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Nutrients Apr 2024Bitterness from phenylthiocarbamide and 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) varies with polymorphisms in the gene. Three SNPs form two common (AVI, PAV) and four rare...
Bitterness from phenylthiocarbamide and 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) varies with polymorphisms in the gene. Three SNPs form two common (AVI, PAV) and four rare haplotypes (AAI, AAV, PVI, and PAI). AVI homozygotes exhibit higher detection thresholds and lower suprathreshold bitterness for PROP compared to PAV homozygotes and heterozygotes, and these differences may influence alcohol and vegetable intake. Within a diplotype, substantial variation in suprathreshold bitterness persists, and some AVI homozygotes report moderate bitterness at high concentrations. A second receptor encoded by a gene containing a functional polymorphism may explain this. Early work has suggested that PROP might activate TAS2R4 in vitro, but later work did not replicate this. Here, we identify three SNPs that result in three diplotypes-SLN/SLN, FVS/SLN, and FVS/FVS-which make up 25.1%, 44.9%, and 23.9% of our sample. These haplotypes show minimal linkage disequilibrium with so we examined the suprathreshold bitterness as a function of both. The participants ( = 243) rated five PROP concentrations in duplicate, interleaved with other stimuli. As expected, the haplotypes explained ~29% ( < 0.0001) of the variation in the bitterness ratings, with substantial variation within the haplotypes (AVI/AVI, PAV/AVI, and PAV/PAV). Notably, the diplotypes (independent of the haplotypes) explained ~7-8% of the variation in the bitterness ratings ( = 0.0001). Given this, we revisited if PROP could activate heterologously expressed TAS2R4 in HEK293T cells, and calcium imaging indicated 3 mM PROP is a weak TAS2R4 agonist. In sum, our data are consistent with the second receptor hypothesis and may explain the recovery of the PROP tasting phenotype in some AVI homozygotes; further, this finding may potentially help explain the conflicting results on the diplotype and food intake.
Topics: Humans; Propylthiouracil; Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled; Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; Female; Taste; Male; Adult; Haplotypes; Homozygote; Young Adult; Taste Threshold
PubMed: 38732607
DOI: 10.3390/nu16091357 -
Journal of Clinical Medicine Apr 2024: Sleep and mental health are closely linked, with sleep deprivation increasing the risk of mental health problems in college students. This study aimed to analyze the...
: Sleep and mental health are closely linked, with sleep deprivation increasing the risk of mental health problems in college students. This study aimed to analyze the role of sleep in the mental health status of a sample of Italian freshmen, considering various mental health outcomes and potential interactions between sleep and other relevant factors, such as sociodemographic characteristics, academic experiences, and mental health history. : All freshmen from a medium-sized Italian university were invited to participate in a multidimensional online survey (n = 3756). Sleep quality was assessed through questions on average hours of sleep per night and on satisfaction of perceived sleep quality. Mental health outcomes included psychophysical well-being, psychological distress, substance use, and problematic internet use. Statistical analysis involved multivariate analysis of variance, followed by pairwise comparisons. : The sample (n = 721) exhibited low levels of well-being and a high prevalence of psychological distress (52.1%). Approximately one-third of students (n = 258) were dissatisfied with their sleep quality, and one-fourth (n = 186) reported inadequate sleep (less than 7 h per night). More specifically, 24.4% of students slept on average six hours per night, and 1.4% slept five hours or less. Satisfaction with perceived sleep quality significantly influenced well-being, psychological distress, and cannabis use (η = 0.02). Interaction effects were observed between satisfaction with sleep quality and drop-out intentions (η = 0.01), as well as between satisfaction with sleep quality and history of mental health diagnosis (η = 0.02), both of which were significant for psychological distress and cannabis use. : This study highlights the influence of perceived sleep quality on academic distress among college freshmen, particularly those with higher intentions of leaving university and with a history of mental health diagnosis.
PubMed: 38731154
DOI: 10.3390/jcm13092626 -
Aging Medicine (Milton (N.S.W)) Apr 2024The aim of this study was to investigate the retinal morpho-functional characteristics of patients with neovascular wet age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) treated...
OBJECTIVES
The aim of this study was to investigate the retinal morpho-functional characteristics of patients with neovascular wet age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) treated with intravitreal injection (IV) of aflibercept (AFL).
