Chronic exposure of pancreatic islets to sulfonylureas (SUs) is known to impair the ability of islets to respond to subsequent acute stimulation by SUs or glucose. Nateglinide (NAT) is a novel insulinotropic agent with a primarily site of action at beta-cell K(ATP) channels, which is common to the structurally diverse drugs like repaglinide (REP) and the SUs. Earlier studies on the kinetics, gl...

Brazil is a country of continental dimensions, with many social inequalities. The latter are reflected on its health system, which comprises a large public component called SUS, a small paid health insurance component and a third very small private component, in which patients pay personally for medical services. Seventy five percent of the population depends on SUS, which thus far does not pro...

Congenital long QT syndrome is a rare disease in which the electrocardiogram QT interval is prolonged due to dysfunctional ventricular repolarization. Variant 3 (LQT-3) is associated with mutations in SCN5A, the gene coding for the heart Na(+) channel alpha subunit. Arrhythmias in LQT-3 mutation carriers are more likely to occur at rest, when heart rate is slow. Several LQT-3 Na(+) channel muta...

Deposition of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide leads to amyloid plaques that together with tau deposits characterize the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). In modeling this pathology, transgenic animals such as the APP23 strain, that expresses a mutant form of the amyloid precursor protein found in familial cases of AD, have been instrumental. In previous studies, we have shown that repeat...

Assessment of diet in large epidemiological studies can be costly and time consuming. An automated dietary assessment system could potentially reduce researcher burden by automatically coding food records. myfood24 (Measure Your Food on One Day) an online 24-h dietary assessment tool (with the flexibility to be used for multiple 24 h-dietary recalls or as a food diary), has been developed for u...

The present study explores the significance of brain dopamine phenotype for individual variation in the neuroendocrine stress response of the rat. For this purpose, we used two Wistar rat lines previously selected for high or low responsiveness of the dopamine system to apomorphine using the gnawing response as the selection criterion. Systemic administration of the drug evoked in apomorphine-s...

Sjögren's syndrome (SjS) is an autoimmune disease characterized by distraction of particularly salivary and lacrimal glands. The aim of the present study was to compare salivary gland scintigraphy (SGS) and salivary gland ultrasonography (SUS) in identifying salivary gland function in patients first diagnosed with SjS. We recruited 20 such patients with SjS (5 male, 15 female, aged from 35 to 6...

reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/cond.2010.090242 Resumen. La teoría predice que la inversión parental debería ser menor si la progenie tiene poco valor reproductivo, como cuando tiene un alto riesgo de depredación. Además, un alto riesgo de depredación puede reducir la actividad parental si esa actividad atrae depredadores. Sin embrago, la habilidad de los padres de determinar los niveles ambient...

Rendezvous search that asks two persons to find each other among a set of possible locations has regained tremendous research interest lately in the research community of cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In a CRN, there are two types of users: primary spectrum users (PUs) and secondary spectrum users (SUs). SUs are only allowed to share spectrum with PUs provided that they do not cause any seve...

Number of complex fluids (as slurries, drilling muds, paints and coatings, many foods, cosmetics, biofluids...) can approximately be described as concentrated dispersions of Structural Units (SUs). Due to shear forces, SUs are assumed to be approximately spherical in shape and uniform in size under steady flow conditions, so that a complex fluid can be considered as a roughly monodisperse dispe...