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BACKGROUND Because of their cancer and treatment adverse effects, most pediatric oncology patients will experience 1 or more symptoms at one time that can seriously affect their quality of life. Because these children are attached to parents, their symptom burden directly influences the parental stress level and parental interpretations of their children's quality of life. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to examine the association between child-reported symptom burden and the pediatric quality of life reported by children with cancer and their parents, and whether parental perceived stress mediates these relationships. METHODS In a cross-sectional design, convenience sampling was used to recruit 80 parent-child dyads. Advanced statistical methods were adopted to analyze the mediating effects of parental stress between children's symptom burden and their quality of life. RESULTS The results revealed that parental stress was the mediator in the relationship between child-reported symptom burden and children's quality of life reported by parents. The results also showed that parental stress was not a mediator in the relationship between child-reported symptom burden and their quality of life. This underscored the differences in interpretations of quality of life reported by children and their parents. CONCLUSION Children's symptom burden is an important factor in predicting parental stress level and the quality of life reported by the children. Children's voice should be incorporated whenever possible. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE The knowledge gained from this study will facilitate intervention development to enhance parents' abilities in stress management and symptom management for their children with the support of the nursing profession.

Background Default-mode network (DMN) plays a key role in the pathophysiology of obsessive−compulsive disorder (OCD). However, the network homogeneity (NH) of DMN in OCD remains equivocal. Objective This study aimed to investigate abnormalities in the NH of the DMN at rest and the correlation between the NH of DMN and clinical variables in patients with OCD. Methods This study used the independent component analysis and unbiased hypothesis-driven NH method to analyze the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data of 40 drug-naive patients with OCD and 40 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy controls (HCs). Results Patients with OCD exhibited decreased NH values in the left ventral medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)/precuneus (PCu) compared with HCs. Furthermore, analyses of receiver operating characteristic curves indicated that the decreased NH values in the right PCC/PCu may be used as a candidate neuroimaging marker to distinguish patients with OCD from HCs. Conclusion These findings contribute new evidence of the participation of the altered NH of the DMN in the pathophysiology of OCD. Trial Registration Study on the mechanism of brain network in obsessive-compulsive disorder with multi-model magnetic resonance imaging (ChiCTR-COC-17013301).

Exosomes contain a variety of biological active substances such as proteins, miRNAs, lncRNAs and lipids, and exosomes from different cells play different biological functions. Exosomes, as a carrier, are involved in many pathological processes such as nerve injury and repair, vascular regeneration, immune response, and fibrosis formation. It plays an important role in the treatment of eye diseases such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and keratitis. This paper reviews the research progress of exosomes in various diseases in vivo, which provides a new way for the treatment of eye diseases.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Type 2 diabetes is associated with an increased risk of dementia. This study investigated the global connectivity patterns in the brains of patients with type 2 diabetes by using a functional MR imaging technique. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Forty patients and 43 age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy controls underwent resting-state functional imaging in a 3T MR imaging unit. Degree centrality, a commonly used measurement of global connectivity, was computed for a full-brain exploration of the regions influenced by type 2 diabetes. We then examined the functional connectivity of each region by using the seed-based approach. Finally, voxelwise correlation analyses were performed to explore the relationship among the connectivity changes, cognitive performance, and diabetes-related variables. RESULTS: Patients exhibited decreased degree centrality in the left lingual gyrus and increased centrality in the right insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (corrected P CONCLUSIONS: This preliminary study shows that network connectivity is altered in patients with type 2 diabetes, which may provide critical insight into the neural substrate of diabetes-related cognitive decline.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients have difficulty in switching between obsessive thought and compulsive behavior, which may be related to the dysfunction of the salience network (SN). However, little is known about the changes in intra- and inter- intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) of the SN in patients with OCD. In this study, we parceled the SN into 19 subregions and investigated iFC changes for each of these subregions in 40 drug-naive patients with OCD and 40 healthy controls (HCs) using seed-based functional connectivity resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). We found that patients with OCD exhibited decreased iFC strength between subregions of the SN, as well as decreased inter-network connectivity between SN and DMN, and ECN. These findings highlight a specific alteration in iFC patterns associated with SN in patients with OCD and provide new insights into the dysfunctional brain organization of the SN in patients with OCD.

Neuroimaging studies have shown structural and functional abnormalities in parts of the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) brain circuitry in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, little is known about changes in the interhemispheric functional homotopy in the resting-state in OCD. This study used a voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) approach combined with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate changes in interhemispheric functional homotopy in 60 OCD patients and 60 healthy controls. Compared with the healthy controls, the OCD patients showed decreased VMHC values in the thalamus. The results suggest that changes in functional homotopy in the CSTC circuitry may be involved in the pathophysiologic mechanism of OCD. Our findings provide new evidence of abnormalities in the CSTC circuitry in OCD.

