Clinical background Brain-derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) as a growth factor is part to the family of neurotrophins. It is a central mediator of stress effects to the neuronal plasticity and links stress and affective disorders as well as somatic diseases. The neurotrophic functions of BDNF influence the survival of neurons und thereby important functions as learning, memory, appetite and sl...

Introduction: Despite significant progress in understanding pain control mechanism, there are numerous questions about central nervous mechanisms underlying stress-induced analgesia. The rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM) in the brainstem integrates a variety of functions, including pain modulation and pain perception. In the present study, we investigated the effect of temporary inactivatio...

Toona sinensis leaf (TSL) is commonly used as a vegetable and in spice in Asia. In this study, feeding with aqueous extract of TSL (TSL-A) alleviated oxidative stress and recovered the motility and functions of sperm in rats under oxidative stress. Protein expressions in testes identified by proteomic analysis and verified by Western blot demonstrated that TSL-A not only downregulated the level...

Erythrocytes are very susceptible to oxidative stress, having a high content of intracellular oxygen and hemoglobin. In the present study, exposure to oxidative stress resulted in a significant impairment of erythrocyte membrane functions, such as deformability and anion exchange. Band 3 protein, also known as anion exchanger-1, plays an important role in these two functions. We show that oxida...

Extensive studies have reported cognitive abnormalities in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Another line of evidence suggests that stress also affects cognitive functions. In this study, we investigated whether there were associations between stress hormones and cognitive functions in ASD and typically developing (TD) children. Cognitive functions in ASD and...

Abstract Nuclear stress (or sentence stress) as a prosodic feature marks information flow in spoken English, and has received some treatment the linguistics literature, most notably pragmatics, but less so newer phonological paradigms. Current theories might shed light on this feature, such Optimality Theory (OT) cognitive grammar (CG). This paper compares potential insights likely predictions ...

We introduce a parametrized family of energy/stress functions useful for proximity analysis, nonlinear dimension reduction, and graph drawing. The functions are inspired by the physics intuitions of attractive and repulsive forces common in graph drawing. Their minimization generates low-dimensional configurations (embeddings, graph drawings) whose interpoint distances match input distances as ...

For several elasticity problems, solution representations for the displacements and stresses are available. The solution representations are given in terms of “arbitrary” complex valued functions. For any choice of the complex functions, the governing differential equations are automatically satisfied. Complex solution representations are therefore useful for applications of the Trefftz method....