bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Behavioural effects of PNU‐282987 and stress in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease
Authors: Vicens Paloma , Heredia Luis , Torrente Margarita , Domingo José L. 
Published: January 2016

AbstractBackgroundCholinergic deficits play an important role in both cognitive and behavioural alterations in Alzheimer's disease. This study was aimed at evaluating the possible therapeutic role of PNU‐282987 (PNU), an α7 nicotinic cholinergic receptor agonist, and the possible effects of stress in precipitating the onset of behavioural deficits in animals with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease.Methods
B6C3‐Tg mice with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease and wild‐type mice either with or without restraint stress received 0‐ or 1‐mg/kg PNU. At 12 months old, mice were evaluated for activity levels, anxiety‐like levels, and spatial learning and memory.ResultsData did not show the effects of PNU on activity and anxiety‐like behaviour. No effect of PNU on acquisition of a spatial learning task was detected, but a reversal of stress effects on retention in the Morris water maze was observed in transgenic mice.ConclusionsFurther studies are needed in order to better understand the role of α7 nicotinic cholinergic receptor agonists in motor activity, anxiety, and spatial learning and memory and to develop more accurate pharmacological treatment of psychopathological diseases.
Prevalence and correlates of sleep problems among elderly Singaporeans
Authors: Sagayadevan Vathsala , Abdin Edimansyah , Binte Shafie Saleha , Jeyagurunathan Anitha , Sambasivam Rajeswari , Zhang Yunjue , Picco Louisa , Vaingankar Janhavi , Chong Siow A. , Subramaniam Mythily 
Published: January 2016

BackgroundThe current study examined the prevalence and correlates of sleep problems among elderly Singaporeans.MethodsData were taken from the Well‐being of Singapore Elderly study, a cross‐sectional, epidemiological survey conducted among Singapore residents aged 60 years and above (n = 2565). Respondents were screened for sleep problems through a series of questions in the Geriatric Mental State examination. Details on sociodemographic characteristics, physical activity, cognition, disability, chronic physical conditions, and depression were also collected. Logistic regression analysis was used to explore significant associations between sleep problems, sociodemographic characteristics, physical activity, cognition, disability, chronic physical conditions, and depression.ResultsOverall, 13.7% (n = 341) of older adults reported at least one sleep problem. Of those who reported sleep problems, 69.4% experienced sleep interruption at night, 48.9% reported having difficulty falling asleep, 22.3% reported early morning awakening, and 11.4% had all three problems. Elderly with sleep problems were significantly more likely to have a range of chronic physical conditions and depression and were also significantly less likely to be physically active. Older adults with at least one sleep problem reported significantly greater disability compared to those with no sleep problems.ConclusionThe high probability of comorbid chronic conditions as well as higher disability among those with sleep problems makes this an important area of research.
Mirtazapine does not improve sleep disorders in Alzheimer's disease: results from a double‐blind, placebo‐controlled pilot study
Authors: Scoralick Francisca M. , Louzada Luciana L. , Quintas Juliana L. , Naves Janeth O.S. , Camargos Einstein F. , Nóbrega Otávio T. 
Published: January 2016

AbstractAimThe aim of this study was to test the efficacy and safety of mirtazapine in the treatment of sleep disorders in patients with Alzheimer's disease by means of a randomized, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled trial. Measurements were obtained for 7 days before intervention (baseline) and for 2 weeks after the onset of treatment.MethodsAlzheimer's disease patients with sleep disorders (n = 24) received 15‐mg mirtazapine (n = 8) or placebo (n = 16) once daily at 2100 hours for 2 weeks. Patients were evaluated with actigraphy and structured scales before and after intervention. Historical control was employed.ResultsTreatment with mirtazapine or placebo had no effect on cognitive and functional status as assessed by the Mini‐Mental State Examination and the Katz scale, respectively. There were no differences between groups in the frequency or severity of the adverse events reported. Compared with the placebo group, mirtazapine users showed increased daytime sleepiness but no improvement in the duration or efficiency of nocturnal sleep after treatment.ConclusionsThis study showed no significant therapeutic effects of 15‐mg mirtazapine in community‐dwelling Alzheimer's disease patients with sleep disorders. Instead, this study found evidence of worsening of daytime sleep patterns.
How attitude strength and information influence moral decision making: Evidence from event‐related potentials
Authors: Hundrieser Manuela , Stahl Jutta 
Published: January 2016

