The number of people with dementia is increasing worldwide and is projected to double every 20 years to 74.7 million by 2030 and 131.5 million by 2050. As of 2001, globally, the number of people with dementia aged 60 years or older was estimated to be 24.3 million, and the prevalence of dementia was 3.9%; therefore, approximately 4.6 million new-onset dementia patients will be diagnosed annually (Ferri et al., 2005). Compared with the 2009 report, the prevalence is increasing in Asia and Africa, especially in low-and middle-income countries. However, the prevalence has declined in Europe and North America. Various studies have been conducted on the development of treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but at present, no effective countermeasures are available. With the increasing number of dementia patients, attention has focused on mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a predementia stage. MCI is a concept proposed by Petersen et al. in 1995, and it is defined as a condition in which cognitive function is lower than expected owing to physiological aging changes, but is not dementia. In MCI, the ability to carry out daily activities

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SummaryCancer cells often exhibit extreme sensitivity to splicing inhibitors. We identified food-derived flavonoids, apigenin and luteolin, as compounds that modulate mRNA splicing at the genome-wide level, followed by proliferation inhibition. They bind to mRNA splicing-related proteins to induce a widespread change of splicing patterns in treated cells. Their inhibitory activity on splicing is relatively moderate, and introns with weak splice sites tend to be sensitive to them. Such introns remain unspliced, and the resulting intron-containing mRNAs are retained in the nucleus, resulting in the nuclear accumulation of poly(A)+ RNAs in these flavonoid-treated cells. Tumorigenic cells are more susceptible to these flavonoids than nontumorigenic cells, both for the nuclear poly(A)+ RNA-accumulating phenotype and cell viability. This study illustrates the possible mechanism of these flavonoids to suppress tumor progression in vivo that were demonstrated by previous studies and provides the potential of daily intake of moderate splicing inhibitors to prevent cancer development.

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