A Selleck CBL0137 significant correlation was found in SP NIS patients

with lesional load (R = 0.43, P < 0.01) but not with parenchymal fractions as measures of brain atrophy. A slight increase in serum FGF-2 levels was also found in R-R MS patients during relapse with gadolinium enhancing lesions and in SP patients with disability progression. These findings support the implication of FGF-2 in the pathogenesis of NIS and concur with recent reports of the involvement of FGF receptor signalling in the disruption of myelin production in differentiated oligodendrocytes and in the loss of adult oligodendrocytes and myelin in vivo due to FGF-2. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Reward-based associative learning is mediated by a distributed network of brain regions that are dependent on the dopaminergic system. Age-related changes in key regions of this system, the striatum and the prefrontal cortex, may adversely affect the ability to use reward information for the guidance of behavior. The present study investigated the effects of healthy aging on different components of reward learning, such as acquisition, reversal, effects of reward magnitude, and transfer find more of learning. A group of 30 young ( mean age = 24.2 yr) and a group of 30 older

subjects ( mean age = 64.1 yr) completed two probabilistic reward-based stimulus association learning tasks. Older subjects showed poorer overall acquisition and impaired reversal learning, as well as deficits in transfer learning. When only those subjects who showed evidence of significant learning were considered, younger subjects showed equivalently fast learning irrespective of reward magnitude, while learning curves in older subjects were steeper for second high compared to low

reward magnitudes. Acquired equivalence learning, which requires generalization across stimuli and transfer of learned contingencies to new stimuli, was mildly impaired in older subjects.”
“Disturbance of circadian gene regulation might contribute to behavioral and psychological symptoms in dementia patients. This study was to evaluate the CpG island methylation status on the circadian gene promoters in dementia patients. We conducted a set of methylation specific polymerase chain reaction (mPCR) followed by nucleotide sequencing to analyze the methylation status within the promoters of nine circadian-related genes, including PERI, PER2, PER3, CRY1, CRY2, CLOCK, BMAL1, TIM and CK1 epsilon, in the genomic DNA from the peripheral blood leukocytes of 80 dementia patients and 80 age- and gender-matched controls. A total of seven dementia patients (7/80) had CpG island methylation in the circadian genes and none of the controls had methylation. There were three and four patients had CpG island methylation on the promoters of PERI and CRY1, respectively.