Summary In most clinical laboratories, low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol is usually estimated indirectly with the Friedewald equation or directly with the N-geneous assay. We assessed LDL-cholesterol values obtained by both methods to find an appropriate fasting period and to assess the influence of the energy content of the last meal. Blood samples were taken from 28 healthy volunteers who had consumed a standard meal (107 g of carbohydrate, 658 kcal) followed by a fasting period of 12 and 18 h, or a high-energy meal (190 g of carbohydrate, 1011 kcal) with a fasting period of 12 h. Prolongation of the fasting period from 12 h to 18 h decreased glucose level, but did not decrease triacylglycerol, total cholesterol, or high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. LDL-cholesterol levels measured with the Ngeneous assay did not change (94.0 ± 21.5 to 96.3 ± 19.1 mg/dl). LDL-cholesterol levels calculated with the Friedewald equation were also similar after fasting periods of 12 h (98.5 ± 21.4 mg/dl) and 18 h (99.7 ± 20.2 mg/dl). The high-energy meal did not change the level of LDL-cholesterol measured with the N-geneous assay (96.1 ± 21.2 mg/dl), or the glucose, triacylglycerol, total cholesterol, or HDL-cholesterol level, but LDL-cholesterol levels evaluated from the Friedewald equation (92.6 ± 20.3 mg/dl) became significantly lower. A fasting time longer than 12 h is not necessary to obtain reasonable blood lipid levels. The Friedewald equation gave higher LDL-cholesterol levels than N-geneous assay in young Japanese females who had eaten a low-energy meal, and lower values when they had eaten a high-energy meal. Thus, it may be necessary to pay attention to energy of nigh meal prior to blood withdrawal.

Timing is critical in determining the causal relationship between two events. Motor adaptation relies on the timing of actions and their results for determining which preceding control signals were responsible for subsequent error in the resulting movements. An artificially induced temporal delay in error feedback as short as 50 ms has been found to slow the learning rate of prism adaptation. Recent studies have demonstrated that our sense of simultaneity is flexibly adaptive when a persistent delay is inserted into visual feedback timing of one's own action. Therefore, judgments of "subjective simultaneity" (i.e. whether two events are simultaneous on a subjective basis) do not necessarily correspond to the actual simultaneity of physical events. We evaluated the effects of adaptation to a temporal shift of subjective simultaneity on prism adaptation by examining whether prism adaptation depends on physical timing or subjective timing. We found that after persistently experiencing an additional 100-ms delay in a pointing experiment, psychometric curves of the timing of judgments about the temporal order of touching and visual feedback were shifted by 40 ms, indicating that subjective simultaneity adapted. Next, while maintaining temporal adaptation, participants adapted to spatial displacement caused by a prism with and without an additional temporal delay in feedback. Learning speed was reliably predicted by physical timing but not by subjective timing. These results indicate that prism adaptation occurs independently of awareness of subjective timing and may be processed in primary motor areas that are thought to have fidelity with temporal relations.

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