METHODS
The study was conducted on 35 patients previously diagnosed with type 1 nAMD who received a fixed-dosing regimen of aflibercept injections over 12 months. The goal was to assess trends in visual abilities over time by measuring visual acuity (VA), contrast sensitivity (CS), visual evoked potentials (VEPs), and spectral domain-optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). The same psychophysical, electro-functional, and morphological tests administered at baseline (T0) were repeated 4 to 8 weeks after the last aflibercept injection (Tn), resulting in a total of six examinations.
RESULTS
At Tn, all subjects exhibited improved VA for both far and near distances compared to values detected at T0. Similarly, VEP amplitude and latency values at Tn showed a greater P100 improvement than those observed at T0. Additionally, the CS examination at Tn demonstrated improvement, particularly at high spatial stimulation frequencies. The Tn SD-OCT results highlighted a reduction in macular thickness compared to T0 values.
CONCLUSIONS
This exploratory research indicates that intravitreal injections of AFL, following a fixed-dosing regimen, represent a valuable therapeutic approach for enhancing visual performance. This conclusion is supported by comprehensive statistical analysis of psychophysical, electro-functional, and morphological examinations within the same group of patients with nAMD, as demonstrated for the first time.
PubMed: 38725692
DOI: 10.1002/agm2.12296 -
Frontiers in Sports and Active Living 2024Sport has the well-known power of improving body awareness, self-esteem, and social interaction, thus promoting quality of life and psychophysical wellbeing....
BACKGROUND
Sport has the well-known power of improving body awareness, self-esteem, and social interaction, thus promoting quality of life and psychophysical wellbeing. Specifically referring to adapted disciplines, habitual practice often becomes an effective integration and self-efficacy booster. Among disabilities, visual impairment deeply alters body image perception, autonomy, and environmental/social interaction heavily reducing sport or leisure involvement opportunities. In particular, visually impaired women represent one of the most vulnerable categories to gender and disability discrimination. Moreover, even when congenitally sightless, they perceive social pressure of mainstream beauty ideals, mostly spread by media, comparable to their sighted peers. On these premises and the previously demonstrated psychophysical benefits of Italian blind baseball practice on this target population, the present study aimed to deepen the social and educative potentialities of such adapted sport applying a more sociological research approach.
METHODS
The "red diamonds" event, namely, the first ever female blind baseball match, was the setting for the administration of our structured online survey. In detail, our survey comprised different evaluation tools such as the 18-item Psychological Well-Being Scale, the 12-item Short Form questionnaire, the Dresden Body Image questionnaire, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and sociological model designed questions. Quality of life, psychological wellbeing, self-esteem, body image, and perceived female sport psychological violence were investigated in the whole women sample ( = 33) voluntarily adhering to the game.
RESULTS
Survey results revealed no statistically significant differences between visually impaired players ( = 13; mean age: 32.84 ± 12.05 years) and sighted on-field subjects (i.e., coaches, assistants, and referees; = 20; mean age: 47.15 ± 12.31 years) in almost all the inquired variables, thus remarking the social and functional benefits of adapted sport through the "dual embodiment" and empowerment phenomenon.
CONCLUSIONS
Given that the event was inspired by and performed on the World Day against women violence, our study deepened not only the topic of disability discrimination but also the currently alarming gender-related one. In such a context, the present research might provide interesting cues for further investigations on disability and gender disparities in sports, hence spreading interest in this under-investigated field. In perspective, the "red diamonds" experience could also contribute to inspiring and progressively developing educative tools against any kind of discrimination by promoting integration and social growth through regular sports practice.
PubMed: 38725476
DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2024.1362664 -
The Oncologist May 2024Cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI) refers to a cognitive decline associated with cancer or its treatments. While research into CRCI is expanding, evidence...
OBJECTIVES
Cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI) refers to a cognitive decline associated with cancer or its treatments. While research into CRCI is expanding, evidence remains scattered due to differences in study designs, methodologies, and definitions. The present umbrella review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current evidence regarding the impact of different breast cancer therapies on cognitive functioning, with a particular focus on the interplay among objective cognitive deficits (ie, measured with standardized tests), subjective cognitive concerns, (ie, self-reported), and other mediating psycho-physical factors.
