Xylitol is widely used as a sweetener in foods and medications. Xylitol ingestion causes a small blood glucose rise, and it is commonly used as an alternative to high-energy supplements in diabetics. In previous studies, a xylitol metabolite, xylulose-5-phosphate, was shown to activate carbohydrate response element binding protein, and to promote lipogenic enzyme gene transcription in vitro; ho...

Yoga has been known to have stimulatory or inhibitory effects on the metabolic parameters and to be uncomplicated therapy for obesity. The purpose of the present study was to test the effect of an 8-week of yoga-asana training on body composition, lipid profile, and insulin resistance (IR) in obese adolescent boys. Twenty volunteers with body mass index (BMI) greater than the 95th percentile we...

Parameter estimation constitutes a major challenge in dynamic modeling of metabolic networks. Here we examine, via computational simulations, the influence of system nonlinearity and the nature of available data on the distribution and predictive capability of identified model parameters. Simulated methionine cycle metabolite concentration data (both with and without corresponding flux data) wa...

Stress response is characterised by biochemical, physiological and behavioural changes in the body. Changes in serum lipids have been reported during examination stress (2, 3, 4). Though emotional stress is known to affect the metabolic rate through alteration in homeostasis (5), yet examination stress has not been implicated as one of the factors influencing metabolic rate which inturn is gove...

INTRODUCTION Prevalence of alcohol consumption is high in the general population and generates specific problems at the workplace. OBJECTIVE To establish benchmarks between levels of alcohol consumption and cardiovascular risk variables and metabolic syndrome. METHODS A cross-sectional study of 7,644 workers of Spanish companies (2,828 females and 4,816 males). Alcohol consumption and its r...

For hypotheses of the type H0 : θ = θ0 vs H1 : θ 6= θ0 we demonstrate the equivalence of a Bayesian hypothesis test using a Bayes factor and the corresponding classical test, for a large class of models, which are detailed in the paper. In particular, we show that the role of the prior and critical region for the Bayes factor test is only to specify the type I error. This is their only role sin...

Recent developments in metabolic engineering have led to the successful biosynthesis of valuable products, such as the precursor of the antimalarial compound, artemisinin, and opioid precursor, thebaine. Synthesizing these traditionally plant-derived compounds in genetically modified yeast cells introduces the possibility of significantly reducing the total time and resources required for their...

INTRODUCTION Mortality in dialysis patients is higher than in the general population, and cardiovascular disease represents the leading cause of death. Hypertension and volume overload are important risk factors for the development of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) in hemodialysis (HD) and peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients. Other factors are mainly represented by hyperparathyroidism, vascul...

Metabolic syndrome (MetS), characterized by central obesity, dyslipidemias, hypertension, and hyperglycemia, impacts 34 percent of the U.S. adult population. MetS has been demonstrated to be affected by dietary components. Data from epidemiological studies and clinical interventions suggest that one or more dairy components might directly affect MetS parameters. For example, calcium has been po...

UNLABELLED The aim of this study was to evaluate comparatively the predictive power of body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC), two anthropometric parameters used in daily practice, for detecting cardio-metabolic diseases, in a rural community in north-east Romania. MATERIAL AND METHODS We evaluated 3248 persons, aged 19 or over, for whom we collected the following data: medical hi...