Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Myotonic dystrophy (DM) is one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy, characterized by its hallmark symptom myotonia. DM is an autosomal dominant disease caused by a toxic gain of function RNA. The toxic RNA is produced from expanded non-coding CTG/CCTG repeats, and these CUG/CCUG repeats sequester ...

lesions in 1 week. Noncompliance with oral medications during October 1995 was associated with the appearance of new skin lesions. A new multidrug regimen was started in December 1995 with the combination of itraconazole (400 mg/d orally) and pentamidine (150 mg/d for 5 days and then 300 mg/d for 6 days intramuscularly). No improvement was observed. The initial therapeutic regimen (5fluorocytos...

Case report (Dr R F Miller) A 31 year old Caucasian man was admitted to this hospital for investigation offever, progressive weight loss and cavitating lesions on his chest radiograph. The patient was a business man, he was homosexual and denied intravenous drug abuse. He smoked 30 cigarettes per day and drank 2 units of alcohol per week. His past medical history began in 1977 when he suffered ...

In a previous works searching for new drugs with high efficiency, we reported the in vitro and in vivo antileishmanial activity of a series of diarylheptanoid structurally related to curcumin against L. amazonensis. This work describes the in vitro antileishmanial activity of a new series of diarylheptanoids and diarylpentanoids derivatives. These drugs were assayed against Leishmania amazonens...

A bioluminescent assay which employs the luciferin-luciferase ATP-dependent reaction was used to evaluate the viability of populations of Pneumocystis carinii derived from infected rat lungs. Contamination with host cells was reduced by a purification method which involved a combination of low- and high-speed centrifugations resulting in a 1,000-fold reduction of the rat cells while enriching f...

The antileishmanial activity of lapachol, isolapachol, and dihydrolapachol, along with soluble derivatives (potassium salt) and acetate was obtained. All the compounds were assayed against metacyclic promastigotes of two different species of Leishmania associated to tegumentar leishmaniasis: L. amazonensis and L. braziliensis. All compounds presented significant activity, being isolapachol acet...

Although the growth characteristics of Pneumocystis carinii have been described in several cell culture systems, the response of this organism to the drugs of choice, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and pentamidine isethionate, have not been described in vitro. The effect of various concentrations of drugs against P. carinii on the growth of this potentially hazardous opportunistic organism as we...