METHODS
The search was made in Pubmed, Embase, and Scopus for articles published until July 2023, following the guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis protocol.
RESULTS
Chemotherapy and endocrine therapy appear consistently associated with CRCI in patients with breast cancer, primarily affecting memory, attention/concentration, executive functioning, and processing speed. Subjective cognitive concerns were often found weakly or not associated with neuropsychological test results, while overall CRCI seemed consistently associated with psychological distress, fatigue, sleep quality, and inflammatory and biological factors.
CONCLUSION
Current evidence suggests that CRCI is common after chemotherapy and endocrine therapy for breast cancer. However, heterogeneity in study designs and the scarcity of studies on more recent treatments such as targeted therapies and immunotherapies, highlight the need for more systematic and harmonized studies, possibly taking into account the complex and multifactorial etiology of CRCI. This may provide valuable insights into CRCI's underlying mechanisms and potential new ways to treat it.
PubMed: 38723166
DOI: 10.1093/oncolo/oyae090 -
Psychological Science May 2024Confidence is an adaptive computation when environmental feedback is absent, yet there is little consensus regarding how perceptual confidence is computed in the brain....
Confidence is an adaptive computation when environmental feedback is absent, yet there is little consensus regarding how perceptual confidence is computed in the brain. Difficulty arises because confidence correlates with other factors, such as accuracy, response time (RT), or evidence quality. We investigated whether neural signatures of evidence accumulation during a perceptual choice predict subjective confidence independently of these factors. Using motion stimuli, a central-parietal positive-going electroencephalogram component (CPP) behaves as an accumulating decision variable that predicts evidence quality, RT, accuracy, and confidence (Experiment 1, = 25 adults). When we psychophysically varied confidence while holding accuracy constant (Experiment 2, = 25 adults), the CPP still predicted confidence. Statistically controlling for RT, accuracy, and evidence quality (Experiment 3, = 24 adults), the CPP still explained unique variance in confidence. The results indicate that a predecision neural signature of evidence accumulation, the CPP, encodes subjective perceptual confidence in decision-making independent of task performance.
PubMed: 38722666
DOI: 10.1177/09567976241246561 -
Journal of Vision May 2024Image differences between the eyes can cause interocular discrepancies in the speed of visual processing. Millisecond-scale differences in visual processing speed can...
Image differences between the eyes can cause interocular discrepancies in the speed of visual processing. Millisecond-scale differences in visual processing speed can cause dramatic misperceptions of the depth and three-dimensional direction of moving objects. Here, we develop a monocular and binocular continuous target-tracking psychophysics paradigm that can quantify such tiny differences in visual processing speed. Human observers continuously tracked a target undergoing Brownian motion with a range of luminance levels in each eye. Suitable analyses recover the time course of the visuomotor response in each condition, the dependence of visual processing speed on luminance level, and the temporal evolution of processing differences between the eyes. Importantly, using a direct within-observer comparison, we show that continuous target-tracking and traditional forced-choice psychophysical methods provide estimates of interocular delays that agree on average to within a fraction of a millisecond. Thus, visual processing delays are preserved in the movement dynamics of the hand. Finally, we show analytically, and partially confirm experimentally, that differences between the temporal impulse response functions in the two eyes predict how lateral target motion causes misperceptions of motion in depth and associated tracking responses. Because continuous target tracking can accurately recover millisecond-scale differences in visual processing speed and has multiple advantages over traditional psychophysics, it should facilitate the study of temporal processing in the future.
Topics: Humans; Motion Perception; Psychophysics; Vision, Binocular; Photic Stimulation; Adult; Depth Perception; Male; Vision, Monocular; Female; Young Adult; Reaction Time
PubMed: 38722274
DOI: 10.1167/jov.24.5.4 -
Journal of Vision May 2024A key question in perception research is how stimulus variations translate into perceptual magnitudes, that is, the perceptual encoding process. As experimenters, we...
