Hypertension is one of the major risk factors of cardiovascular diseases, but despite a century of clinical and basic research, the discrete etiology of this disease is still not fully understood. The same is true for obesity, which is recognized as a major global epidemic health problem nowadays. Obesity is associated with an increasing prevalence of the metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk f...

There is increasing evidence that inflammatory mechanisms other than eosinophilic inflammation may be involved in producing the final common pathway of enhanced bronchial reactivity and reversible airflow obstruction that characterises asthma. A review of the literature has shown that, at most, only 50% of asthma cases are attributable to eosinophilic airway inflammation. It is hypothesised tha...

BACKGROUND Most non-chromosomal congenital heart defects are thought to be caused by the interaction of genetic factors involving multiple genes and environmental factors. Families that have several affected members have been reported, however, which suggests that a single autosomal dominant or recessive gene may cause the cardiac defects. A family in which atrioventricular septal defect seemed...

Some highlights in the development of our knowledge about carcinogens as etiological agents for cancer are reviewed briefly. Advances during the past 20 years relating to metabolic activation with the genesis of reactive metabolites, molecular targets and their interactions with activated carcinogens, oncogenes as molecular targets and the dependence on cell proliferation, all relating to the i...

Magnetic relaxation in large spin molecular paramagnets is often found to behave as δM(t) ∼ √ t at short times t. This behaviour was explained by Prokofiev & Stamp as arising from dipole interactions between molecular spins. However, as observed by Miyashita & Saito, the same behaviour can arise from a different mechanism which, in the present work, is related to hyperfine interactions. The Miy...

This review is to examine the current literatures on the relationship between periodontitis and hypertension as well as to explore the possible biological pathways underlying the linkage between these health conditions. Hypertension is one of the major risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Oxidative stress and endothelial dysfunction are among the critical components in the development of h...

Novel mechanism of antioxidant activity of buckminsterfullerene C₆₀ based on protons absorbing and mild uncoupling of mitochondrial respiration and phosphorylation was postulated. In the present study we confirm this hypothesis using computer modeling based on Density Functional Theory. Fullerene's geroprotective activity is sufficiently higher than those of the most powerful reactive oxygen sp...

A simple mechanism for allocating indivisible resources is sequential allocation in which agents take turns to pick items. We focus on possible and necessary allocation problems, checking whether allocations of a given form occur in some or all mechanisms for several commonly used classes of sequential allocation mechanisms. In particular, we consider whether a given agent receives a given item...

Long-term investigation of prevalence of antiovarian antibodies in serum of girls and adolescent women confirm their significantly higher incidence in patients with primary amenorhea (PA), oligomenorhea and secondary amenorhea (OSA). Simultaneously, in association with ovarian disorders, significantly increased levels of gonadotropins, particularly FSH, LH and their ratio (FSH/LH) declare an ac...

Confusion readily occurs in memory processes between patterns that overlap substantially. Possible mechanisms are considered that might operate in an automatic manner to reduce such confusion. One such mechanism is the recall of patterns in a distorted way, so that they are enriched with greater activity in distinctive elements of experienced patterns than in overlapping elements. Selective con...