Previous studies have revealed changed functional connectivity patterns between brain areas in chess players using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). However, how to exactly characterize the voxel-wise whole brain functional connectivity pattern changes in chess players remains unclear, which could provide more convincing evidence for establishing the relationship between longterm chess practice and brain function changes. In this study, we employed newly developed whole brain functional connectivity pattern homogeneity (FcHo) method to identify the voxel-wise changes of functional connectivity patterns in 28 chess master players and 27 healthy novices. Seed-based functional connectivity analysis was used to identify the alteration of corresponding functional couplings. FcHo analysis revealed signi cantly increased whole brain functional connectivity pattern similarity in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior middle temporal gyrus (aMTG), primary visual cortex (V1), and decreased FcHo in thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players. Resting-state functional connectivity analyses identi ed chess players showed decreased functional connections between V1 and precentral gyrus. Besides, a linear support vector machine (SVM) based classi cation achieved an accuracy of 85.45%, a sensitivity of 85.71% and a speci city of 85.19% to differentiate chess players from novices by leave-one-out cross-validation. Finally, correlation analyses revealed that the mean FcHo values of thalamus were signi cantly negatively correlated with the training time. Our ndings provide new evidences for the important roles of ACC, aMTG, V1, thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players and indicate that long-term professional chess training may enhance the semantic and episodic processing, e ciency of visual-motor transformation, and cognitive ability.

Thyroid autoimmunity (TAI) triggered by genetic and epigenetic variation occurs mostly in women of reproductive age. TAI is described mainly by positivity of anti‐thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPO‐Ab) and/or thyroglobulin antibody (TG‐Ab). TPO‐Ab, but not TG‐Ab, was suggested to be associated with pregnancy outcome in euthyroid women undergoing assisted reproductive technology (ART), but their results are conflicting. This meta‐analysis was performed to decide whether the presence of TPO‐Ab—in a concentration dependent manner—correlates with the success of ART. A systematic literature search was performed in the PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE databases for relevant articles published from January 1999 to April 2022, and these studies focused on the effect of TAI on pregnancy outcomes of women who underwent in vitro fertilization, intracytoplasmic sperm injection and intrauterine insemination and met the inclusion criteria: (i) the studies were prospective or retrospective study; (ii) all patients undergoing ART were tested for thyroid‐related antibodies; (iii) the assessed ART outcomes included miscarriage rate (MR) or delivery rate (DR). The exclusion criteria were: (i) female congenital uterine malformation, chromosomal diseases and other infectious diseases; (ii) overt hypothyroidism or pre‐existing thyroid disease; (iii) thrombus tendency. We divided the included patients into three groups according to the TPO‐Ab threshold they defined: (i) TPO‐Ab (−), threshold <34 IU/mL; (ii) TPO‐Ab‐34, threshold >34 IU/mL; (iii) TPO‐Ab‐100, threshold >100 IU/mL. We then extracted necessary relevant data, including MR and DR. Egger's test was used to evaluate the risk of publication bias. This meta‐analysis included a total of 7 literatures involving 7466 patients with TAI (−) and 965 patients with TAI (+) and revealed that there was no significant difference between group TPO‐Ab‐34 and group TPO‐Ab (−) in MR [risk ratio (RR): 0.61 (0.35, 1.08), p = 0.09] and DR [RR: 0.97 (0.83, 1.13), p = 0.69]. By contrast, compared to TPO‐Ab (−) group, TPO‐Ab‐100 patients showed markedly higher MR [RR: 2.12 (1.52, 2.96), p = 0.0046], and lower DR [RR: 0.66 (0.49, 0.88), p < 0.0001] with high degree of statistical significance. This meta‐analysis suggests that, for euthyroid patients, high level of TPO‐Ab (>100 IU/mL) could adversely influence the pregnancy outcome of ART.

Blau syndrome (BS) is a rare genetic immune disease which commonly presents in childhood. Currently, the miss‐rate of BS diagnosis is very high, and an effective clinical management of BS has not been well established. This case report depicts a 54‐year‐old male Chinese patient presenting with hand malformation, fever, skin rash and joint pain. His diagnosis was ultimately confirmed according to typical medical history and genetic analysis. This case report will further help clinicians to be aware of this rare clinical entity for correct diagnosis and proper treatment.

Previous studies have revealed changed functional connectivity patterns between brain areas in chess players using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). However, how to exactly characterize the voxel-wise whole brain functional connectivity pattern changes in chess players remains unclear, which could provide more convincing evidence for establishing the relationship between long-term chess practice and brain function changes. In this study, we employed newly developed whole brain functional connectivity pattern homogeneity (FcHo) method to identify the voxel-wise changes of functional connectivity patterns in 28 chess master players and 27 healthy novices. Seed-based functional connectivity analysis was used to identify the alteration of corresponding functional couplings. FcHo analysis revealed significantly increased whole brain functional connectivity pattern similarity in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior middle temporal gyrus (aMTG), primary visual cortex (V1), and decreased FcHo in thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players. Resting-state functional connectivity analyses identified chess players showed decreased functional connections between V1 and precentral gyrus. Besides, a linear support vector machine (SVM) based classification achieved an accuracy of 85.45%, a sensitivity of 85.71% and a specificity of 85.19% to differentiate chess players from novices by leave-one-out cross-validation. Finally, correlation analyses revealed that the mean FcHo values of thalamus were significantly negatively correlated with the training time. Our findings provide new evidences for the important roles of ACC, aMTG, V1, thalamus and precentral gyrus in chess players and indicate that long-term professional chess training may enhance the semantic and episodic processing, efficiency of visual-motor transformation, and cognitive ability.