Suchergebnisse

This study aims to specify the definitions of two terms, bigraphia and digraphia, and examine how these phenomena appear in post-socialist countries. It is currently a global phenomenon to use two or more writing systems in one country, due to the spread of English and the Internet. Bigraphia means when the function and prestige of two writing systems (or two varieties of one system) are equal. On the other hand, when there is a difference in the function and/or prestige between two writing systems, it is defined as digraphia. The paper examines the combination of writing systems in post-socialist countries such as Russia, Belarus, Serbia, and Uzbekistan. In-digraphia refers to a situation in which variations of one writing system coexist, and out-digraphia refers to a situation in which two different writing systems coexist. A narrower sense of digraphia is observed in Belarus today: Belarusian Cyrillic-Т(BC-T) is used to write Tarashkievitsa and Belarusian Cyrillic-N (BC-N) is used to write Narkamaŭka. Out-digraphia is observed in Serbia and Uzbekistan. In these countries, Cyrillic and Latin scripts are used to write Serbian and Uzbek. Out-digraphia is also confirmed in Russian texts: It is commonly thought that only Cyrillic letters are used to write Russian, but recently the use of the so-called "macaronic alphabet," which is a mix of Cyrillic and Latin letters, has become common.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease characterized by memory loss and the presence of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the patients' brains. In this study, we investigated the alterations in metabolite profiles of the hippocampal tissues from 6, 8, and 12 month-old wild-type (WT) and 5xfamiliar AD (5xFAD) mice, an AD mouse model harboring 5 early-onset familiar AD mutations, which shows memory loss from approximately 5 months of age, by exploiting the untargeted metabolomics profiling. We found that nicotinamide and adenosine monophosphate levels have been significantly decreased while lysophosphatidylcholine (LysoPC) (16:0), LysoPC (18:0), and lysophosphatidylethanolamine (LysoPE) (16:0) levels have been significantly increased in the hippocampi from 5xFAD mice at 8 months or 12 months of age, compared to those from age-matched wild-type mice. In the present study, we focused on the role of nicotinamide and examined if replenishment of nicotinamide exerts attenuating effects on the reduction in dendritic spine density in hippocampal primary neurons from 5xFAD mice. Treatment with nicotinamide attenuated the deficits in spine density in the hippocampal primary neurons derived from 5xFAD mice, indicating a potential role of nicotinamide in the pathogenesis of AD. Taken together, these findings suggest that the decreased hippocampal nicotinamide level could be linked with AD pathogenesis and be a useful therapeutic target for AD. ; This study was financially supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant, funded by the Korean Government (2016R1A2B4012232) and also partly supported by Seoul National University Bundang Hospital Research Fund, South Korea (02–2013-015). HJ.K. received a scholarship from the BK21-Plus Education Program provided by the National Research Foundation of Korea.