BackgroundThe Basal ganglia (BG) played a crucial role in the brain-level mechanisms of chronic pain disorders. However, the functional changes of BG in chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS) are still poorly understood. This study investigated the BG subregions’ resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) in CP/CPPS patients compared with healthy controls.MethodsTwenty eight patients with CP/CPPS and 28 age- and education-matched healthy males underwent clinical measurements and 3T brain MR imaging, including T1-weighted structural images and resting-state functional imaging. The data were analyzed (...) by the seeded-based rs-FC analysis. Then, a machine learning method was applied to assess the feasibility of detecting CP/CPPS patients through the changed rs-FC.ResultsCompared with healthy males, patients presented decreased rs-FC between the BG subregions and right middle cingulate cortex, and correlated with pain (r = 0.51, p-uncorrected = 0.005) and urinary symptoms (r = –0.4, p-uncorrected = 0.034). The left superior temporal gyrus and right supramarginal gyrus showed decreased rs-FC with the BG subregions as well. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.943 (accuracy = 80%, F1-score = 80.6%) was achieved for the classification of CP/CPPS patients and healthy males with support vector machine (SVM) based on the changed rs-FC.ConclusionThese findings provide evidence of altered BG subregions’ rs-FC in CP/CPPS, which may contribute to our understanding of the BG’s role in CP/CPPS. (shrink)

Reading experience is viewed as ‘interactive and negotiable’ for different reading positions are created in readers’ responses to the same news report. To understand the differences between ‘preferred reading’ and actual readings, this article, drawing on the context models and the Appraisal framework, analyzes 785 readers’ comments attached to 23 hard news stories sourced from the China Daily mobile application and the People’s Daily Online website. The study combines corpus semantic tagging analysis for readers’ choices of evaluative lexis with a (...) manual analysis of Appraisal resources for reading position construction based on a whole text perspective. The results show that readers are likely to use Appraisal resources strategically to defend their own opinions against other commenters or affiliate with large numbers of potential readers without commenting. Furthermore, comments were found to be directed either at the text or at other commenters, and through this a number of different reading positions were revealed. The readers’ context models are the cognitive link between discourse properties and social strategies in the process of news understanding. (shrink)