Musical training effect on reading musical notation: evidence from event-related potentials.
Musical training enhances a range of non-musical cognitive functions, including visuospatial abilities. The aim of this study was to explore which event-related potential (ERP) components were enhanced or reduced as a result of musical training. Both electrophysiological and behavioral methods were used to compare musicians and non-musicians in the processing of pitch and duration when reading single musical notes. It was observed that in the early stage of note reading, the musician/non-musician differences emerged in the latency range of the N1 and N2. The N1 component was enhanced; in contrast, the N2 component was reduced in musicians. It is possible that musicians receive auditory meanings from visual music notations, so they therefore did not find it necessary to spend more resources on executing spatial attention than non-musicians do during pitch processing.

title: The written language performance of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Taiwan.
abstract: Poor writing is common in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, the writing performance of children with ADHD has been rarely formally explored in Taiwan, so the purpose of this study was to investigate writing features of children with ADHD in Taiwan. There were 25 children with ADHD and 25 normal children involved in a standardization writing assessment - Written Language Test for Children, to assess their performance at the dictation, sentence combination, adding/deducting redical, cloze and sentence making subtests. The results showed that except for the score of the sentence combining subtest, the score of children with ADHD was lower than the normal student in the rest of the subtests. Almost 60% of ADHD children's scores were below the 25th percentile numbers, but only 20% for normal children. Thus, writing problems were common for children with ADHD in Taiwan, too. First, children with ADHD performed worse than normal children on the dictation and cloze subtests, showing the weaker abilities of retrieving correct characters from their mental lexicon. Second, children with ADHD performed worse on the adding/deducting redical subtest than normal children did. Finally, at the language level, the score of children with ADHD on the sentence combination subtest was not lower than normal children, implicating their normal grammatic competence. It is worth mentioning that Taiwanese children with ADHD ignore the details of characters when they are writing, a finding that is common across languages.

title: Exploring the association between visual perception abilities and reading of musical notation.
abstract: In the reading of music, the acquisition of pitch information depends primarily upon the spatial position of notes as well as upon an individual's spatial processing ability. This study investigated the relationship between the ability to read single notes and visual-spatial ability. Participants with high and low single-note reading abilities were differentiated based upon differences in musical notation-reading abilities and their spatial processing; object recognition abilities were then assessed. It was found that the group with lower note-reading abilities made more errors than did the group with a higher note-reading abilities in the mental rotation task. In contrast, there was no apparent significant difference between the two groups in the object recognition task. These results suggest that note-reading may be related to visual spatial processing abilities, and not to an individual's ability with object recognition.

title: Interaction of pitch and duration processing by non-musicians in reading musical notation.
abstract: To study the relation of pitch and duration processing in reading musical notation, a Stroop-like task was used by 20 non-musicians. A probe display was presented before each target note. Participants were required to process the tonal and metric information of the probe and then to make a match or mismatch decision between probe and target. The target's color informed participants which dimension (pitch or duration) required analysis. The congruity of the irrelevant dimension of the target was manipulated to examine the effect on the relevant dimension. The interference effect of the irrelevant dimension on the relevant dimension was obvious for number of errors and reaction times. This result is consistent with pitch and duration being processed interdependently and reconciles with the theory of dynamic attention.

title: Visual processing of music notation: a study of event-related potentials.
abstract: In reading music, the acquisition of pitch information depends mostly on the spatial position of notes, hence more spatial processing, whereas the acquisition of temporal information depends mostly on the visual features of notes and object recognition. This study used both electrophysiological and behavioral methods to compare the processing of pitch and duration in reading single musical notes. It was observed that in the early stage of note reading, identification of pitch could elicit greater N1 and N2 amplitude than identification of duration at the parietal lobe electrodes. In the later stages of note reading, identifying pitch elicited a greater negative slow wave at parietal electrodes than did identifying note duration. The sustained contribution of parietal processes for pitch suggests that the dorsal pathway is essential for pitch processing. However, the duration task did not elicit greater amplitude of any early ERP components than the pitch task at temporal electrodes. Accordingly, a double dissociation, suggesting involvement of the dorsal visual stream, was not observed in spatial pitch processing and ventral visual stream in processing of note durations.

title: Comparing upper gastrointestinal X-ray and endoscopy for gastric cancer diagnosis in Korea.
abstract: To compare the cost and accuracy of upper gastrointestinal (GI) X-ray and upper endoscopy for diagnosis of gastric cancer using data from the 2002-2004 Korean National Cancer Screening Program (NCSP).



The study population included 1,503,646 participants in the 2002-2004 stomach cancer screening program who underwent upper GI X-ray or endoscopy. The accuracy of screening was defined as the probability of detecting gastric cancer. We calculated the probability by merging data from the NCSP and the Korea Central Cancer Registry. We estimated the direct costs of the medical examination and the tests for upper GI X-ray, upper endoscopy, and biopsy.



