We compared mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells and fibroblasts (MEFs) for their ability to metabolically activate the environmental carcinogens benzo[a]pyrene (BaP), 3-nitrobenzanthrone (3-NBA) and aristolochic acid I (AAI), measuring DNA adduct formation by (32)P-postlabelling and expression of xenobiotic-metabolism genes by quantitative real-time PCR. At 2 μM, BaP induced Cyp1a1 expression in ME...

AIMS The benefits of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) on functional status, left ventricular (LV) remodelling and survival in patients with drug-refractory congestive heart failure (CHF), LV systolic dysfunction, and wide QRS have been demonstrated in randomized trials. However, the impact of CRT on right ventricular (RV) function, an independent prognostic factor in CHF remains question...

Phosphodiesterase 3 (PDE3) and PDE4 regulate levels of cyclic AMP, which are critical in various cell types involved in allergic airway inflammation. Although PDE4 inhibition attenuates allergic airway inflammation, reported side effects preclude its application as an antiasthma drug in humans. Case reports showed that enoximone, which is a smooth muscle relaxant that inhibits PDE3, is benefici...

OBJECT This retrospective review was conducted to determine the surgical treatment principle for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients with atlantoaxial instability (AAI). METHODS Thirteen patients with AAI, including 5 RA patients, received preoperative computed tomography- (CT-) based image-guided navigation system (IGS) in C1 lateral mass-C2 pedicle screw-rod system fixation (LC1-PC2 fixation...

Automatic accent inser·tion (AAI) is the problem of re-inserting accents (diacritics) into a text where they are missing. Unaccented French texts are still quite common in electronic media, as a result of a long history of character encoding problems and the lack of well-established conventions for typing accented characters on computer keyboards. We present an AAI method for French, based on a...

Application-level network relays possess many desirable properties, including support for communication between disconnected clients, increasing bandwidth between distant clients, and enabling routing around Internet failures. One problem not considered by existing systems is how to assign client load to relay servers in order to maximize throughput of the relay-system. In this paper, we are in...

This research is aimed to the determination of the changes in the cardiac energetic output for three different modes of cardiac rhythm pacing. The clinical investigation of thirteen patients with the permanent dual-chamber pacemaker implantation was carried out. The patients were taken to echocardiography examination conducted by way of three pacing modes (AAI, VVI and DDD). The myocardial ener...

This study of 45 high-risk mothers and infants examined the current indirect effects model of intergenerational transmission of disorganized attachment, which posits that maternal childhood experiences of loss or trauma contribute to maternal states of mind on the AAI which in turn contribute to infant disorganization. The severity of experiences of both abuse and loss were examined in relation...

BACKGROUND Cardiac memory (CM) refers to persistent T-wave changes on resumption of normal conduction after a period of abnormal ventricular activation. Traditionally, to observe CM, normal ventricular activation had to be restored, limiting the exploration of this phenomenon in clinical practice. OBJECTIVE This study sought to prove that CM can be detected during continuous aberrant activati...

BACKGROUND The extraction of the middle latency auditory evoked potentials (MLAEP) is usually done by moving time averaging (MTA) over many sweeps (often 250-1,000), which could produce a delay of more than 1 min. This problem was addressed by applying an autoregressive model with exogenous input (ARX) that enables extraction of the auditory evoked potentials (AEP) within 15 sweeps. The objecti...