VU University Medical Center, Departments of Pathology1, Physiology2, Cardiac Surgery3, Cardiology4, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. ICaR-VU5, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Netherlands Forensic Institute6 (NFI), The Hague, the Netherlands. Sanquin Research, Department of Immunopathology7, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Academic Medical Center, Department of Hematology8 Amsterdam, The Netherlands Maastri...

PURPOSE To investigate the impact of diabetic retinopathy on quantitative retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) assessment and diagnostic power for glaucoma by scanning laser polarimetry (GDx-VCC) and optical coherence tomography (StratusOCT). METHODS The individual RNFL parameters of GDx and OCT were obtained for 170 eyes (one eye from each of 170 subjects [45 healthy, 47 glaucoma, 40 diabetes, a...

The hand-foot (HF) impairment score in leprosy patients is the sum of the WHO disability grades for hands and feet. This retrospective study explored the possibility of using the HF score for evaluation of the effectiveness of corticosteroid treatment programmes for nerve function impairment (NFI). Changes in the score were compared with changes in sensory testing (ST) and voluntary muscle test...

The plant-specific NAC transcription factors play important roles in plant response to drought stress. Here, we have compared the expression levels of a subset of GmNAC genes in drought-tolerant DT51 and drought-sensitive MTD720 under both normal and drought stress conditions aimed at identifying correlation between GmNAC expression levels and drought tolerance degree, as well as potential GmNA...

BACKGROUND Fatigue is a common symptom in Stroke. Several self-report scales are available to measure this debilitating symptom but concern has been expressed about their construct validity. OBJECTIVE To examine the reliability and validity of a recently developed scale for multiple sclerosis (MS) fatigue, the Neurological Fatigue Index (NFI-MS), in a sample of stroke patients. METHOD Six p...

We report BeppoSAX NFI observations of the X-ray source SAX J1747.0–2853 recently discovered in the region of the Galactic Center. The presence of type I X-ray bursts indicates that this source, positionally coincident with the transient GX 0.2–0.2 observed in 1976, is a neutron star accreting from a low mass companion.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the presence of atypical birefringence patterns, as measured by the typical scan score (TSS), on the diagnostic accuracy of a scanning laser polarimeter (the GDx VCC; Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc., Dublin, CA) assessed by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for discriminating between glaucoma and healthy eyes. METHODS Tw...

Increasing access to extensively replicated and broadly distributed tree-ring collections has led to a greater use of these large data sets to investigate climate forcing on tree growth. However, the number of chronologies added to large accessible databases is declining and few are updated, while chronologies are often sparsely distributed and are more representative of marginal growing enviro...

PURPOSE To compare the diagnostic accuracy of scanning laser polarimetry (SLP) parameters between images taken with enhanced corneal compensation (ECC) and those with variable corneal compensation (VCC) and to explore the effect of atypical birefringence patterns on this accuracy. DESIGN Cross-sectional observational study. PARTICIPANTS Forty-one healthy subjects and 92 patients with primar...

Metallothionein (MT) promoter was methylated in rat hepatoma and in mouse lymphosarcoma cells by methylation of cytosine within the CpG dinucleotide region. After demethylation of MT-I promoter in mouse lymphosarcoma cells or in the transplanted rat hepatoma with 5-azacytidine, a potent inhibitor of DNA methyltransferase, the promoter was activated in response to heavy metal treatment. MT-I pro...