RATIONALE: Improved ventilation strategies have been the mainstay for reducing mortality in acute respiratory distress syndrome. Their unique clinical effectiveness is, however, unmatched by our understanding of the underlying mechanobiology, and their impact on alveolar dynamics and gas exchange remains largely speculative.OBJECTIVES: To assess changes in alveolar dynamics and associated effects

Human and murine platelets (PLTs) variably express toll-like receptors (TLRs), which link the innate and adaptive immune responses during infectious inflammation and atherosclerotic vascular disease. In this paper, we show that the TLR9 transcript is specifically up-regulated during pro-PLT production and is distributed to a novel electron-dense tubular system-related compartment we have named the

Background: Smoking is known to have many short- and long-term cardiovascular effects. Cardiac index (CI), which is cardiac output indexed to body surface area, is considered to be a valid measure of cardiac performance. We investigated whether there were any differences in CI or other echocardiographic variables between never smokers, ex-smokers, and current smokers in a cardiopulmonary healthy p

The tumor suppressor 15-hydroxyprostaglandin dehydrogenase (15-PGDH) is the key enzyme in prostaglandin E2 catabolism and is down-regulated in colorectal cancer (CRC) tissue. Canonical Wnt signaling is frequently elevated in colon cancers and has been shown to down-regulate 15-PGDH expression. Therefore, we have in the current study investigated if the non-canonical ligand WNT5A relates to increas

Objectives To estimate the prevalence and cumulative incidence of gout in southern Sweden with respect to socioeconomic status. Methods Among residents of Skåne region in the year 2013 (total population 1.3 million), adult persons (age 18 years +) who between 1998 and 2013 received a diagnosis of gout (International Classification of Disease 10th Edition (ICD-10) code M10) by any physician were id

Objective: To describe beliefs about health and illness among foreign-born people with diabetic foot ulcers that might affect selfreported self-care and health-care seeking and to study whether there are dissimilarities related to origin. Method: Qualitative descriptive study. Semi-structured interviews with people aged 38-86 years; 13 born in European and 13 in non-European countries (all except

We calculate all neutral vector two-point functions in Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT) to two-loop order and use these to estimate the ratio of disconnected to connected contributions as well as contributions involving the strange quark. We extend the ratio of −1/10 derived earlier in two flavour ChPT at one-loop order to a large part of the higher order contributions and discuss corrections to

Aims: Tobacco smoking is known to increase the long-term risk of developing Type 2 diabetes mellitus, but the mechanisms involved are poorly understood. This observational, cross-sectional study aims to compare measures of insulin sensitivity and β-cell function in current, ex- and never-smokers. Methods: The study population included 1246 people without diabetes (mean age 44 years, 55% women) fro

Fieldnotes is an exploration of imaginary geographies. It is a series of surreal short films examining how the concept of ethnographic fieldnotes can be related to places, situations and the way ethnography is communicated. Each film in the series is also an evocation, based on video recorded at a single location at a single time. The video is then composited and soundtracked into a surreal accoun

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the transmuted probability models, which arise from transforming a "base" distribution into its generalized counterpart. While many standard probability distributions were generalized throughout this construction, the concept lacked deeper theoretical interpretation. We show that the transmuted distributions can be viewed as the distribution of maxim

Elucidating the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of melanistic color pattern formation has become an important focus of evolutionary biology. There are relatively few studies, however, examining the composition and architecture of pigment cells in melanistic reptiles. The typical color pattern of the skink Plestiodon latiscutatus, which inhabits the Izu Islands and Izu Peninsula of Japan, consist

Electron microscopy of normal human epidermiscomprising very large series of sections in combination withtilting of the sections has revealed that all "indeterminatecells" carry the specific markers of either melanocytes orLangerhans cells. The term "indeterminate cells" can thusbe abandoned. In addition, it is suggested that an epidermaldendritic cell lacking specific markers in the section under

The avian genus Calandrella (larks) was recently suggested to be non-monophyletic, and was divided into two genera, of which Calandrella sensu stricto comprises 4–5 species in Eurasia and Africa. We analysed mitochondrial cytochrome b (cytb) and nuclear Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD) sequences from all species, and for cytb we studied 21 of the 22 recognised subspecies, with the aim to clar

After mating, spermatophores of signal crayfish are stored on the body of the female for a period before fertilization. This study compared the post-mating protein profile and pattern of protein tyrosine phosphorylation of the signal crayfish spermatophore to that of the freshly ejaculated spermatophore and found substantial differences. Two major bands of tyrosine-phosphorylated proteins of molec