OBJECTIVE:To investigate an association between the metabolic syndrome (MS) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) of normal ranges. DESIGN: A population-based cross-sectional survey in three rural communities, South Korea. SUBJECTS: A total of 1248 men and 2157 women aged 30 y and older. MEASUREMENTS: Body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, fasting blood lipid and glucose, resting blood pressure, and ALT. RESULTS: ALT and BMI increased with an addition of the MS components. A consistent association between ALT more than 15 IU/l and the MS was found in both sexes, independently of age, education, BMI, smoking, alcohol drinking, and sedentary life style. The odds ratios for the MS in the highest quintiles of ALT were 7.1-fold higher than the reference quintile in men and 2.1-fold higher in women. The likelihood ratio tests for trend were also significant with ALT increments (Po0.001 for trend). CONCLUSION: The MS is significantly associated with the higher quintiles of normal ALT in both genders. ALT could be a sensitive marker of hepatic dysfunction associated with the MS, even in the range below the current limit.

Apicidin is a fungal metabolite shown to exhibit anti-proliferative, anti-invasive, and anti-inflammatory properties by the inhibition of histone deacetylase (HDAC). However, the effects of apicidin on the maturation and immunostimulatory function of dendritic cells (DCs) remain unknown. In this study, we investigated whether apicidin modulates surface molecule expression, cytokine production, endocytosis capacity, and underlying signaling pathways in murine bone marrow-derived DCs. We observed that apicidin significantly attenuated surface molecule expression in LPS-stimulated DCs, suppressed production of interleukin (IL)-12 and proinflammatory cytokines (IL-6 and TNF-alpha) by DCs, and reduced IFN-gama production by T cells. The apicidin-treated DCs were found to be highly efficient in antigen capture via mannose receptor-mediated endocytosis. Apicidin also inhibited LPS-induced MAPK activation and NF-kB nuclear translocation in DCs. Moreover, the apicidin-treated DCs were incapable of inducing Th1 responses and normal cell-mediated immune responses. These novel findings not only provide new insights into the immunopharmacological role of apicidin in terms of its effects on DCs, but also broaden current perspectives of the immunopharmacological functions of apicidin, and have implications for the development of therapeutic adjuvants for the treatment of DC-related acute and chronic diseases.

Learning environmental regularities allows us to make predictions and guide behavior. Growing evidence of location probability learning (LPL) has shown that the statistical regularity of target locations affects spatial attention allocation. However, past studies on LPL have mostly focused on adults’ learning. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of this learning, we investigated the effect of target location probability on 5- to 9-year-old children’s visual search in comparison with that of adults. Both children and adults responded faster when the target appeared in the high probability “rich” quadrant than in the low probability “sparse” quadrants of the search space. This attentional bias toward the rich quadrant persisted even when the target was equally likely to appear in all four quadrants. Importantly, the magnitude of the bias was constant across various ages of participants and did not depend on individual differences in executive functions. Taken together, these results provide novel and converging evidence that implicit statistical learning of target locations occurs early in development and remains stable until early adulthood, which is a distinct developmental pattern from explicit goal-driven spatial attention learning.