expansion of time attributed to oddball presentation is purely due to the earlier gating of oddball stimuli. In fact, the first two experiments provide some evidence that the effect of an oddball must compensate for the later gating of these stimuli.The present study explored the origin of perceptual changes repeatedly observed in the context of actions. In Experiment 1, participants tried to hit a circular target with a stylus movement under restricted feedback conditions. We measured the perception of target size during action planning and observed larger estimates for larger movement distances. In Experiment 2, we then tested the hypothesis that this action specific influence on perception is due to changes in the allocation of spatial attention. For this purpose, we replaced the hitting task by conditions of focused and distributed attention and measured the perception of the former target stimulus. The results revealed changes in the perceived stimulus size very similar to those observed in Experiment 1. These results indicate that action's effects on perception root in changes of spatial attention.Given appropriate training, human observers typically demonstrate clear improvements in performance on perceptual tasks. However, the benefits of training frequently fail to generalize to other tasks, even those that appear similar to the trained task. A great deal of research has focused on the training task characteristics that influence the extent to which learning generalizes. However, less is known about what might predict the considerable individual variations in performance. As such, we conducted an individual differences study to identify basic cognitive abilities and/or dispositional traits that predict an individual's ability to learn and/or generalize learning in tasks of perceptual learning. We first showed that the rate of learning and the asymptotic level of performance that is achieved in two different perceptual learning tasks (motion direction and odd-ball texture detection) are correlated across individuals, as is the degree of immediate generalization that is observed and the rate at which a generalization task is learned. This indicates that there are indeed consistent individual differences in perceptual learning abilities. We then showed that several basic cognitive abilities and dispositional traits are associated with an individual's ability to learn (e.g., simple reaction time; sensitivity to punishment) and/or generalize learning (e.g., cognitive flexibility; openness to experience) in perceptual learning tasks. We suggest that the observed individual difference relationships may provide possible targets for future intervention studies meant to increase perceptual learning and generalization.The aim of the current study was to develop a novel task that allows for the quick assessment of spatial memory precision with minimal technical and training requirements. In this task, participants memorized the position of an object in a virtual room and then judged from a different perspective, whether the object has moved to the left or to the right. Results revealed that participants exhibited a systematic bias in their responses that we termed the reversed congruency effect. Specifically, they performed worse when the camera and the object moved in the same direction than when they moved in opposite directions. Notably, participants responded correctly in almost 100% of the incongruent trials, regardless of the distance by which the object was displaced. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect cannot be explained by the movement of the object on the screen, but that it relates to the perspective shift and the movement of the object in the virtual world. We also showed that the presence of additional objects in the environment reduces the reversed congruency effect such that it no longer predicts performance. In Experiment 3, we showed that the reversed congruency effect is greater in older adults, suggesting that the quality of spatial memory and perspective-taking abilities are critical. Overall, our results suggest that this effect is driven by difficulties in the precise encoding of object locations in the environment and in understanding how perspective shifts affect the projected positions of the objects in the two-dimensional image.TAS-117 is a potent and selective allosteric pan-v-akt murine thymoma viral oncogene homolog (Akt) inhibitor. We conducted a single-arm single-center phase 2 study of TAS-117 in heavily treated patients with tumors refractory to systemic chemotherapy and harboring phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt mutations. Patients with gastrointestinal (GI) cancers were orally administered 16 mg TAS-117 daily, and those with non-GI tumors were administered 24 mg on a 4 days on/3 days off schedule. The primary endpoint was overall response rate (ORR). Secondary endpoints included disease control rate (DCR), progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), PFS ratio, safety, and tolerability. Thirteen patients were enrolled eight with non-GI (breast, ovarian, endometrial, and non-small cell lung) and five with GI (colon, rectal, gastric, and