Objectives: Although cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), the treatment mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study aimed to investigate the effects of CBT on changes in the intrinsic whole-brain functional network of OCD patients. Materials and Methods: Twenty drug-naive and noncomorbid OCD patients were recruited, and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed before and after 12 weeks of CBT. Moreover, 20 healthy controls were scanned twice with a 12-week interval. A graph-theory degree centrality (DC) approach and functional connectivity method were used to analyze the whole-brain functional network hub and connectivity changes in OCD patients before and after CBT treatment. Results: A significant group × time interaction on DC was found in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); the DC in the left DLPFC was significantly reduced after CBT treatment. Resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between the left DLPFC and right orbitofrontal cortex was increased in the OCD patients at baseline, and normalized after CBT treatment. RSFC changes between the left DLPFC and default mode network (DMN) positively correlated with changes in clinical symptoms in OCD patients. Conclusions: These findings suggest that CBT can modulate changes in intrinsic functional network hubs in the cortico–striato–thalamo-cortical circuit in OCD patients. Cognitive control network and DMN connectivity may be a potential imaging biomarker for evaluating CBT treatment for OCD.

In order to investigate whether changes in the accounting system of mandatory significantly improve the quality of accounting earnings of listed companies, this paper uses empirical research methods and takes A-shares listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen manufacturing industry in the year of 2004-2009 as samples to analyze. The results show that with the constant reform and improvement of Chinese accounting system, the earnings quality of a share shows a significant upward trend on the whole, which demonstrates the changes in the accounting system can promote the earning quality to some extent. At the same time the research discover also shows that simple changes in accounting standards does not improve the quality of accounting information, unless it is accompanied by supporting the strong legal and enforcement mechanisms.

In this study, we explored different spontaneous functional connectivity patterns between the anterior prefrontal cortex and other brain regions in nonmedicated patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder in a resting state, and examined the relationship between the abnormal spontaneous functional connectivity patterns of the anterior prefrontal cortex and clinical symptoms in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Twenty nonmedicated patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and 20 sex-matched and age-matched healthy individuals underwent resting state functional MRI scanning. Compared with the healthy controls, significantly increased positive functional connectivity with the right anterior prefrontal cortex was observed in the right insula and the middle cingulate cortex in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Our findings suggest that abnormal intrinsic or spontaneous functional connectivity in the cognitive control system in a resting state may underlie the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Spontaneous brain activity or off-line activity after memory encoding is associated with memory consolidation. A few recent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) studies indicate that the RS-fMRI could map off-line memory consolidation effects. However, the gene effects on memory consolidation process remain largely unknown. Here we collected two RS-fMRI sessions, one before and another after an episodic memory encoding task, from two groups of healthy young adults, one with apolipoprotein E (APOE) e2/e3 and the other with APOE e3/e4. The ratio of regional homogeneity (ReHo), a measure of local synchronization of spontaneous RS-fMRI signal, of the two sessions was used as an index of memory-consolidation. APOE e3/e4 group showed greater ReHo ratio within the medial temporal lobe (MTL). The ReHo ratio in MTL was significantly correlated with the recognition memory performance in the APOE e3/e4 group but not in e2/e3 group. Additionally, APOE e3/e4 group showed lower ReHo ratio in the occipital and parietal picture-encoding areas. Our results indicate that APOE e3/e4 group may have a different off-line memory consolidation process compared to e2/e3 group. These results may help generate future hypotheses that the off-line memory consolidation might be impaired in Alzheimer’s disease.

Resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) has been drawing more and more attention in recent years. However, a publicly available, systematically integrated and easy-to-use tool for RS-fMRI data processing is still lacking. We developed a toolkit for the analysis of RS-fMRI data, namely the RESting-state fMRI data analysis Toolkit (REST). REST was developed in MATLAB with graphical user interface (GUI). After data preprocessing with SPM or AFNI, a few analytic methods can be performed in REST, including functional connectivity analysis based on linear correlation, regional homogeneity, amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF), and fractional ALFF. A few additional functions were implemented in REST, including a DICOM sorter, linear trend removal, bandpass filtering, time course extraction, regression of covariates, image calculator, statistical analysis, and slice viewer (for result visualization, multiple comparison correction, etc.). REST is an open-source package and is freely available at http://www.restfmri.net.