Study design:Retrospective, cross-sectional design.Objectives:To identify factors that predict unsatisfactory seating pressure in spinal cord-injured (SCI) individuals.Setting:Seating Clinic at the University Hospital, Norway.Methods:All wheelchair users with traumatic SCI hospitalized between 1 January 2007 and 31 December 2010 were included. Individual assessment by a team was performed. To measure seating pressure, a ...

Room temperature zinc-mediated diastereoselective allylation or propargylation of isatin-derived N-tert-butanesulfinyl ketimines for synthesis of highly enantiomerically enriched tetrasubstituted 3-aminooxindoles is described.

Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) is the causal agent of rice bacterial leaf blight, one of the most important rice bacterial diseases in China and many other countries. The upstream portions of 41 candidate genes encoding non-transcription activator-like effectors of Xoo Chinese strain 13751 were fused with the coding sequence ...

Introduction: Cathepsin B is of significant importance to cancer therapy as it is involved in various pathologies and oncogenic processes in humans. Numerous studies have shown that abnormal regulation of cathepsin B overexpression is correlated with invasive and metastatic phenotypes in cancers. Cathepsin B is normally associated with the lysosomes ...

Landmark events occur in a coordinated manner during pre-implantation development of the mammalian embryo, yet the regulatory network that orchestrates these events remains largely unknown. Here, we present the first systematic investigation of the network in pre-implantation mouse embryos using morpholino-mediated gene knockdowns of key embryonic stem cell (ESC) factors ...

Aim of the study was the evaluation of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and the detection of deviant behavior in early-treated children and adolescents with PKU in comparison with healthy peers. Special focus was laid on the impact of compliance with treatment as defined by the national recommendations on HRQoL. ...

Molecular gates have received considerable attention as drug delivery systems. More recently, aptamer-based gates showed great potential in overcoming major challenges associated with drug delivery by means of nanocapsules. Based on a switchable aptamer nanovalves approach, we herein report the first demonstration of an engineered single molecular gate that directs ...

Single molecule force spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful approach to examine the stability and dynamics of single proteins. We have completed force extension experiments on the small cold shock protein B from Thermotoga maritima, using a specially constructed chimeric polyprotein. The family of cold shock proteins is evolutionarily highly ...

Study design:Multifaceted: extensive discussions at workshop and conference presentations, survey of experts and feedback.Objectives:Present the background, purpose and development of the International Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Data Sets for Non-Traumatic SCI (NTSCI), including a hierarchical classification of aetiology.Setting:International.Methods:Consultation via e-mail, presentations and discussions at ISCoS conferences (2006-2009), and workshop (1 ...

Structural studies of membrane proteins are still hampered by difficulties of finding appropriate membrane mimicking media that maintain protein structure and function. Phospholipid nanodiscs seem promising to overcome the intrinsic problems of detergent containing environments. While nanodiscs can offer a near native environment, the large particle size complicates their routine ...

(-)-Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), one representative of the well-studied chemopreventive phytochemicals but with low bioavailability, was encapsulated in mono-dispersed nanoparticles that were assembled from bioactive caseinophosphopeptides (CPP) and chitosan (CS). The encapsulation efficiency of EGCG in CS-CPP nanoparticles ranged from 70.5 to 81.7%, meanwhile, the in vitro release of EGCG from CS-CPP ...

PURPOSE: Acquired immunity is impaired in hemodialysis (HD) patients, and decreased T cell number may contribute. Receptor activator of nuclear factor-κB ligand (RANKL) and osteoprotegerin (OPG) are expressed in cells of the immune system and affect T cell development, homeostasis and proliferation. Serum levels of RANKL and OPG and their ...

Abdominoplasty is a frequent operative procedure among patients with massive weight loss following laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding (LAGB) surgery. After abdominoplasty, patients are carefully monitored and usually discharged from the clinic after overnight hospitalization. We report a case of acute esophageal dilation after abdominoplasty, following LAGB, mimicking a serious pulmonary ...

Sterilization conditions need to be optimized to effectively neutralize the bioburden while using short exposure times for minimizing the changes in chemical composition, material properties and device architecture. Towards this goal, effects of ethylene oxide (EtO) exposure parameters such as time, temperature, humidity, and EtO concentration on the polymer properties ...

Given global demand on health workforces, understanding student enrollment motivations are critical. Prior studies have concentrated on variation in career and lifestyle values; the current work evaluated the importance of disgust sensitivity in the prediction of health career interests. We argue that emotional proclivities may be important and that disgust ...

PURPOSE: Management of hydrocephalus with insertion of ventriculoperitoneal (VP) shunt is associated with significant complications in both adult and pediatric patients. These may be more common in developing countries due to poor economic conditions and a dearth of available resources. We report a 6 years' experience with VP shunt insertion in ...

BACKGROUND: Both vertebrobasilar dolichoectasia (VBD) and cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are related with the risk of intracerebral hemorrhage. We aimed to examine the relationship between the VBD and CMB in ischaemic stroke patients. METHODS: A consecutive series of 182 patients hospitalized because of ischaemic stroke or transient ischaemic attack (TIA), and ...

