In order to investigate the changes of serum hyaluronic acid (HA) and laminin (LN) levels and their clinical implication in the patients with bladder tumors, the serum HA and LN levels in 34 patients with bladder tumor and 30 cases of control group were detected by radioimmunoassay before and after operation. The results showed that the serum HA and LN levels in the patients with bladder tumors were significantly higher than those in control group (P<0.01) before operation, and decreased significantly after operation (P<0.05). The serum levels of HA and LN in infiltration tumors were higher than those in superficial tumors (P<0.05). The serum HA and LN levels in patients with lymph node metastasis were higher than those without lymph node metastasis (P<0.01). The investigation revealed that HA and LN might be involved in the malignant biology behavior of bladder tumors and could be used as important markers of assistant diagnosis and condition monitoring.

To investigate the distribution of possible novel mutations from parkin gene in variant subset of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) in China and explore whether parkin gene plays an important role in the pathogenesis of PD, 70 patients were divided into early-onset group and late-onset group; 70 healthy subjects were included as controls. Genomic DNA from 70 normal controls and from those of PD patients were extracted from peripheral blood leukocytes by using standard procedures. Mutations of parkin gene (exon 1–12) in all the subjects were screened by PCR-single strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP), and further sequencing was performed in the samples with abnormal SSCP results, in order to confirm the mutation and its location. A new missense mutation Gly284Arg in a patient and 3 abnormal bands in SSCP electrophoresis from samples of another 3 patients were found. All the DNA variants were sourced from the samples of the patients with early-onset PD. It was concluded that Parkin point mutation also partially contributes to the development of early-onset Parkinson’s disease in Chinese.

To study behavioral character and changes of neuronal activity in the basal ganglia of rat model of levodopa-induced dyskinesia, unilateral 6-hydroxydopamine lesioned rat model of Parkinson disease (PD) was treated with levodopa/benserazide twice daily for 4 weeks and the behavior observed on the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 14th, 21st and 28th day. The animals were sacrificed and immunohistochemical technique was used to measure the changes of Fos expression in the caudate putamen (CPU), globus pallidus (GP) and sensorimotor area of cerebral cortex 2 h after the last treatment. The results showed that pulsatile treatment with a subthreshold dose of levodopa gradually induced abnormal involuntary movement (AIM), including stereotypy (limb dyskinesia, axial dystonia and masticatory dyskinesia) towards the side contralateral to the dopamine-denervated striatum and increased contraversive rotation. The motor pattern of each subtype was highly stereotypic across individual rats, and the proportion of each subtype was not consistent among individual rats. Fos positive nuclei in the CPU and GP were increased by levodopa acute administration, and more remarkably in the CPU, but not in the cerebral cortex. After repeated levodopa treatment, Fos positive nuclei were reduced remarkably in the CPU, but were increased in the GP and cerebral cortex. It was concluded that the neural mechanisms underlying levodopa induced AIM in rat model of PD was very similar to those seen in levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID) in PD patients and MPTP-lesioned monkeys, and increased striatopallidal neuronal activity might be involved in occurrence of LID.

In this study, the mechanism by which Suramin inhibits the replication of epidemic encephalitis B virus was explored to provide a theoretical basis for its further application in clinical practice. After viral infection of HepG2 and IMR-32 cells, different concentrations of Suramin were added to the culture media, and then the cultural supernatants and infected cells were collected 48 h later. For the evaluation of the curative effect, cytopathic effect (CPE), virus titers, the expression of viral protein and viral RNA were determined by Western blot RT-PCR andin vitro RNA synthesis, respectively. At the concentration of 50 μg/ml of Suramin, HepG2 and IMR-32 infected with epidemic encephalitis B virus decreased by 51.8% and 0.03% respectively, as compared with controls. It was suggested that expression of encephalitis B virus proteins NS3 and E was notably reduced by Suramin. This is especially true of E protein. At RNA level, however, no difference in RNA virus was found between Suramin-treated virus and non-treated cells. Our results suggest that Suramin can inhibit viral replication by blocking the production of viral proteins.