AbstractMoral judgments are based on complex processing. This study aimed to investigate neural correlates of moral decisions. Participants (N = 32) were asked to express their opinion on various moral issues while ERPs were recorded. After reading texts containing either confirming or contradicting arguments regarding the issues, participants were asked to express their opinion again. A higher N400 amplitude and a higher amplitude of the late positive potential for value‐incongruent words compared to value‐congruent words could be observed. Furthermore, after participants had read conflicting arguments, slower responses and larger N400 differences (value‐incongruent minus value‐congruent) were observed. These results showed that language processing for a moral context is influenced by the subjective value system, and it can be assumed that a demanding cognitive elaboration contributed to the observed RT and N400 priming effects. This is the first ERP study comparing moral judgments before and after reading confirming or conflicting information; it revealed that evaluative reasoning can influence neural processing for moral decisions.
The Motivational Effects of Mission Matching: A Lab‐Experimental Test of a Moderated Mediation Model
Authors: Smith Jason 
Published: January 2016

AbstractScholarly literature finds positive motivational effects of matching workers and missions. However, the psychological mechanisms behind this matching effect have not been explored. This article develops and tests a moderated mediation model of mission matching in which meaningfulness serves as an intervening mechanism that explains the association between mission matching and effort. It also considers how individual differences in prosocial motivation influence the intervening role of meaningfulness. Using a real‐effort laboratory experiment with monetary incentives, the article shows that matched subjects exert more effort than mismatched subjects, that this effect is mediated by increases in meaningfulness, that prosociality moderates the effect of a match on meaningfulness, and that the indirect effect of a match on effort through increases in meaningfulness varies as a function of prosociality. These results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of mission matching and suggest that matching may be particularly important for certain types of workers.
Environmental Protection in the Presence of Unemployment and Common Resources
Authors: Abe Kenzo , Saito Muneyuki 
Published: January 2016

AbstractThis paper examines the effects of an export tax (on a processed resource good), the number of harvesters and an afforestation policy in a small, open economy with urban unemployment. The export tax increases the urban unemployment rate, but improves the quality of the environment. Here, the optimal export tax is lower than the adjusted marginal environmental damage. Reducing the number of harvesters has a similar resource allocation effect to that of an export tax. However, the afforestation policy can resolve the trade‐off between urban unemployment and the quality of the environment and may also improve the welfare of a country.
Collective Leadership, Career Concern, and the Housing Market in China: The Role of Standing Committees
Authors: Gao Nan , Long Cheryl Xiaoning , Xu Lixin Colin 
Published: January 2016

AbstractDespite an emerging literature on political determinants of economic performance, little is known about whether standing committees of the Communist Party, an institution of collective leadership, matter for economic development. Using Chinese provincial‐level panel data, we find that a higher ratio of new members in the standing committee of the local Communist Party is correlated with a higher housing sales/gross domestic product (GDP) ratio. Moreover, more new members in the standing committee are also associated with a lower level of GDP per capita and a lower manufacturing output growth rate. The results on the size of the real estate sector are robust to dealing with the endogeneity of the ratio of new standing committee members. Our findings suggest that career incentives of party leadership affected real estate development at the expense of manufacturing growth in the locality, and that the structure of collective leadership has important economic consequences.
Measuring the Technological Structure of Chinese Imports
Authors: Wei Hao 
Published: January 2016

AbstractThis paper uses the optimal partitioning method of clustering analysis using orderly samples to classify trade goods and analyzes the technological structure of Chinese imports. The results indicate that since 2000, medium–high technology products have made up the majority of China's imported goods, while the shares of medium or higher technology products have decreased and the share of medium–low technology products has increased sharply. The number of imported goods with a comparative advantage in the Chinese market decreased, while the overall comparative advantage of imported goods also declined. China imports different types of products from different countries and regions around the world. The findings suggest that China should increase the import scale of high technology products.
Innovation, Imitation and Intellectual Property Rights in Developing Countries
Authors: Hwang Hong , Wu Jollene Z. , Yu Eden S. H. 
Published: January 2016

AbstractThis paper sets up a vertically related market model in which imitation and innovation are endogenously determined to study the impact of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on less‐developed countries. It shows how a less‐developed country switches from imitation to innovation as it develops. It is also found that the relationship between IPR protection and economic development is U‐shaped. The IPR protection tends to go down and then go up as income rises. This finding also conforms with that in the empirical literature on IPR protection.
The Optimal Privatization Policies under an International Mixed Duopoly
Authors: Ou Ruiqiu , Li Jie , Lu Jing , Guo Chenxu 
Published: January 2016

AbstractThis paper explores the socially optimal privatization policies under the setting of international mixed duopoly. We find that partial privatization is socially optimal under Cournot competition and private leadership competition, whereas full nationalization is socially optimal under public leadership competition. Moreover, the equilibrium social welfare under private leadership competition is higher than that observed under Cournot competition and that observed under private leadership competition, which differs from the findings of Matsumura (). We also show that the endogenous timing game has a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium outcome, under which the government chooses a partial privatization policy, and private leadership competition emerges as the optimal output decision sequence of firms. An important policy implication from this paper is that the government should partially privatize the public firm and facilitate the emergence of private leadership competition in an international mixed market.
Executive Compensation and Legal Investor Protection: Evidence from China's Listed Firms
Authors: Zheng Zhigang , Zhou Li‐An , Sun Yanmei , Chen Chao 
Published: January 2016