The deadly combination of tuberculosis (TB) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) currently ravaging the world, taking a toll of about 0.35 million people every year, is one of the major public health crises of the decade. Throughout the course of HIV infection, the risk of acquisition, reactivation, and reinfection of ...

Threats to stable oil supplies and concerns over environmental emissions have pushed for renewable biofuel developments to minimize dependence on fossil resources. Recent biofuel progress has moved towards fossil resource-independent carbon cycles, but environmental issues regarding use of nitrogen fertilizers have not been addressed on a global scale. The recently ...

Background:Prostate cancer remains a significant health problem for men in the Western world. Although treatment modalities are available, these do not confer long-term benefit and are accompanied by substantial side effects. Adoptive immunotherapy represents an attractive alternative to conventional treatments as a means to control tumor growth.Methods:To selectively target the ...

One of the more provocative realizations that have come out of the genome sequencing projects is that organisms possess a large number of uncharacterized or poorly characterized enzymes. This finding belies the commonly held notion that our knowledge of cell metabolism is nearly complete, underscoring the vast landscape of unannotated ...

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a significant public health concern with prevalence of major and minor depressions reaching 20 % in the first three postpartum months. Sociodemographic and psychopathology correlates of PPD are well established; however, information on the relationship between premenstrual disorders and the development of PPD is less well established. ...

A novel imaging and signal separation strategy is proposed to be able to separate [(18)F]FDG and multiple [(15)O]H(2)O signals from a simultaneously acquired dynamic PET acquisition of the two tracers. The technique is based on the fact that the dynamics of the two tracers are very distinct. By adopting an ...

O-H…X and O-H…O H-bonds as well as C-X…X dihalogen and C-X…O halogen bonds have been investigated in halomethanol dimers (bromomethanol dimer, iodomethanol dimer, difluorobromomethanol…bromomethanol complex and difluoroiodomethanol…iodomethanol complex). Structures of all complexes were optimized at the counterpoise-corrected MP2/cc-pVTZ level and single-point energies were calculated at the CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVTZ level. Energy decomposition ...

ABSTRACT The spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs) are a clinically and genetically heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders, among which SCA subtype 13 (SCA13) was found associated with mutations in the KCNC3 gene. Among 522 Chinese Han SCA patients (including familial and sporadic) we have collected since 1995, approximately 40% of them have ...

OBJECTIVES:Adenoma detection rate (ADR) is a key measure of quality in colonoscopy. Low ADRs are associated with development of interval cancer after "negative" colonoscopy. Uncontrolled studies mandating longer withdrawal time, and other incentives, have not significantly improved ADR. We hypothesized that an endoscopist training program would increase ADRs.METHODS:Our Endoscopic Quality ...

Concerns about protecting patient's privacy are experienced as a limitation in the opportunity to obtain and utilize social support by many physicians. As resources of social support can modify the process of burnout, patient confidentiality may increase risk of this syndrome by interfering with proper stress adaptation. This study investigates ...

Striatal cholinergic interneurons (ChIs) are involved in reward-dependent learning and the regulation of attention. The activity of these neurons is modulated by intrinsic and extrinsic GABAergic and glutamatergic afferents, but the source and relative prevalence of these diverse regulatory inputs remain to be characterized. To address this issue, we performed ...

BACKGROUND: In recent years, many mini-incisional techniques for double-eyelid plasty have been developed. However, the removal of pretarsal tissue has not been satisfactory because only small pockets of soft tissue just inferior to the skin have been removed to place the suture. The formed double eyelid may therefore not be ...

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is an autoimmune disorder directed against the β cells of the pancreatic islets. The genetic risk of the disease is linked to HLA-DQ risk alleles and unknown environmental triggers. In most countries, only 10-15% of children or young adults newly diagnosed with T1DM have a ...

We previously demonstrated that sperm heads from amphibians (Xenopus and Rana) and zebrafish (Danio) could form giant lampbrush chromosomes when injected into the nucleus of amphibian oocytes. However, similar experiments with mammalian sperm heads were unsuccessful. Here, we describe a slightly modified procedure and demonstrate that human sperm heads can ...

The basis of hypersexual behavior among patients with dementia is not entirely clear. Hypersexual behavior may be a particular feature of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), which affects ventromedial frontal and adjacent anterior temporal regions specialized in interpersonal behavior. Recent efforts to define hypersexual disorder indicate an increasing awareness of ...

Renal cell carcinoma comprises 2-3 % of all adult malignancies and its incidence is increasing. Overall survival of patients with advanced disease has increased over the last decade due to the development of many effective targeted agents. Unfortunately, most patients inevitably develop resistance to these agents. While our understanding of the ...

PURPOSE: The objective of this study was to ascertain whether a relationship exists between pre-diagnostic serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) and risk of breast cancer in young women. METHODS: About 600 incident cases of breast cancer were matched to 600 controls as part of a nested case-control study that ...

