BACKGROUND Green tobacco sickness (GTS) affects approximately one-quarter of tobacco workers. The primary aim of this analysis is to expand existing knowledge of GTS risk factors by delineating the association of measures of skin integrity with the prevalence of GTS among Latino farmworkers. METHODS Data are from a longitudinal study of skin disease among 304 North Carolina Latino farmworkers...

BACKGROUND Ginseng total saponin (GTS) contains various ginsenosides. These ginsenosides are widely used for treating cardiovascular diseases in Asian communities. The aim of this study was to study the effects of GTS on cardiac injury after global ischemia and reperfusion (I/R) in isolated guinea pig hearts. METHODS Animals were subjected to normothermic ischemia for 60 minutes, followed by ...

We present Midas, a system that uses complex data processing to extract and aggregate facts from a large collection of structured and unstructured documents into a set of unified, clean entities and relationships. Midas focuses on data for financial companies and is based on periodic filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)....

This paper describes work carried out in the ESPRIT MIDAS project to provide secure management facilities. The work is based on extensions to the OSI CMIP management protocol which provide for mutual authentication at association set-up and integrity checks in all PDUs. The first version of this mechanism has been implemented and tested; in practice it has been found to be rather slow in operat...

The Millstone Hill Incoherent Scatter Data Acquisition System (MIDAS) is based on an abstract model of an incoherent scatter radar. This model is implemented in a hierarchical software system, which serves to isolate hardware and low-level software implementation details from higher levels of the system. Inherent in this is the idea that implementation details can easily be changed in response ...

Although the protein-induced vitamin K absence or antagonist-II (PIVKA-II) is used as a prognostic marker in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a newly-improved assay, NX-PVKA (PIVKA-II measured using P-11 and P-16 antibodies) and NX-PVKA-R (ratio of PIVKA-II and NX-PVKA), are more accurate markers of PIVKA-II. We conducted a prospectively preliminary analysis of the relationship between NX-PVKA-R...

Several studies have demonstrated that behavioral activation induced by psychostimulants is prevented by ginseng total saponin (GTS), which has been known to act on the central dopaminergic system. In an attempt to investigate whether the effect of GTS is through its inhibitory action on the elevated dopaminergic transmission, we examined the effect of GTS on nicotine-induced dopamine (DA) rele...

Severe haemorrhage is a common cause of death despite the recent advances in critical care. Conventional resuscitation fluids are designed to re-establish tissue perfusion, but they fail to prevent inflammatory responses during resuscitation. Our previous studies indicated that the vagus nerve can modulate systemic inflammation via the alpha7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (alpha7nAchR). Here...

Chronic verapamil administration has been shown to reduce the renal dysfunction, glomerular sclerosis, and mortality in partially nephrectomized rats; the mechanism is unknown. Therefore, the present micropuncture study examines the effect of verapamil on glomerular hemodynamics of Munich-Wistar rats 4 wk after five-sixths nephrectomy. Whole-kidney function was similar in nephrectomized rats tr...