Hyperinsulinemia and Estrogen-Deficiency as Risk Factors for Stroke in Women To the Editor: We read with great interest the recent article by Dr. Ho and colleagues1 dealing with the relationship between diabetes and stroke mortality in women. The results of their study demonstrated that women with diabetes mellitus and no prevalent cardiovascular diseases (CVD) had a 3-fold–increased fatal stro...

Receptors for insulin and other hormones are often influenced by their environment, including fatty acid content and membrane fluidity. Y79 retinoblastoma cells enriched with arachidonic or docosahexaenoic acid show an increase in membrane fluidity determined by fluorescence polarization using the plasma membrane-specific probe, trimethylammonium-diphenylhexatriene. Unlike cells enriched with p...

Salmonella typhimurium cells were subjected to pulsed electric field (PEF) treatment at 25 kV/cm for 0-4 ms to investigate the effect of PEF on the cytoplasmic membrane lipids and oxidative injury of cells. Results indicated that PEF treatment induced a decrease of membrane fluidity of Salmonella typhimurium (S. typhimuriumi), possibly due to the alterations of fatty acid biosynthesis-associate...

The mechanism by which dietary unsaturated fatty acids lower low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol is unknown. Unsaturated fatty acids incorporated into the cell membrane can increase membrane fluidity and, as a result, dramatically alter membrane-dependent cell functions. Therefore, we examined the effect of long-term dietary consumption of corn oil and coconut oil with and without cholest...

The antioxidant activity of five new compounds from a group of quaternary ammonium salts with antioxidant function has been investigated. The effect of the compounds on the degree of lipid oxidation in the erythrocyte membrane subjected to UV radiation was studied. It was found that all the salts used decreased oxidation of the lipids in the erythrocyte membrane. The antioxidant activity of the...

Chronic lindane intoxication by injecting subcutaneously the toxicant, resulted in an altered lipid pattern in rat ventral prostate membranes. An increase of membrane fluidity was also observed using a fluorescence polarization technique. When in vitro experiments were carried out with both treated and untreated rats, an interesting lack of parallelism was found, which could indicate the develo...

The polycystic kidney disease 1 (PKD1) gene product polycystin has been predicted to be an integral membrane protein involved in cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions. The erythrocyte membrane fluidity in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) patients is increased, and this may be due to a membrane cytoskeletal abnormality. The abnormal erythrocyte sodium-lithium countertranspor...

Sperm protein tyrosine phosphorylation has been associated with capacitation, motility changes, zona binding, and fertilizing ability. We previously demonstrated that gradient-isolated human sperm subpopulations differ in their plasma membrane composition, their ability to phosphorylate proteins in tyrosine residues, and their capacity to undergo hyperactivation. In this study, we have characte...

on cell morphology, i.e. the formation of stomatocytes, when the native mixed-acid PC species in the monolayer are replaced by (1,2-dilinoleoyl)-PC (Fig. 1). This species has a pronounced cone shape because of a larger cross-section at the end of its hydrophobic tails. Consequently, the outer monolayer, and thereby the whole membrane, will bend inwards. Further support for the above hypothesis ...