Endothelium-dependent vasodilators, nitrates, and atrial natriuretic factor relax blood vessels by increasing vascular cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP). The mechanisms by which cGMP relaxes vascular smooth muscle (VSM) are not known. Since contraction of VSM is associated with increased intracellular calcium and pH, we hypothesized that cGMP may decrease vascular tone by lowering ionized, ...

Chronic hypoxia (CH) results in reduced sensitivity to vasoconstrictors in conscious rats that persists upon restoration of normoxia. We hypothesized that this effect is due to endothelium-dependent hyperpolarization of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cells following CH. VSM cell resting membrane potential was determined for superior mesenteric artery strips isolated from CH rats (PB = 380 torr; 4...

Video self-modeling (VSM) is a type of intervention that has been developed to assist students in viewing themselves successfully in a wide variety of domains. The present study was designed to analyze the effects of VSM on children with autism spectrum disorder in an academic setting, with specific focus on improving on-task behavior and appropriate transitions. Participants were two children ...

The current study investigated the effects of a Video Self-Modeling (VSM) intervention on the compliance and aggressive behavior of three children placed in a psychiatric hospital. Each participant viewed brief video clips of himself following simple adult instructions just prior to the school's morning session and the unit's afternoon free period. A multiple baseline design across settings was...

With progressing age, large arteries diminish their longitudinal stretch, which in extreme cases results in tortuosity. Increased age is also associated with loss of vessel distensibility. We measured pressure-diameter curves from muscular porcine carotid arteries ex vivo at different longitudinal stretch ratios (lambda(z) = 1.4 and 1.8) and under different vascular smooth muscle (VSM) conditio...

The concentration of cyclic AMP within cells is regulated by the activities of adenylyl cyclases and phosphodiesterases (PDE) and the receptors and G proteins that modulate their activities. The extent to which cyclic AMP accumulates in a given cell and activates protein kinase A (PKA) is subject to tight transcriptional and post-transcriptional autoregulation (Table 1). For example, cyclic AMP...

This paper presents a model to add personality features to robots, the Transactional Analysis (TA) is used to define a psychological profile and the Viable Systems Model (VSM) is used to help explain the decisions made by the robot and how this impacts on its viability.

INTRODUCTION Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) patients show impaired visuospatial perception in the dark, as compared to normal patients with acute nociceptive pain. The purpose of this study is 2-fold: (i) to ascertain whether this distorted visuospatial perception is related to the chronicity of pain, and (ii) to analyse visuospatial perception of CRPS in comparison with another neuropat...

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is an important modulator of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) growth and function. Several lines of evidence suggest that the SNS also promotes VSM differentiation. The present study tests this hypothesis. Expression of smooth muscle myosin (SM2) and alpha-actin were assessed by Western analysis as indexes of VSM differentiation. SM2 expression (normalized to al...