Obesity is a condition in which a person has an abnormally high and unhealthy proportion of body fat. To measure obesity, researchers commonly use a scale known as the body mass index (BMI). BMI is calculated by dividing a person's weight (in kilograms) by their height (in meters) squared. BMI provides a more accurate measure of obesity or being overweight than weight alone. What is obesity? Co...

emerging new medications in the treatment of hbv produces hope and promises for curing of hbv. over the past decade, the development of oral nucleoside/nucleotide analogs (nas) with favorable potencies and tolerabilities has led to substantial advances in chronic hepatitis b (chb) therapy. the oral anti-hbv agents currently approved are lamivudine, adefovir dipivoxil , entecavir , telbivudine, ...

Calcific aortic stenosis, with a prevalence of 3-9%, is the most frequent heart valve disease and the main cause for valve replacement in patients over 60 years of age. Once thought to be caused by a passive calcium precipitate within the aortic valve leaflets, there is now increasing evidence that development and progression of calcific aortic valve disease may be triggered by underlying genet...

The development of resistance to drugs poses one of the greatest threats to malaria control. In Africa, the efficacy of readily affordable antimalarial drugs is declining rapidly, while highly efficacious drugs tend to be too expensive. Cost-effective strategies are needed to extend the useful life spans of antimalarial drugs. Observations in South-East Asia on combination therapy with artemisi...

Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PH) is a chronic, progressive, and fatal lung disease characterized by narrowing of pulmonary arteries associated with muscular thickening and intimal proliferation, known as remodeling. If untreated, the 5-year survival rate of PH is 34% (McLaughlin et al., 2002). Unfortunately, there is no systematic strategy established to effectively manage this devastating ...

T he new American Thoracic Society/European Respiratory Society classification of the idiopathic interstitial pneumonias [1] has redefined entities previously grouped as ‘‘idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis’’ (IPF), but carrying a much better prognosis than that disorder. As a result, the core entity of IPF is now diagnosed with greater precision than ever before. The outcome has worsened correspond...

Gene therapy, the treatment of any disorder or pathophysiologic state on the basis of the transfer of genetic information, was a high-priority goal in the 1990s. The lung is a major target of gene therapy for genetic disorders, such as cystic fibrosis and alpha1-antitrypsin deficiency, and for other diseases, including lung cancer, malignant mesothelioma, pulmonary inflammation, surfactant defi...

An urgent current need in regenerative medicine is that of identifying a plentiful, safe and ethically acceptable stem cell source for the development of therapeutic strategies to restore functionality in damaged or diseased organs and tissues. In this context, human term placenta represents a prime candidate, as it is available in nearly unlimited supply, is ethically problem-free and easily p...

There is a potential role for antisense oligonucleotides in the treatment of disease. The principle of antisense technology is the sequence-specific binding of an antisense oligonucleotide to target mRNA, resulting in the prevention of gene translation. The specificity of hybridisation makes antisense treatment an attractive strategy to selectively modulate the expression of genes involved in t...