gallbladder) cancers. Ten patients were treated with TAS-117 after ≥ 4 lines of therapy. Twelve patients showed PIK3 catalytic subunit alpha (PIK3CA) mutations; one harbored an Akt1E17K mutation. The median treatment duration was 1.4 months; the median number of treatment cycles was 2. The ORR was 8 %, and DCR was 23 %. The median PFS and OS were 1.4 and 4.8 months, respectively. p38 MAPK inhibitor Grade 3-4 treatment-related adverse events were anorexia (grade 3, 8 %) and hyperglycemia (grade 3, 8 %; grade 4, 8 %).Grade 3-4 treatment-related adverse events occurred in 27 % of grade 3 anorexia (9 %) and hyperglycemia (grade 3, 8 %; grade 4, 9\%). TAS-117 showed limited antitumor activity and manageable toxicity. link2 Clinical efficacy was observed in patients with ovarian cancer harboring PIK3CA E545K mutations and in patients with breast cancer harboring PIK3CA H1047R and Akt1E17K mutations.Trial registration This study was retrospectively registered with ClinicalTrial.gov (NCT03017521 on January 11, 2017).Drug metabolism is a critical process for the removal of unwanted substances from the body. In humans, approximately 80% of oxidative metabolism and almost 50% of the overall elimination of commonly used drugs can be attributed to one or more of various cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes from CYP families 1-3. In addition to the basic metabolic effects for elimination, CYP enzymes in vivo are capable of affecting the treatment outcomes in many cases. Drug-metabolizing CYP enzymes are mainly expressed in the liver and intestine, the two principal drug oxidation and elimination organs, where they can significantly influence the drug action, safety, and bioavailability by mediating phase I metabolism and first-pass metabolism. Furthermore, CYP-mediated local drug metabolism in the sites of action may also have the potential to impact drug response, according to the literature in recent years. This article underlines the ability of CYP enzymes to influence treatment outcomes by discussing CYP-mediated diversified drug metabolism in primary metabolic sites (liver and intestine) and typical action sites (brain and tumors) according to their expression levels and metabolic activity. Moreover, intrinsic and extrinsic factors of personal differential CYP phenotypes that contribute to interindividual variation of treatment outcomes are also reviewed to introduce the multifarious pivotal role of CYP-mediated metabolism and clearance in drug therapy.In this study, we use for the first time the electropenetrography (EPG) technique to characterize and describe the feeding activities of Collaria scenica (Stål) adults and their respective waveforms on wheat, Triticum aestivum L. plants. It comprised of four waveforms, two related to non-feeding (Np and R) and two with feeding activities (CR and I). The Np wave represents the insect resting or walking on the plant surface (75% of the recording time). R wave was associated to sensory evaluation of leaf surface with the tip of the labium (labial dabbing activity-ca. 1% of the recording time). Feeding activities were of relative short duration; cell rupture waveform (CR-ca. 49 min-ca. 15% of the recording time) was highly irregular due to constant movement of the stylets internally in the plant tissue. The waveform I (ca. 28 min-ca. 9% of the recording time) showed stereotypical and repetitive pattern and represents ingestion of the cell contents previously degraded via cell-rupturing activities. The damage caused by C. scenica in wheat leaflets is a result of cell-rupturing activities, generated by action of digestive enzymes plus mechanical action of serrated mandibular stylets. link3 This results in whitish streaks, dots, or spots on the leaflet of wheat plants which cause significant damage and eventually plants' death.Hypertension is a chronic condition that can lead to serious health problems. Patients with High Blood Pressure (HBP) are often asked to have their BP checked at home. The traditional at-home procedure has some drawbacks, such as forgetting to check or write down the values, errors in transcribing the numbers, or the impossibility of immediately notifying medical staff of out-of-range BP values. To facilitate self-measurements by patients at home we devised TensioBot, a Telegram based chatbot. The bot sends patients reminders to check their BP, advice on good monitoring practices, measurement tracking, medical alerts and allows healthcare professionals to access up-to-date measurement information. TensioBot has been tested for two years in a randomized controlled trial with 112 patients (55 using the bot and 57 in the control group). We found that, although the bot group showed similar results in terms of adherence to the BP checking schedule, bot users scored better in terms of knowledge and skills on BP checking best practices. Participants rated the bot very positively, perceived it as useful and easy to use, and continued to use it after the intervention. Moreover, all data being equal, we describe some other benefits of using a chatbot for self-managed in-house BP control, both for patients and healthcare professionals and systems.