We examined whether or not extra-corporeal circulation influences autonomic nervous system function in patients with chronic kidney disease by recording a photoplethysmogram for 10 minutes, just before and after starting hemodialysis. The subjects included 14 normal volunteers and 14 dialysis patients with chronic kidney disease (7 diabetics and 7 non-diabetics). The psychosomatic symptoms and anxiety states of the subjects were evaluated using the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), respectively. Using Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), the α₁ of the pulse waves was calculated and compared among the subjects. The α₁ value in diabetic patients before starting the hemodialysis session (the median value, 0.44; range, the 75th–25th percentile range, 0.49–0.43) was lower than the controls (the median value, 0.61; range, 0.73–0.44), but increased after starting hemodialysis (the median value, 0.55; range, 0.55–0.52). For non-diabetic patients, the α1 value was unchanged by hemodialysis. The depression scores in GHQ-28 in the diabetics were higher than in the controls. These results suggest that the dialysis patients with diabetic nephropathy are depressive and that their autonomic nervous system function is affected by hemodialysis.

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Objective: The aim of this study was to clarify whether differences in the effects of aroma on cognitive function between males and females are due to differences in either olfactory function or higher order cognitive function using event-related potentials (P300).
Methods: Twenty-six healthy subjects (14 females), who were judged as normal by olfaction tests, participated in the experiment. The subjects were instructed to hold a stick was dipped into rose aroma or diluted solution and to press a button when rare stimuli were presented during an oddball task.
Results: P300 peak amplitudes were significantly reduced under the aroma condition in females whereas there was no such reduction in males. Olfactory function, subjective evaluations, reaction times, and accuracy of the oddball task did not differ between the males and the females.
Conclusion: These results reveal that effects of rose aroma on cognitive function are greater in females than males because of differences in higher order cognitive function rather than olfactory function.

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Long-term video electroencephalography (LTVEEG) reading is time-consuming. BESA Epilepsy (BESAE) is a software package that detects and clusters spike-like events automatically, to assist manual interpretation. The software potentially improves the efficiency of LTVEEG reading, although it has not been applied clinically. In this study, we compared the localization of epileptic spikes between BESAE-assisted and conventional visual detection in 83 patients with suspected diagnoses of epilepsy (average age of 33 years ranging from 13 to 64; 31 males). The spike localization with the two methods was concordant in 55.4%, partially concordant in 20.5%, and discordant in 24.1%. The major reason for discordance was the presence of epileptic spikes missed by BESAE. The spike localization by means of BESAE-assisted detection was consistent with the clinical diagnosis in 75.9% of the patients. It took an average of 7 minutes 43 seconds for a BESAE-assisted review to analyze a 3-to-4-day LTVEEG record. This study showed that BESAE-assisted spike detection for LTVEEG is efficient and fairly reliable compared with visual detection. Further improvement is necessary for clinical application.

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