Search

Objectives: Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have become increasingly popular for treating various physical and mental disorders. An increase in mindfulness levels through the teaching of mindfulness meditation is the most well-studied mechanism of MBIs. Recent studies, however, suggest that an increase in mindfulness is also observed in physical or psychosocial interventions not explicitly labeled as MBIs, or what the authors call non-MBIs. The authors aimed to review what non-MBIs can increase mindfulness levels despite not explicitly teaching mindfulness meditation. Design: The authors conducted a literature search for studies that included a non-MBI study arm measuring pre- and postintervention mindfulness levels using one of the following eight validated self-reported mindfulness questionnaires: Five-Faceted Mindfulness Questionnaire, Mindful Awareness and Attention Scale, Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, Toronto Mindfulness Scale, Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale, Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills, Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure, and Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised. The authors identified 69 non-MBI study arms from 51 independent studies of the non-MBI itself or as active controls of an MBI under investigation. The authors documented or calculated, if not provided, effect sizes (ES) for changes in mindfulness levels following these interventions. Results: Among the 69 non-MBI arms, 36 showed no effect for change in mindfulness (ES 1.3) for change in mindfulness. Conclusions: Analysis of the characteristics of non-MBIs with significant increases in mindfulness levels suggested some commonalities between MBIs and non-MBIs, shedding light on a spectrum of mindfulness-related interventions and the possibility that there are many roads to developing mindfulness.

Point-of-care (POC) testing has become widely used in clinical analysis because of its speed and portability; however, POC tools, such as lateral flow assays, suffer from low specificity, unclear readouts, and susceptibility to environmental and user errors. Herein, we report an ELISA-based competitive volumetric bar-chart chip (CV-chip) that eliminates these limitations. The CV-chip displays the readout in the form of ink bar charts based on direct competition between gases generated by the sample and the internal control. By employing a “competition mode”, this platform decreases the potential influence of background resulting from environmental factors and provides visually clear positive or negative results without the requirement of calibration. In addition, the on-chip comparison enables the device to distinguish imperceptible differences (less than 1.3-fold) in human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) concentrations that are near the cutoff value for pregnancy (~1.4 ng/mL). We also utilized the ELISA-based CV-chip to successfully detect biomarkers from cancer cells. As a proof-of-concept application in a clinical setting, the CV-chip was employed to evaluate the status of drugs of abuse in 18 patients. For six different drugs, zero false-positive and very few false-negative (

Introduction Sumoylation is involved in nucleolus-nucleoplasm transport of DNA topoisomerase I (topo I), which may associate with changes of cellular and topo I functions. Skin fibroblasts of patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc) exhibit profibrotic cellular changes. The aims of this study were to examine the catalytic function and sumoylation of topo I in the nuclei of SSc fibroblasts, a major cell type involved in the fibrotic process. Methods Eleven pairs of fibroblast strains obtained from nonlesional skin biopsies of SSc patients and age/sex/ethnicity-matched normal controls were examined for catalytic function of nuclear topo I. Immunoprecipitation (IP)-Western blots were used to examine sumoylation of fibroblast topo I. Real-time quantitative RT-PCR was used to measure transcript levels of SUMO1 and COL1A2 in the fibroblasts. Results Topo I in nuclear extracts of SSc fibroblasts generally showed a significantly lower efficiency than that of normal fibroblasts in relaxing equivalent amounts of supercoiled DNA. Increased sumoylation of topo I was clearly observed in 7 of 11 SSc fibroblast strains. Inhibition of SUMO1 with SUMO1 siRNA improved the catalytic efficiency of topo I in the SSc fibroblasts. In contrast, sumoylation of recombinant topo I proteins reduced their catalytic function. Conclusions The catalytic function of topo I was decreased in SSc fibroblasts, to which increased sumoylation of topo I may contribute.