PURPOSE Choledochocystolithiasis and its associated complications such as cholangitis and pancreatitis are managed by endoscopic retrograde cholangiography (ERC), with endoscopic stone extraction followed by laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC). However, affected patients present with complex conditions linked to operative difficulties in performing LC. The aim of this study was to elucidate the p...

Popular belief has it that alcohol, particularly red wine, protects against atherosclerosis and associated cardio- and cerebrovascular conditions. That presumption motivates this paper, which describes the mechanisms underlying the J-shaped risk curve for alcohol use, with benefits for vascular disease risk at low consumption levels and harmful effects--both directly on the user and indirectly ...

Introduction Major global stakeholder groups including the United Nations, World Health Organization and Institute of Medicine seek to raise awareness of the threat to global health and security of chronic and non-communicable diseases. These conditions comprise 50-85% of the global annual morbidity burden and constitute a major drain on national economies. To move from awareness of this proble...

A novel method for the direct fabrication of arrays of micropatterned polymeric and carbon nanofiber structures on any substrate is developed. First SU-8, an epoxy-based negative photoresist, is electrospun under optimized conditions to produce a layer of polymeric nanofibers. Next, this nanofibrous mat is micropatterned using photolithography, and finally, pyrolysis produces ordered arrays of ...

Heparan sulfate glycosaminoglycans (HSGAGs) are an important subset of complex polysaccharides that represent the third major class of biopolymer, along with polynucleic acids and polypeptides. However, the importance of HSGAGs in biological processes is underappreciated because of a lack of effective molecular tools to correlate specific structures with functions. Only recently have significan...

Event-related potentials were recorded in a paradigm where an unrelated word was interposed between two related words. In one condition, the intervening item was masked and in another condition it was not. The N400 component indicated that priming of the related word was disrupted by the intervening item whether it was masked or not. The data are interpreted to be inconsistent with retrieval mo...

The intrinsic cycle length of the ventricular parasystolic pacemaker may be modulated by electrotonic influence of intervening ventricular depolarizations. In order to quantify the magnitude of modulation in relation to the timing of the intervening depolarization, a curve of influence was constructed in a patient with ventricular parasystole. The current communication deals with the detailed d...

We have isolated and sequenced a tRNAPhe gene from Neurospora crassa. Hybridization analyses suggest that trnaPhe is the only tRNA encoded on the cloned 5 kb DNA fragment. The tRNAPhe gene contains an intervening sequence 16 nucleotides in length located one nucleotide 3' to the anticodon position. The tRNAPhe coding region of Neurospora and yeast are 91% conserved, whereas their intervening se...

A Monte Carlo study compared 14 methods to test the statistical significance of the intervening variable effect. An intervening variable (mediator) transmits the effect of an independent variable to a dependent variable. The commonly used R. M. Baron and D. A. Kenny (1986) approach has low statistical power. Two methods based on the distribution of the product and 2 difference-in-coefficients m...