Carbonyl stress compounds such as glyoxal and methylglyoxal have been recently attracting much attention because of their possible clinical significance in chronic and age-related diseases. A high-performance liquid chromatographic procedure has been developed for the simultaneous quantitation of glyoxal and methylglyoxal in human urine. The assay is based on the reaction of these compounds with 1,2-diamino-4,5-dimethoxybenzene to form fluorescent adducts, which are separated by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography in a total run time of 45 minutes and quantitated fluorometrically using 2,3-pentanedione as an internal standard. Derivatization is performed for diluted urine (100-120 mOsm/kg H2O) under acidic conditions (pH 4.5) at 60 degrees C over a prolonged time (15 h) to maximize the yields. The assay is specific and sensitive enough to analyze urinary levels of glyoxal and methylglyoxal with the within- and between-day relative standard deviations of less than 5%. Urinary levels (mean +/- standard deviation, n = 16) of glyoxal and methylglyoxal in healthy subjects were 4.7 +/- 1.35 microg/mg creatinine, 2.2 +/- 0.65 microg/mg creatinine, respectively, the former being 2 to 3 times more than the latter in every subject. The glyoxal and methylglyoxal levels positively correlated with each other, which may suggest that the levels reflect the individual activity of glyoxalase by which both compounds are detoxified.
Keishibukuryogan (KBG; Guizhi-Fuling-Wan in Chinese) is one of the Kampo (Japanese traditional) medicines used to treat patients with climacteric syndrome. KBG can be used by patients who cannot undergo hormone replacement therapy due to a history of breast cancer. We evaluated whether cytosine-adenine (CA) repeat polymorphism of the estrogen receptor β gene can be a predictor of the beneficial effect of KBG on climacteric syndrome. We also investigated the relationship between CA repeat polymorphism, the patients' profiles, and the therapeutic effect. We found that CA was an SS, SL, or LL genotype according to the number of repeats. We studied 39 consecutive patients with climacteric disorders who took KBG for 12 weeks. The diagnosis of climacteric disorders was made on the basis of the Kupperman index. KBG significantly improved the patients' climacteric symptoms (i.e., vasomotor symptoms in the patients with the LL genotype and melancholia in the patients with the SL genotype). No relationship between the patients' profiles and CA repeat polymorphism was recognized. CA repeat polymorphism could thus be a potential biomarker to predict the efficacy of KBG in climacteric syndrome, and its use will help to reduce the cost of treating this syndrome by focusing the administration of KBG on those most likely to benefit from it.
A novel method for music video recommendation is presented in this paper. The contributions of this paper are twofold. (i) The proposed method constructs a network, which not only represents relationships between music videos and users but also captures multi-modal features of music videos. This enables collaborative use of multi-modal features such as audio, visual, and textual features, and multiple social metadata that can represent relationships between music videos and users on video hosting services. (ii) A novel scheme for link prediction considering local and global structures of the network (LP-LGSN) is newly derived by fusing multiple link prediction scores based on both local and global structures. By using the LP-LGSN to predict the degrees to which users desire music videos, the proposed method can recommend users' desired music videos. The experimental results for a real-world dataset constructed from YouTube-8M show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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