Continuous ingestion of phencyclidine (PCP) in humans produces long-lasting schizophrenic-like cognitive dysfunction. Although a malfunction of dopaminergic and/or glutamatergic neurotransmission is implicated in the etiology of schizophrenia, involvement of the dopaminergic-glutamatergic neurotransmission in the cognitive dysfunction induced by repeated PCP treatment is minor. We demonstrated that mice treated with PCP (10 mg/kg/day s.c.) for 14 days displayed an impairment of latent learning in a water-finding task and of learningassociated phosphorylation of Ca 2ϩ /calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) and NR1 in the prefrontal cortex even after drug withdrawal. The infusion of a CaMKII inhibitor and NR1 antisense oligonucleotide into the prefrontal cortex produced an impairment of latent learning and decrease of learning-associated phosphorylation of CaMKII, which were observed in the PCP-treated mice. Exogenous NMDA-induced CaMKII activation was not observed in slices of the prefrontal cortex prepared from mice treated repeatedly with PCP. The potentiation of NMDA receptor function by the infusion of glycine into the prefrontal cortex ameliorated these impairments in mice treated repeatedly with PCP. The high potassium-stimulated release of dopamine from the prefrontal cortex was less extensive in the PCP-treated than saline-treated mice. The infusion of a dopamine-D1 receptor agonist into the prefrontal cortex attenuated the impairment of latent learning and decrease of learning-associated NR1 phosphorylation in the PCPtreated mice, suggesting a functional linkage between glutamatergic and dopaminergic signaling. These findings indicate that repeated PCP treatment impairs latent learning through a prefrontal cortical dysfunction of NMDA-CaMKII signaling, which is associated with dopaminergic hypofunction.Schizophrenia is characterized by severe and persisting deficits in cognitive functions (Winterer and Weinberger, 2004). Several lines of evidence suggest that the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor is involved in the pathogenesis of schizophrenic cognitive dysfunction. Postmortem studies in patients with schizophrenia have identified altered expression patterns of NMDA receptor subunits (Dracheva et al., 2001) and decreased levels of phosphorylated NR1, an essential NMDA receptor subunit (Emamian et al., 2004) in the prefrontal cortex, which is considered to be the region contributing most to the pathophysiology of schizophrenic

We report the case of a 68-year-old woman with acute thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) that developed after pneumococcal vaccination. She was found in a confusional state with high fever 15 days after vaccination. Laboratory data showed hemolytic anemia and thrombocytopenia, and blood smear showed fragmented erythrocytes. TTP was diagnosed based on the clinical presentation, and was subsequently confirmed by the absence of ADAMTS13 activity and the presence of inhibitor against ADAMTS13 in serum. She was successfully treated using plasma exchange and corticosteroids, and no recurrence has been identified. This appears to represent the first report of TTP following pneumococcal vaccination.

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As the next generation standard of video coding, high efficiency video coding (HEVC) achieves high coding efficiency. The coding unit (CU) was adopted as the processing unit for HEVC to improve the coding efficiency. However, determining the optimal distribution of CU sizes requires lengthy calculation. To reduce the calculation time in intra prediction processing, we developed a method that determines the CU sizes using the variance value of the input image. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces encoding time by about 40-70% compared to that of a conventional HEVC test model.