The directional selectivity of retinal ganglion cell responses represents a primitive pattern recognition that operates within a retinal neural circuit. The cellular origin and mechanism of directional selectivity were investigated by selectively eliminating retinal starburst amacrine cells, using immunotoxin-mediated cell targeting techniques. Starburst cell ablation in the adult retina abolished not only directional selectivity of ganglion cell responses but also an optokinetic eye reflex derived by stimulus movement. Starburst cells therefore serve as the key element that discriminates the direction of stimulus movement through integrative synaptic transmission and play a pivotal role in information processing that stabilizes image motion.

Bilateral CSDH was an independent predictor for the recurrence of CSDH. Antiplatelet or anticoagulant drugs might facilitate the growth of CSDH. These results may help to identify patients at high risk for the recurrence of CSDH.

No abstract

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common brain-imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), hypertension being the main known risk factor. Here, we identify 27 genome-wide loci for WMH-volume in a cohort of 50,970 older individuals, accounting for modification/confounding by hypertension. Aggregated WMH risk variants were associated with altered white matter integrity (p = 2.5×10-7) in brain images from 1,738 young healthy adults, providing insight into the lifetime impact of SVD genetic risk. Mendelian randomization suggested causal association of increasing WMH-volume with stroke, Alzheimer-type dementia, and of increasing blood pressure (BP) with larger WMH-volume, notably also in persons without clinical hypertension. Transcriptome-wide colocalization analyses showed association of WMH-volume with expression of 39 genes, of which four encode known drug targets. Finally, we provide insight into BP-independent biological pathways underlying SVD and suggest potential for genetic stratification of high-risk individuals and for genetically-informed prioritization of drug targets for prevention trials.

We focused on the impact of postoperative infection on long-term survival after potentially curative resection for gastric cancer. Postoperative surgical and medical complications have been implicated as a negative predictor of long-term outcome in various malignancies. However, there have been no published reports assessing the impact of complications arising from postoperative infection on survival in gastric cancer. We studied a population of 1,332 patients who underwent curative resection for gastric cancer. These patients were divided into two groups based on the occurrence (141 patients, 10.6%) or absence (1,191 patients, 89.4%) of postoperative complications due to infection. We investigated the demographic and clinicopathological features of each patient with and without postoperative complications from infection, and thereby the impact of postoperative infection on long-term survival. Patients with postoperative infection had significantly higher frequency of males, upper side tumor location, and total gastrectomy as a surgical procedure, more advanced stage of gastric cancer, and greater age compared with those without postoperative infection. Patients with complications due to postoperative infection had significantly more unfavorable outcome compared with those patients without postoperative infection. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that age, preoperative comorbidity, blood transfusion, tumor depth, nodal involvement, and postoperative infection correlated with overall survival. We conclude that postoperative complications from infection are a predictor of adverse clinical outcome in patients with gastric cancer. However, further immunological study and prospective trials are necessary to confirm the biological significance of these findings.