BACKGROUND Kawasaki Disease (KD), a systemic vasculitis of medium sized vessels, is the most common cause of acquired heart disease among children in the developed world. Some KD patients demonstrate echocardiographic evidence of depressed myocardial mechanics. However, the incidence, etiology, and reversibility of abnormal mechanics in KD patients remain undefined. METHODS AND RESULTS We ret...

background recently, assessment of the atrial motion and deformation indices obtained via doppler myocardial imaging (dmi) has been proposed as a new method of exploring the atrial function. objective our aim was to assess the right atrial (ra) regional function using myocardial velocities, strain, and strain rate imaging (sri) and compare it with the function of the inter-atrial septum (ias) a...

We examined the effect of intensity during prolonged exercise (PE) on left (LV) and right ventricular (RV) function. Subjects included 18 individuals (mean +/- SE: age = 28.1 +/- 1.1 yr, maximal aerobic power = 55.1 +/- 1.6 ml . kg(-1) . min(-1)), who performed 150 min of exercise at 60 and 80% maximal aerobic power on two separate occasions. Transthoracic echocardiography assessed systolic and...

BACKGROUND In compensated aortic stenosis (AS), cardiac performance measured at the ventricular chamber is typically supranormal, whereas measurements at the myocardium are often impaired. We investigated intramyocardial mechanics after aortic valve replacement (AVR) and the effects relative to the presence or absence of coronary artery disease (CAD+ or CAD-), respectively. METHODS AND RESULT...

Attenuated Salmonella typhi organisms which express genes encoding protective antigens of other pathogens have been developed for use as experimental oral vaccines. A delta asd S. typhi strain attenuated by deletions in cya, crp, and cdt which contains hepatitis B core (HBc) and pre-S genes encoded on an Asd+ pBR-based plasmid vector was constructed. Healthy adult volunteers ingested a single d...

Protection against malaria in humans can be achieved by repeated exposure to infected mosquito bites during prophylactic chloroquine treatment (chemoprophylaxis and sporozoites (CPS)). We established a new mouse model of CPS immunization to investigate the stage and strain-specificity of malaria immunity. Immunization with Plasmodium chabaudi by mosquito bite under chloroquine cover does not ge...

Studies of the resistance patterns to infection with a murine cytomegalovirus in inbred strains of mice revealed the existence of resistant and susceptible strains. Resistance was found to be associated with possession of the H-2k allele at the major histocompatibility locus of the mouse. The F1 hybrid between a resistant strain (C3H/HeJ) and a susceptible strain (BALB/c) was found to have a re...

OBJECTIVES Most previous studies of job strain and cardiovascular risk have been limited to adult data. It remains unclear whether this association might be explained by factors already present before entering the labour market. This study examined whether pre-employment family factors and participants' own dispositional factors contribute to the relationship between job strain and carotid inti...

The fatigue behavior of silver films on polyethylene-terephthalate substrates is studied for various levels of film thickness, pre-stretch, sample width, and applied strain range. Films with large pre-stretch have a shorter fatigue life, with failure caused by strain localization (films thicker than 100 nm) or intergranular crack formation (100 nm film). There is a significant effect of film th...