The Naturally Occurring YMDD Mutation among Patients Chronically Infected HBV and Untreated with Lamivudine: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Several recent reports have demonstrated that tyrosine (Y)-methionine (M)-aspartic acid (D)-aspartic acid (D) (YMDD) motif mutations can naturally occur in chronic HBV patients without antiviral treatment such as lamivudine therapy. This paper aims to assess the overall spontaneous incidence and related risk factors of YMDD-motif mutations among lamivudine-naïve chronic HBV carriers, so as to provide some clue for clinical treatment of hepatitis B. Methodology/Principal Findings: Chinese and English literatures were searched for studies reporting natural YMDD mutations among untreated chronic HBV patients from 2001 to 2010. The incidence estimates were summarized and analyzed by meta-analyses. Forty-seven eligible articles from eight countries were selected in this review (13 in English and 34 in Chinese). The pooled incidence of YMDD-motif mutation among untreated chronic HBV patients from eight countries was 12.21 % (95 % CI: 9.69%–14.95%). China had an incidence of 13.38 % (95 % CI: 10.90%–16.07%) and seven other countries had an incidence of 9.90 % (95 % CI: 3.28%–19.55%), respectively. Lamivudine therapy would increase the risk of mutations 5.23 times higher than the untreated patients. A higher HBV DNA copy number was associated with increased incidence of natural YMDD mutation. No significant difference was found in YMDD mutation incidence between groups of different gender, age, HBeAg status, patients ’ ALT (alanine aminotransferase) level, and between the groups of HBV genotype B and C. Conclusions: The YMDD-motif mutations can occur spontaneously with a relatively high incidence in CHB patient

Seeing Emotion with Your Ears: Emotional Prosody Implicitly Guides Visual Attention to Faces

Interpersonal communication involves the processing of multimodal emotional cues, particularly facial expressions (visual modality) and emotional speech prosody (auditory modality) which can interact during information processing. Here, we investigated whether the implicit processing of emotional prosody systematically influences gaze behavior to facial expressions of emotion. We analyzed the eye movements of 31 participants as they scanned a visual array of four emotional faces portraying fear, anger, happiness, and neutrality, while listening to an emotionally-inflected pseudo-utterance (Someone migged the pazing) uttered in a congruent or incongruent tone. Participants heard the emotional utterance during the first 1250 milliseconds of a five-second visual array and then performed an immediate recall decision about the face they had just seen. The frequency and duration of first saccades and of total looks in three temporal windows ([0–1250 ms], [1250–2500 ms], [2500–5000 ms]) were analyzed according to the emotional content of faces and voices. Results showed that participants looked longer and more frequently at faces that matched the prosody in all three time windows (emotion congruency effect), although this effect was often emotion-specific (with greatest effects for fear). Effects of prosody on visual attention to faces persisted over time and could be detected long after the auditory information was no longer present. These data imply that emotional prosody is processed automatically during communication and that these cues play a critical role in how humans respond to related visual cues in the environment, such as facial expressions

Checking and bootstrapping lexical norms by means of word similarity indexes

In psychology, lexical norms related to the se- mantic properties of words, such as concreteness and va- lence, are important research resources. Collecting such norms by asking judges to rate the words is very time consuming, which strongly limits the number of words that compose them. In the present article, we present a technique for estimating lexical norms based on the latent semantic analysis of a corpus. The analyses conducted emphasize the technique’s effectiveness for several semantic dimensions. In addition to the extension of norms, this technique can be used to check human ratings to identify words for which the rating is very different from the corpus-based estimate

Long-term surveillance of haematopoietic stem cell recipients with resolved hepatitis B: high risk of viral reactivation even in a recipient with a vaccinated donor

Reactivation of resolved hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is increasingly recognized in patients with severe immunosuppression. We monitored seven patients with pretransplant antibodies to hepatitis B surface antigen (anti-HBs) and hepatitis B core antigen (anti-HBc) for HBV reactivation after allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT). Reverse seroconversion (from anti-HBs to HBsAg) was observed in six recipients occurring 12, 14, 16, 22, 31 and 39 months after allo-HSCT, respectively. The only patient without HBV reactivation had the highest pretransplant anti-HBs titre and died after the shortest follow-up period (25 months). A novel HBV surface mutant (D144G/G145E) was isolated from one recipient of stem cells from a donor vaccinated against HBV. Another surface mutant (P142L/G145R) was detected in a recipient from a non-immune donor. Serum ALT elevation was measured in only two of the six patients with viral reactivation followed by spontaneous clearance of HBsAg in one of them. Antiviral treatment reduced viral load in five patients, but the emergence of YMDD motif polymerase mutations resulted in lamivudine resistance in two patients. In conclusion, the risk of reactivation of a resolved HBV infection is close to 100%, in allogeneic stem cell recipients and vaccination of the donor does not always warrant reliable protection