OBJECTIVES We examined the protective effects of ethanolic extract of Lippia citriodora (L. citriodora) on rats subjected to chronic constriction injury (CCI) of sciatic nerve and possible mechanisms of actions. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this experimental study, the extract was administered 50, 100 and 200 mg/kg, Intraperitoneally (I.P) from the surgery time for 14 consecutive days. The change...

To study the effects of acupuncture analgesia on the hippocampus, we observed the effects of electroacupuncture (EA) and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MEK) inhibitor on pain-excited neurons (PENs) and pain-inhibited neurons (PINs) in the hippocampal area CA1 of sham or chronic constrictive injury (CCI) rats. The animals were randomly divided into a control, a CCI, and a U0126 (MEK1/2 inhibi...

This study evaluates the role of the number of secondary diagnoses for calculating the Charlson comorbidity index (CCI) in risk adjustment of the 90-day mortality rate after hip fracture surgical repair. Comorbidities were selected by reviewing the medical records of 390 patients 50 years of age or older in a teaching hospital in Rio de Janeiro from 1995 to 2000. Logistic regression models were...

This paper considers coordinated transmission for interference mitigation and power allocation in a correlated two-user two-hop multi-input multioutput (MIMO) relay system. The proposed transmission scheme utilizes statistical channel state information (CSI) (e.g., transmit correlation) to minimize the cochannel interference (CCI) caused by the relay. To this end, it is shown that the CCI can b...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of death and disability in young people. No effective therapy is available to ameliorate its damaging effects. Our aim was to investigate the optimal therapeutic time window of edaravone, a free radical scavenger which is currently used in Japan. We also determined the temporal profile of reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, oxidative stress, a...

Peripheral glucocorticoid receptors (GRs) play a significant role in the anti-inflammatory effects of glucocorticoids; however, the role of central GRs in nociceptive behaviors after peripheral nerve injury (neuropathic pain behaviors) remains unknown. Here we show that the development of neuropathic pain behaviors (thermal hyperalgesia and mechanical allodynia) induced by chronic constriction ...

OBJECTIVE Health-care expenditures are strongly influenced by overall illness burden. Appropriate risk adjustment is required for correct policy analysis. We compared three risk adjustment methods: the Charlson comorbidity index (CCI), the chronic disease score (CDS), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's comorbidity index (AHRQCI) in terms of their estimation power in analyzing ...

Since N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is a donor of cysteine, we studied the relationship between NAC and concentration of oxidized and reduced glutathione (GSH/GSSG ratio), and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and glutathione-S-transferase (GST) activities in the lumbosacral spinal cord of rats with chronic constriction injury (CCI) of the sciatic nerve that received NAC (150mg/kg/day, i.p.) or 0.9% saline...

Chronic neuroinflammation plays an important role in the development and maintenance of neuropathic pain. The compound flexibilide, which can be obtained from cultured soft coral, possesses anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects in the rat carrageenan peripheral inflammation model. In the present study, we investigated the antinociceptive properties of flexibilide in the rat chronic constricti...