Plos One
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All the opinions in this article are those of the authors and should not be construed to reflect, in any way, those of the Department of Veterans Affairs. ⋯ The peer review process largely succeeds in selecting high impact articles and dispatching lower impact ones, but the process is far from perfect. While the inter-rater reliability between individual reviewers is low, the accuracy of sorting is improved with a greater number of reviewers.
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Representations in the cortex are often distributed with graded firing rates in the neuronal populations. The firing rate probability distribution of each neuron to a set of stimuli is often exponential or gamma. In processes in the brain, such as decision-making, that are influenced by the noise produced by the close to random spike timings of each neuron for a given mean rate, the noise with this graded type of representation may be larger than with the binary firing rate distribution that is usually investigated. ⋯ The implication is that spiking-related noise will continue to be a factor that influences processes such as decision-making, signal detection, short-term memory, and memory recall even with the quite large networks found in the cerebral cortex. In these networks there are several thousand recurrent collateral synapses onto each neuron. The greater noise with graded firing rate distributions has the advantage that it can increase the speed of operation of cortical circuitry.
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The catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) enzyme has a key function in the degradation of catecholamines and a functional polymorphism is val158met. The val/val genotype results in a three to fourfold higher enzymatic activity compared with the met/met genotype, with the val/met genotype exhibiting intermediate activity. Since pain syndromes as well as anxiety and depression are associated to low and high COMT activity respectively and these conditions are all associated with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) we wanted for the first time to explore the relationship between the polymorphism and IBS. ⋯ In this study we found an association between the val/val genotype of the val158met COMT gene and IBS as well as to specific IBS related bowel pattern in IBS patients.
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Allergic asthma is associated with airway eosinophilia, which is regulated by different T-effector cells. T cells express transcription factors T-bet, GATA-3, RORγt and Foxp3, representing Th1, Th2, Th17 and Treg cells respectively. No study has directly determined the relative presence of each of these T cell subsets concomitantly in a model of allergic airway inflammation. ⋯ Allergen exposure led to the accumulation of T-bet(+), GATA-3(+) and Foxp3(+) cells in peribronchial and alveolar tissue, GATA-3(+) and Foxp3(+) cells in perivascular tissue, and RORγt(+) cells in alveolar tissue. A total of 28 cytokines, chemokines and receptor genes were altered more than 3 fold upon allergen exposure, with expression of half of the genes claimed in all three microenvironments. Our study shows that allergen exposure affects all T effector cells in lung, with a dominant of Th2 cells, but with different local cell distribution, probably due to a distinguished local inflammatory milieu.
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Our knowledge about affective processes, especially concerning effects on cognitive demands like word processing, is increasing steadily. Several studies consistently document valence and arousal effects, and although there is some debate on possible interactions and different notions of valence, broad agreement on a two dimensional model of affective space has been achieved. ⋯ Moreover, these effects even persist in an experiment with discrete emotion conditions when the stimuli are controlled for emotional valence and arousal levels. We interpret this result as evidence for discrete emotion effects in visual word recognition that cannot be explained by the two dimensional affective space account.