Avc Video Enhancer Review
Ena Baccari
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The proper activities of enhancers and gene promoters are essential for coordinated transcription within a cell. Although diverse methodologies have been developed to identify enhancers and promoters, most have tacitly assumed that these elements are distinct. However, studies have unexpectedly shown that regulatory elements may have both enhancer and promoter functions. Here we review these results, focusing on the factors that determine the promoter and/or enhancer activity of regulatory elements. We discuss emerging models that define regulatory elements by accessible DNA and their non-mutually-exclusive abilities to drive transcription initiation (promoter activity) and/or to enhance transcription at other such regions (enhancer activity).
(PROMPT). A short RNA (also known as upstream antisense RNA (uaRNA)) that is transcribed upstream and on the opposite strand from an mRNA transcription start site and is typically degraded by the nuclear exosome. It has many similarities to an enhancer RNA.
Aging is accompanied by cognitive decline, although recent research indicates that the rate of decline depends on multiple lifestyle factors. One of such factors is musical practice, an activity that involves several sensory and motor systems and a wide range of high-level cognitive processes. This paper describes the first systematic review and meta-analysis, to our knowledge, of the impact of musical practice on healthy neurocognitive aging. The inclusion criteria for the review required that studies were empirical works in English or Spanish that they explored the effects of musical practice on older people; they included an assessment of cognitive functions and/or an assessment of brain status; and they included a sample of participants aged 59 years or older with no cognitive impairment or brain damage. This review led to the selection of 13 studies: 9 correlational studies involving older musicians and non-musicians and 4 experimental studies involving short-term musical training programs. The results of the meta-analysis showed cognitive and cerebral benefits of musical practice, both in domain-specific functions (auditory perception) and in other rather domain-general functions. Moreover, these benefits seem to protect cognitive domains that usually decline with aging and boost other domains that do not decline with aging. The origin of these benefits may reside, simultaneously, in the specific training of many of these cognitive functions during musical practice (specific training mechanism), in the improvement of compensatory cognitive processes (specific compensatory mechanism), and in the preservation of general functions with a global influence on others, such as perceptual capacity, processing speed, inhibition and attention (general compensatory mechanism). Therefore, musical practice seems to be a promising tool to reduce the impact of cognitive problems associated to aging.
Copyright: 2018 Romn-Caballero et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
According to certain models of aging, most age-related differences in cognitive measures are associated with changes in a small group of functions. Specifically, there is evidence supporting the role of sensory capacity [8], processing speed [9] and inhibition [10] as possible mediators of the effects of aging on many other cognitive processes. A decline in sensory capacity seems to affect the early stages of processing, while slower processing seems to lead to incomplete later operations and reduce the amount of information available simultaneously [9]. In fact, processing speed acts as a mediator of many age-sensitive functions [11,12], including functions that involve both fluid and crystallized abilities, such as phonological fluency [13] and naming [14]. Moreover, inhibitory mechanisms seem to be central to the efficiency of working memory, limiting the entry of irrelevant information or rejecting irrelevant information that has gained access [10]. Therefore, inhibition could be important for avoiding distractions and also for speech comprehension, memory and flexibility. Finally, the increased complexity of the tasks used to assess all these functions has been found to affect the performance of older individuals more than that of younger ones (i.e., complexity effect) [11]. This effect seems to be mainly due to the decline in high-level processes (e.g., working memory).
This is accompanied by brain changes, as shown by the increase in gray matter volume in perceptual, somatosensory and motor-related regions, as well as in high-level functions areas [53,54]. Additionally, musicians also exhibit benefits in the white matter, such as in the corpus callosum and the arcuate fasciculus, among others [55,56].
Thus, musical practice may be a potential tool for mitigating both the impact of age-related non-pathological cognitive changes as well as the incidence of dementias. However, to our knowledge, no systematic reviews have been conducted so far in the field of aging. The aim of this research was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis in order to compile the most relevant data to date and draw the first conclusions on the impact of musical practice on cognitive and cerebral aging.
To this end, we decided to include studies with both an experimental and correlational design, given their complementarity: experimental methodology involves randomization and thus allows causal relationships to be established; by contrast, correlational designs offer the possibility of analyzing samples with a higher and more extensive level of musical practice over longer periods of time. Unfortunately, few experimental studies exist on this subject. However, these designs provide crucial evidence to clarify issues that are not clearly explained by correlational designs (i.e., whether cognitive improvements are due to practice or, conversely, a better cognitive status leads to a greater involvement in this activity). In addition, experimental studies are also interesting in themselves, as they can elucidate whether a late onset of the activity still provides neurocognitive benefits.
The studies selected in the review met the following criteria: (1) be empirical; (2) explore the effects of musical practice on the sample; (3) include an assessment of cognitive functions and/or an assessment of brain status with a physiological recording and/or neuroimaging technique; (4) include a sample of participants aged 59 years or older with (5) no cognitive impairment or brain damage; and (6) be written in English or Spanish. The age criterion was selected on the basis of the existing evidence that cognitive [4] and cerebral [3] aging occurs most markedly around 60 years of age. We decided to extend a priori this age limit to 59 years in order to cover studies that by convention begin their range at this age.
Coding sheets were created for recording the variables (see S2 File). By using them, basic information, design, sample, outcomes and results were obtained from each of the selected studies. In the correlational studies, the variables related to the musical experience of the sample were also extracted. In the experimental studies, information of musical training programs and the follow-up assessments were collected. Moreover, information regarding the control variables was also collected in both types of studies.
Quality assessment was also performed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias (RoB) for experimental studies [58] and the Risk of Bias in Non-randomized Studies of Interventions (ROBINS-I) for correlational studies [59]. The judgment in the different domains for each study are summarized in Figs 2 and 3.
As most of the studies included multiple neuropsychological measures of the same function, we decided to generate aggregates following the recommendations of Borenstein et al. [65] (see S2 Table). The aggregates were produced with the Agg function of the MAd package in R [66]. In the absence of correlations between the different measures, the default correlation of 0.5 was selected, based on Wampold et al. [67]. The metafor package for R [68] was used to conduct the univariate meta-analyses of the various cognitive functions. Given the great variability of neuropsychological outcomes and other differences between studies (e.g., age, education, musical variables), a random effects model was used for the meta-analyses. The studies used different tests involving different scales, so the standardized mean difference (SMD) and the 95% confidence interval (CI) were used as the summary measure of effect. Significance was defined as the two-sided p-value of
Our research included 9 correlational studies, with a total sample of 1,530 subjects. The main characteristics of these studies are summarized in Table 1. The proportion of men and women was similar in most studies. The presence of neurological or psychiatric disorders and cognitive impairment in the studies was controlled for, and efforts had been made to generate homogeneous groups regarding age, education, IQ, and in certain cases also regarding physical activity [64,71], income [71] and social activity [64]. However, differences between the studies can be observed in age (mean age range: 67 to 74.87 years), level of education (range: 9.4 to 18.3 years of education on average), and in the variables related to musical practice (Table 2).
The review of the included articles provided additional evidence of improvements associated with musical practice in auditory skills (i.e., frequency discrimination, duration, gaps and amplitude modulations [37]) and speech perception (i.e., faster speech sound classification and EEG-based evidence suggesting more efficient and robust coding of speech [73]). However, the advantages in perceptual processing were not observed in Moussard et al. [76] with a visual task (no changes were observed in the early components P1 and N170). This suggests that these advantages are more restricted to the auditory modality at early stages of processing. Moreover, Bidelman and Alain [73] pointed out that increases in P3 amplitude may also indicate possible attentional improvements, implying that the advantages of musicians may extend beyond pre-attentive levels.
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