AbstractThis paper seeks to relate the increases in executive compensation observed in China to improvement of the legal environment. We build a simple model and demonstrate that improvement in legal investor protection reduces the manager's private benefits of control; in order to make the managerial incentives compatible, some of the forgone private benefits have to be compensated in the form of increased executive pay. Using a large dataset on Chinese listed corporations, we find strong evidence that improvement of the legal environment is significantly associated with both the rise in executive compensation and the reduction in agency costs, which is consistent with our model predictions.
The Impacts of Japanese and US Outsourcing on Chinese Firms
Authors: Ma Jingmei , Ding Yibing , Jia Hongyu 
Published: January 2016

AbstractThis paper investigates the impact of manufacturing outsourcing to China from its two biggest trading partners—the USA and Japan, for the period of 1990–2008. Both a fundamental model and an augmented model are established, using export data of intermediate goods and two subcategories, processed goods and parts and components (P&C). We find that output growth is positively correlated with outsourcing, and outsourcing from the USA and Japan exerts lower effects than the average level. Our results show that Chinese outsourcees not only access higher productivity than their domestic non‐outsourcee counterparts, but also generate spillover effects to the non‐outsourcees. Moreover, outsourcees of Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) gain more technological advantage while outsourcees of US origin act as a more effective external stimulus to increase production of non‐outsourcees in China.
Who's in the Forbes Global 2000? The Role of Home Market, Multinational Firms and Economic Development
Authors: Peng Shi‐Shu , Huang Deng‐Shing , Yang Tzu‐Han , Sun Ying‐Chih 
Published: January 2016

AbstractWe investigate the determinants of the share of very large enterprises that a country has at the industry‐level at the industry‐level, using data from the Forbes Global 2000 across 48 countries and 16 industries in the period of 2004–2010. We find significant and positive evidence for three effects affecting such share: the home market effect (HME), multinational firm effect (MFE) and economic development effect (EDE). A further industry‐specific analysis of the HME suggests that the industry‐level degree of increasing returns to scale may only partly explain the effects being positive without them being different across industries.
The Economics of Taxation in Casino Tourism with Cross‐border Market Power
Authors: Gu Xinhua , Tam Pui Sun , Lei Chun Kwok , Chang Xiao 
Published: January 2016

AbstractThis paper provides a theoretical proof that casino taxation may have great potential as a contributor to tourism efficiency under sufficient market power. We also examine empirical evidence for the economic efficiency of casino tourism in Macao even with a “high” tax owing to geographic market power. Both theory and evidence point to such power as a key factor that affects the ability of a tourism resort to pass along local taxes to gambling visitors. This ability makes all the difference between the good or bad effect of casino taxes on tourism development. The policy implication is that a gaming tax should be lowered to support casino businesses if it is inefficient, but can be raised to extract public revenues if it is efficient.
Fresh Cadres bring Fresh Air? Personnel Turnover, Institutions, and China's Water Pollutions
Authors: Gao Nan , Liang Pinghan 
Published: January 2016

AbstractWeak law enforcement is usually blamed for the dramatic deterioration of the environment in China. Using a panel data covering 287 Chinese prefecture‐cities during 2004–2011, we investigate the role of personnel turnover and institutions in water pollution. We show that water pollution deteriorates with the tenure of incumbent mayors. Mayor turnover and institutional quality are associated with lower pollution. Furthermore, personnel turnover and institutions complement each other in mitigating pollution: the influence of mayor turnover on pollution reduction is larger in the cities endowed with stronger executive constraints. We also suggest some channels through which personnel turnover affects water pollution. In general, we illustrate that the turnover of cadres has only limited and temporary effects in mitigating pollution.
Epidemiology and risk factors for nosocomial bloodstream infections in solid organ transplants over a 10‐year period
Authors: Berenger B.M. , Doucette K. , Smith S.W. 
Published: January 2016

