BACKGROUND Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) has witnessed dramatic treatment advances over the past decade. However, with the exception of epoprostenol, data from short-term randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have not shown a benefit of these drugs on survival. There remains a need to differentiate between available therapies and current endpoint responses which in turn, could be used to ...

Ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament of the spine (OPLL) is characterized by ectopic bone formation in the spinal ligaments, and mechanical stress has been suggested to play an important role in the progression of OPLL. To identify the genes that participate in OPLL, the differential display reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method was used. A 283-base pair...

Prostacyclin is an arachidonic acid metabolite that modulates vascular tone within the lung. The current study evaluated the hypothesis that prostacyclin can also modulate tissue remodeling by affecting fibroblast-mediated contraction of extracellular matrix. To accomplish this, fibroblasts were cultured in three-dimensional native type I collagen gels in the presence of prostacyclin analogs: c...

Prostacyclin analogs, such as epoprostenol, treprostinil, iloprost, and beraprost, have long been used for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) treatment, yet their relative efficiency remains disputed. Eligible randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving the 4 therapies mentioned above were retrieved from PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane (up to August 1, 2015). Odds ratios (ORs) were estimated ...

Running title: BPS ameliorates diabetes mellitus Nahoko Sato, Masayuki Kaneko, Mitsutaka Tamura and Hajimu Kurumatani The First Pharmacology Laboratory, Pharmaceutical Research Labs, Toray Industries. Inc., Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan All correspondence should be addressed to: Nahoko Sato E-mail: [email protected] Submitted 28 September 2009 and accepted 21 December 2009. This is an unc...

Peripheral arterial disease (PAD), diagnosed by decreased ankle-brachial index (ABI), is a major clinical problem, affecting 8% of people 60 to 69 years old and at least 18% of people over age 70 (1). A substantial minority of patients with PAD report intermittent claudication (IC) (2). As the population ages, IC is an increasingly common cause of disability, particularly in elderly women (3). ...