All guidelines recommend short-acting inhaled beta 2-adrenoceptor agonists as the first-line drugs in acute asthma attacks and inhaled corticosteroids as the drugs of choice when regular daily treatment is needed. Short-acting inhaled beta 2-adrenoceptor agonists are not effective in reducing nocturnal awakenings because of their short duration of action. In addition there has been an intense deba

The post-burn immune dysfunction predisposes patients to sepsis and multiple organ failure leading to increased mortality. HIV infection also results in a depressed immune response. The combination of burn injury and HIV might therefore lead to an increased morbidity and mortality as compared to non-HIV infected burn patients. Twenty burn patients and 10 healthy volunteers were included in a prosp

Today embedded control systems are created using tools that give insufficient support for rapid prototyping and code reuse. New tools for the implementation of embedded controllers are necessary. This paper presents the experimental software framework Palsjo, and the language PAL. The Palsjo system is a rapid prototyping environment designed to support on-line system reconfigurations and code reus

Single-channel currents were activated by THIP (4,5,6,7-tetrahydroisoxazolo[5,4-c]pyridin-3-ol) in cell-attached patches on CA1 pyramidal neurons in the rat hippocampal slice preparation. THIP activated GABA(A) channels after a delay that was concentration-dependent and decreased by 1 muM diazepam. The currents showed outward rectification. Channels activated at depolarized 40 mV relative to the c

Asthma is an increasingly common disorder, affecting 5-10% of the population. It involves a dysregulated immune function, which may predispose to subsequent cancer. We examined cancer risk among Swedish subjects who had hospital admission once or multiple times for asthma. An asthma research database was created by identifying asthma patients from the Swedish Hospital Discharge Register and by lin

Objectives This study assessed paternal occupational exposure to di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP) in association with reduced fertility. Methods Men working in three plants with DEHP exposure were studied retrospectively. Male and female employees and their partners were invited to participate if they had reported a pregnancy or an attempt to achieve a pregnancy. Postal questionnaires and telephon

Production of high-amylose potato lines can be achieved by inhibition of two genes coding for starch branching enzymes. The use of antisense technology for gene inhibition have yielded a low frequency of high-amylose lines that mostly was correlated with high numbers of integrated T-DNA copies. To investigate whether the production of high-amylose lines could be improved, RNA interference was used

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disease primarily affecting cartilaginous joints but also extra-articular tissues such as the nose and upper respiratory tract. We have investigated extra-articular cartilage involvement in two commonly used animal models for RA, collagen-induced and pristane-induced arthritis, by immunizing rats with different susceptibility to disease (LEW.1 A,

The complementary employment of two separation techniques, one analytical-scale, the other preparative-scale, i.e. the lift-hyperlayer asymmetrical flow field-flow fractionation (AsyFIFFF) and the split flow-thin cell (SPLITT) is presented for the first time as a methodology to size-separate and rapidly characterize starch granules of different botanical origins. Very rapid separation and size cha

The effect of the application of pulsed electric fields to potato tissue on the diffusion of the fluorescent dye FMI-43 through the cell wall was studied. Potato tissue was subjected to field strengths ranging from 30 to 500 V/cm, with one 1 ms rectangular pulse, before application of FM1-43 and microscopic examination. Our results show a slower diffusion of FM1-43 in the electropulsed tissue when

Direct electrochemistry of heme multicofactor-containing enzymes, e.g., microbial theophylline oxidase (ThOx) and D-fructose dehydrogenase (FDH) from Gluconobacter industrius was studied on alkanethiol-modified gold electrodes and was compared with that of some previously studied complex heme enzymes, specifically, cellobiose dehydrogenase (CDH) and sulphite oxidase (SOx). The formal redox potenti

NMR spin relaxation in the rotating frame (R-1p) is a unique method for atomic-resolution characterisation of conformational (chemical) exchange processes occuring on the microsecond timescale. We present a rotating frame C-13 relaxation dispersion experiment for measuring conformational dynamics in uniformly C-13-labeled proteins. The experiment was validated by using the E140Q mutant of the C-te

A case report of a patient who suffered from a rapidly progressive lung adenocarcinoma with malignant pleural effusions, is given. The patient failed to respond on two series of conventional cytotoxic drug therapy (Carboplatin, Etoposid). Interleukin-2 (IL-2) treatment was first started as intrapleural instillations (3.0 million IU per day in 6 days). A clear clinical response was achieved with ce

This paper presents a finite volume scheme on rectangular and triangular meshes based on a third order accurate logarithmic reconstruction. Several numerical experiments, including the Euler equations for compressible gas dynamics, illustrate the high resolution and non-oscillatory properties of the new scheme.

Hydrogen embrittlement is often a catastrophic phenomenon of machine elements failure under cyclic stresses. This hydrogen is generated as a result of tribo-chemical and mechanical actions on the working surfaces. This hydrogen can have three different zones or stages of behaviour under tribo-mechanical actions. Firstly, it can strongly adsorb on the mating surfaces at a shallow subsurface zone an

Objective: Fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF23) is a circulating factor involved in phosphate (Pi) and vitamin D metabolism. Serum FGF23 is increased at later stages of chronic kidney disease due to chronic hyperphosphatemia and decreased renal clearance. Recent studies also indicate that FGF23 may directly regulate the expression of parathyroid hormone (PTH) in vitro. Therefore, the objective of t

We discuss the age of the stellar disks in the solar neighborhood. After reviewing the various methods for age dating, we discuss current estimates of the ages of both the thin- and the thick disks. We present preliminary results for kineymatically-selected stars that belong to the thin- as well as the thick disk. All of these dwarf and sub-giant stars have been studied spectroscopically and we ha