AbstractBackgroundBloodstream infections (BSIs) are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in solid organ transplantation (SOT). We sought to determine the types of nosocomial BSIs and risk factors for them in SOT.MethodsProspectively collected databases of all SOT and nosocomial BSIs occurring at our institution for a 10‐year period were reviewed.ResultsFrom 2003–2012, we observed 157 nosocomial BSI episodes in 2257 SOTs, the majority of which were caused by staphylococci and enterococci (67.5%). The most common sources of BSI were central line, organ space, respiratory, and gastrointestinal. Kidney transplant patients had the lowest risk of acquiring a BSI compared with other SOT types. Lung transplant patients were at increased risk of methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus BSI and heart transplant patients were at increased risk of a Candida albicans BSI, when compared to other organ transplant types. When coagulase‐negative Staphylococcus (CoNS) or C. albicans was isolated, the central line was most often the source. The implementation of central‐line bundles during the study period correlated temporally with a decreased rate of CoNS BSI. Over the 10‐year period, vancomycin‐resistant enterococci became the most common enterococcal BSI. Donor‐positive cytomegalovirus status was associated with an increased risk of BSI, when compared to donor‐negative patients.ConclusionsThis study demonstrates the common sources, risk factors, and causative organisms of BSI, which can guide empiric antibiotic choices, and highlights areas where preventative interventions could be targeted to prevent nosocomial BSI in SOT.
Cerebellar ataxias: β‐III spectrin's interactions suggest common pathogenic pathways
Authors: Perkins Emma , Suminaite Daumante , Jackson Mandy 
Published: January 2016

AbstractSpinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs) are a genetically heterogeneous group of disorders all characterised by postural abnormalities, motor deficits and cerebellar degeneration. Animal and in vitro models have revealed β‐III spectrin, a cytoskeletal protein present throughout the soma and dendritic tree of cerebellar Purkinje cells, to be required for the maintenance of dendritic architecture and for the trafficking and/or stabilisation of several membrane proteins: ankyrin‐R, cell adhesion molecules, metabotropic glutamate receptor‐1 (mGluR1), voltage‐gated sodium channels (Nav) and glutamate transporters. This scaffold of interactions connects β‐III spectrin to a wide variety of proteins implicated in the pathology of many SCAs. Heterozygous mutations in the gene encoding β‐III spectrin (SPTBN2) underlie SCA type‐5 whereas homozygous mutations cause spectrin associated autosomal recessive ataxia type‐1 (SPARCA1), an infantile form of ataxia with cognitive impairment. Loss‐of β‐III spectrin function appears to underpin cerebellar dysfunction and degeneration in both diseases resulting in thinner dendrites, excessive dendritic protrusion with loss of planarity, reduced resurgent sodium currents and abnormal glutamatergic neurotransmission. The initial physiological consequences are a decrease in spontaneous activity and excessive excitation, likely to be offsetting each other, but eventually hyperexcitability gives rise to dark cell degeneration and reduced cerebellar output. Similar molecular mechanisms have been implicated for SCA1, 2, 3, 7, 13, 14, 19, 22, 27 and 28, highlighting alterations to intrinsic Purkinje cell activity, dendritic architecture and glutamatergic transmission as possible common mechanisms downstream of various loss‐of‐function primary genetic defects. A key question for future research is whether similar mechanisms underlie progressive cerebellar decline in normal ageing.
image
Initial clinical evaluation of PET‐based ion beam therapy monitoring under consideration of organ motion
Authors: Kurz Christopher , Bauer Julia , Unholtz Daniel , Richter Daniel , Herfarth Klaus , Debus Jürgen , Parodi Katia 
Published: January 2016

Purpose:Intrafractional organ motion imposes considerable challenges to scanned ion beam therapy and demands for a thorough verification of the applied treatment. At the Heidelberg Ion‐Beam Therapy Center (HIT), the scanned ion beam delivery is verified by means of postirradiation positron‐emission‐tomography (PET) imaging. This work presents a first clinical evaluation of PET‐based treatment monitoring in ion beam therapy under consideration of target motion.Methods:Three patients with mobile liver lesions underwent scanned carbon ion irradiation at HIT and postirradiation PET/CT (x‐ray‐computed‐tomography) imaging with a commercial scanner. Respiratory motion was recorded during irradiation and subsequent image acquisition. This enabled a time‐resolved (4D) calculation of the expected irradiation‐induced activity pattern and, for one patient where an additional 4D CT was acquired at the PET/CT scanner after treatment, a motion‐compensated PET image reconstruction. For the other patients, PET data were reconstructed statically. To verify the treatment, calculated prediction and reconstructed measurement were compared with a focus on the ion beam range.Results:Results in the current three patients suggest that for motion amplitudes in the order of 2 mm there is no benefit from incorporating respiratory motion information into PET‐based treatment monitoring. For a target motion in the order of 10 mm, motion‐related effects become more severe and a time‐resolved modeling of the expected activity distribution can lead to an improved data interpretation if a sufficient number of true coincidences is detected. Benefits from motion‐compensated PET image reconstruction could not be shown conclusively at the current stage.Conclusions:The feasibility of clinical PET‐based treatment verification under consideration of organ motion has been shown for the first time. Improvements in noise‐robust 4D PET image reconstruction are deemed necessary to enhance the clinical potential.