A key question in perception research is how stimulus variations translate into perceptual magnitudes, that is, the perceptual encoding process. As experimenters, we cannot probe perceptual magnitudes directly, but infer the encoding process from responses obtained in a psychophysical experiment. The most prominent experimental technique to measure perceptual appearance is matching, where observers adjust a probe stimulus to match a target in its appearance along the dimension of interest. The resulting data quantify the perceived magnitude of the target in physical units of the probe, and are thus an indirect expression of the underlying encoding process. In this paper, we show analytically and in simulation that data from matching tasks do not sufficiently constrain perceptual encoding functions, because there exist an infinite number of pairs of encoding functions that generate the same matching data. We use simulation to demonstrate that maximum likelihood conjoint measurement (Ho, Landy, & Maloney, 2008; Knoblauch & Maloney, 2012) does an excellent job of recovering the shape of ground truth encoding functions from data that were generated with these very functions. Finally, we measure perceptual scales and matching data for White's effect (White, 1979) and show that the matching data can be predicted from the estimated encoding functions, down to individual differences.
Topics: Humans; Psychophysics; Visual Perception; Photic Stimulation
PubMed: 38722273
DOI: 10.1167/jov.24.5.5 -
Frontiers in Pain Research (Lausanne,... 2024This study investigates the impact of combining psychophysical stress, induced by forced swim (FSS), with masseter inflammation on reactive oxygen species (ROS)...
This study investigates the impact of combining psychophysical stress, induced by forced swim (FSS), with masseter inflammation on reactive oxygen species (ROS) production in trigeminal ganglia (TG), TRPA1 upregulation in TG, and mechanical hyperalgesia. In a rat model, we demonstrate that FSS potentiates and prolongs CFA-induced ROS upregulation within TG. The ROS levels in CFA combined with FSS group surpass those in the CFA-only group on days 4 and 28 post-treatment. FSS also enhances TRPA1 upregulation in TG, with prolonged expression compared to CFA alone. Furthermore, CFA-induced mechanical hyperalgesia is significantly prolonged by FSS, persisting up to day 28. PCR array analyses reveal distinct alterations in oxidative stress genes under CFA and CFA combined with FSS conditions, suggesting an intricate regulation of ROS within TG. Notably, genes like , , , and exhibit significant changes, providing potential targets for managing oxidative stress and inflammatory pain. Western blot and immunohistochemistry confirm DUOX1 protein upregulation and localization in TG neurons, indicating a role in ROS generation under inflammatory and stress conditions. This study underscores the complex interplay between psychophysical stress, inflammation, and oxidative stress in the trigeminal system, offering insights into novel therapeutic targets for pain management.
PubMed: 38721062
DOI: 10.3389/fpain.2024.1372942 -
Vision Research Aug 2024We used the psychophysical summation paradigm to reveal some spatial characteristics of the mechanism responsible for detecting a motion-defined visual target in central...
We used the psychophysical summation paradigm to reveal some spatial characteristics of the mechanism responsible for detecting a motion-defined visual target in central vision. There has been much previous work on spatial summation for motion detection and direction discrimination, but none has assessed it in terms of the velocity threshold or used velocity noise to provide a measure of the efficiency of the velocity processing mechanism. Motion-defined targets were centered within square fields of randomly selected gray levels. The motion was produced within the disk-shaped target region by shifting the pixels rightwards for 0.2 s. The uniform target motion was perturbed by Gaussian motion noise in horizontal strips of 16 pixels. Independent variables were field size, the diameter of the disk target, and the variance of an independent perturbation added to the (signed) velocity of each 16-pixel strip. The dependent variable was the threshold velocity for target detection. Velocity thresholds formed swoosh-shaped (descending, then ascending) functions of target diameter. Minimum values were obtained when targets subtended approximately 2 degrees of visual angle. The data were fit with a continuum of models, extending from the theoretically ideal observer through various inefficient and noisy refinements thereof. In particular, we introduce the concept of sparse sampling to account for the relative inefficiency of the velocity thresholds. The best fits were obtained from a model observer whose responses were determined by comparing the velocity profile of each stimulus with a limited set of sparsely sampled "DoG" templates, each of which is the product of a random binary array and the difference between two 2-D Gaussian density functions.
Topics: Humans; Motion Perception; Sensory Thresholds; Psychophysics; Photic Stimulation; Discrimination, Psychological; Space Perception; Adult
PubMed: 38718618
DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2024.108422