Abdominal sacrocolpopexy has been shown to have the highest, most durable success rates among techniques for apical pelvic organ prolapse repair. Recently, there has been increased application of minimally invasive techniques, such as laparoscopic and robotic approaches, to performing a sacrocolpopexy. We report an overview of the literature in order ...

Plant lycopene exhibits antioxidant activity in animal tissues. Transient cerebral ischemia/reperfusion in Mongolian gerbils resulted in delayed neuronal death in hippocampal regions. We examined the antioxidant effects of lycopene because we expected lycopene to attenuate ischemia-related neuronal damage by controlling apoptosis at the gene level. The gerbils were divided into ...

Oostatic peptides are organic molecules, which influence an insect reproduction due to a regulation of the eggs development. It was proved that decapeptide-H-Tyr-Asp-Pro-Ala-Pro-Pro-Pro-Pro-Pro-Pro-OH (YDPAPPPPPP)-isolated from mosquito Aedes aegypti, inhibits trypsin activity in the midgut of the mosquito. Therefore, it was named trypsin-modulating oostatic factor (Aea-TMOF). Feeding the recombinant cells with ...

The objective of the study was to investigate the association between IL-8 and other biomarkers of endothelial dysfunction (MCP-1, V-CAM, I-CAM) and the disease activity scores in a sample of 54 patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) without use of biological agents. Fifty-four AS patients without treatment with anti-TNFs agents between ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Patient reported outcomes (PROs) are especially useful in assessing treatments for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) since they measure dimensions of health-related quality of life that cannot be captured using strictly objective physiological measures. The aim of this study was to compare the effects of combination etanercept and methotrexate (ETN ...

We investigate several approaches to coarse grained normal mode analysis on protein residual-level structural fluctuations by choosing different ways of representing the residues and the forces among them. Single-atom representations using the backbone atoms C( α ), C, N, and C( β ) are considered. Combinations of some of these ...

Background:High multivitamin (10-fold AIN-93G, HV) diets fed during pregnancy to Wistar rats increase characteristics of metabolic syndrome in offspring when weaned to the recommended vitamin (RV) diet.Objective:To determine whether the effects of HV gestational diets on obesogenic phenotypes in the offspring arise as a consequence of altered hypothalamic control of ...

Plant phytochemicals are increasingly recognised as sources of bioactive molecules which may have potential benefit in many health conditions. In mangoes, peel extracts from different cultivars exhibit varying effects on adipogenesis in the 3T3-L1 adipocyte cell line. In this study, the effects of preparative HPLC fractions of methanol peel extracts ...

An algal-bacterial microcosm was synthetically constructed of Chlorella vulgaris MMl and Pseudomonas MTl. This microcosm was able to treat simulated wastewater supplemented with mixtures of phenol and pyridine up to 4.6 and 4.4 mM, respectively, in a continuous stirred tank bioreactor (CSTR) using photosynthetic oxygenation. Complete pollutant removal and detoxification and ...

Even though other γδ T-cell subsets exhibit antitumor activity, adoptive transfer of γδ Tcells is currently limited to one subset (expressing Vγ9Vδ2 T-cell receptor (TCR)) due to dependence on aminobisphosphonates as the only clinically appealing reagent for propagating γδ T cells. Therefore, we developed an approach to propagate polyclonal γδ ...

The history of neurology in Sri Lanka stretches over half a century. It commenced in the 1950s with the return of the first neurologist and neurosurgeon after their training in the United Kingdom. In the 1970s, the entire country was served by a single neurologist practicing from Colombo, the capital ...

HRQoL is impaired in cirrhosis. Establishing the relevance of depression, anxiety, alexithymia and cirrhosis stage on the patients' HRQoL. Sixty cirrhotics underwent a neuropsychological assessment, including ZUNG-SDS, STAI Y1-Y2 and TAS-20. Minimal hepatic encephalopathy (MHE) was detected by PHES, HRQoL by Short-Form-36 (SF-36). Depression was detected in 34 patients (57 %, ...

Cocaine is one of well-known drugs of abuse, and many children experience early exposure to cocaine. Because of an immature neuronal system in adolescents, they may react differently to repeated cocaine administration compared to adults. Most of the published papers report the effect of cocaine on adult male rats and ...

PURPOSE: Inverse correlations of apolipoprotein D (ApoD) expression with tumor growth have been shown, therefore proposing ApoD as a good prognostic marker for diverse cancer types, including colorectal cancer (CRC). Besides, ApoD expression is boosted upon oxidative stress (OS) in many pathological situations. This study aims at understanding the role ...

We describe a woman presenting primarily with slowly progressing scarring alopecia. Course, symptoms, and clinical picture were highly suggestive for lichen planus. But mycological investigations revealed that cicatricial alopecia was caused by a specific infection with Trichophyton schoenleinii running a chronic course with minimal skin inflammation.

The coherent excitations of DNA hydration water at 100K have been investigated by neutron scattering spectroscopy to extract the excess signal of D2O-hydrated DNA with respect to dry DNA samples. A structural characterization of the sample, through the analysis of the static structure factor, has suggested that DNA hydration water ...