The probability of detecting gastric cancer via upper endoscopy was 2.9-fold higher than via upper GI X-ray. The unit costs of screening using upper GI X-ray and upper endoscopy were $32.67 and $34.89, respectively. In 2008, the estimated cost of identifying one case of gastric cancer was $53,094.64 using upper GI X-ray and $16,900.43 using upper endoscopy. The cost to detect one case of gastric cancer was the same for upper GI X-ray and upper endoscopy at a cost ratio of 1:3.7.



Upper endoscopy is slightly more costly to perform, but the cost to detect one case of gastric cancer is lower.

title: Human originated bacteria, Lactobacillus rhamnosus PL60, produce conjugated linoleic acid and show anti-obesity effects in diet-induced obese mice.
abstract: Many previous studies have reported that conjugated linoleic acid could be produced by starter culture bacteria, but the effects of the bacteria were not investigated. Moreover, there was no evidence of the conjugated linoleic acid-producing bacteria having potential health or nutritional effects related to conjugated linoleic acid, including reducing body fat. Here, we investigated the anti-obesity effect of Lactobacillus rhamnosus PL60, a human originated bacterium that produces t10, c12-conjugated linoleic acid, on diet-induced obese mice. After 8 weeks of feeding, L. rhamnosus PL60 reduced body weight without reducing energy intake, and caused a significant, specific reduction of white adipose tissue (epididymal and perirenal). Although the size of epididymal adipocytes was not reduced by L. rhamnosus PL60, apoptotic signals and UCP-2 mRNA levels increased in adipose tissue. Liver steatosis, a well known side effect of CLA, was not observed by L. rhamnosus PL60 treatment; on the contrary it seemed to be normalized. Results showed that the amount of conjugated linoleic acid produced by Lactobacillus rhamnosus PL60 was enough to produce an anti-obesity effect.

title: Controlling hematopoiesis through sumoylation-dependent regulation of a GATA factor.
abstract: GATA factors establish transcriptional networks that control fundamental developmental processes. Whereas the regulator of hematopoiesis GATA-1 is subject to multiple posttranslational modifications, how these modifications influence GATA-1 function at endogenous loci is unknown. We demonstrate that sumoylation of GATA-1 K137 promotes transcriptional activation only at target genes requiring the coregulator Friend of GATA-1 (FOG-1). A mutation of GATA-1 V205G that disrupts FOG-1 binding and K137 mutations yielded similar phenotypes, although sumoylation was FOG-1 independent, and FOG-1 binding did not require sumoylation. Both mutations dysregulated GATA-1 chromatin occupancy at select sites, FOG-1-dependent gene expression, and were rescued by tethering SUMO-1. While FOG-1- and SUMO-1-dependent genes migrated away from the nuclear periphery upon erythroid maturation, FOG-1- and SUMO-1-independent genes persisted at the periphery. These results illustrate a mechanism that controls trans-acting factor function in a locus-specific manner, and differentially regulated members of the target gene ensemble reside in distinct subnuclear compartments.

title: Multiple forms of secretory phospholipase A2 in plants.
abstract: Multiple secretory phospholipase A2 (sPLA2) genes have been identified in plants and encode isoforms with distinct regulatory and catalytic properties. Elucidation of this genetic and biochemical heterogeneity has provided important clues to the regulation and function of the individual enzymes. An increasing body of evidence shows that their lipid products, lysophospholipids and free fatty acids, mediate a variety of cellular responses, including plant growth, development, and responses to stress and defense. This review discusses the newly-acquired information on plant sPLA2s including the molecular and biochemical characteristics, and signaling functions of each isoform.

title: Molecular mechanisms of deguelin-induced apoptosis in transformed human bronchial epithelial cells.
abstract: Increasing evidence has demonstrated that the phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI3K)/Akt signaling pathway plays an important role in cell proliferation, apoptosis, angiogenesis, adhesion, invasion, and migration, functions that are critical to cancer cell survival and metastasis. Increased expression of activated Akt has been observed in the early stages of tobacco-induced lung carcinogenesis. Moreover, blocking the PI3K/Akt pathway specifically inhibits the proliferation of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells, indicating that the PI3K/Akt pathway is a potential target for chemoprevention and therapy in lung cancer. The aim of this work is to study the lung cancer chemopreventive potential of PI3K/Akt inhibitors using an in vitro lung carcinogenesis model. We found that genetic or pharmacologic approaches targeting the PI3K/Akt pathway inhibited the proliferation of premalignant and malignant human bronchial epithelial (HBE) cells. After screening several natural products to identify a potential lung cancer chemopreventive agent, we have found that deguelin, a rotenoid isolated from Mundulea sericea (Leguminosae), specifically inhibits the growth of transformed HBE and NSCLC cells by inducing cell-cycle arrest in the G2/M phase and apoptosis, with no detectable toxic effects on normal HBE cells, most likely due to the agent's ability to inhibit PI3K/Akt-mediated signaling pathways. The specific sensitivity of premalignant and malignant HBE and NSCLC cells to deguelin suggests that this drug could be clinically useful for chemoprevention in early-stage lung carcinogenesis and for therapy in confirmed lung cancer.