OBJECTIVE To study the demographic and clinical parameters of three different categories of obesity, with particular focus on a cohort of individuals with BMI > or = 50 kg/m2, the fastest growing category of obesity. DESIGN Over 700 obese individuals were studied (186 with BMI = 30-39 kg/m2, 316 with BMI = 40-49 kg/m2 and 290 with BMI > or = 50 kg/m2). RESULTS Median BMI was 51 kg/m2 for pa...

PURPOSE Oral cancer is the fifth most common form of cancer in the world and comprises 6.5% of all cancer deaths. Since one of the major risk factors for oral cancer is tobacco use, we hypothesized that polymorphic genes coding for tobacco carcinogen-metabolizing enzymes may play a role in oral cancer susceptibility. MATERIALS AND METHODS To investigate the association between polymorphisms o...

OBJECTIVE We investigate the prognostic role of pre-treatment ratio between Type 1 (M1) and Type 2 (M2) tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) in locally advanced cervical cancer (LACC) patients treated with chemoradiation (CT/RT). METHODS 84 consecutive LACC patients treated with cisplatin-based CT/RT for a total dose of 50.0 Gy, followed by radical surgery were analysed. Double-staining immuno...

background and aims: influenza a virus of orthomyxoviridae family is able to create pandemic influenza. vaccination is the most effective way to prevent influenza virus infection. matrix protein 2 (m2) is a homotetramer ion channel with 97 amino acids length and highly conserved among influenza viruses and is considered for development of a universal influenza vaccine. materials and methods: we...

Influenza A virus poses serious health threat to humans. Neutralizing antibodies against the highly conserved M2 ion channel is thought to offer broad protection against influenza A viruses. Here, we screened synthetic Camel single-domain antibody (VHH) libraries against native M2 ion channel protein. One of the isolated VHHs, M2-7A, specifically bound to M2-expressed cell membrane as well as i...

A graph G is called randomly H − decomposable if every maximal H − packing in G uses all edges in G. G is called H − equipackable if every maximal H − packing in G is also a maximum H − packing in G. M2 − decomposable graphs, randomly M2 − decomposable graphs and M2 − equipackable graphs have been characterized. The definitions could be generalized to multigraphs. And M2 − decomposable multigra...

Let m2 denote the infinite dimensional N-graded Lie algebra defined by the basis ei for i ≥ 1 and by relations [e1, ei] = ei+1 for all i ≥ 2, [e2, ej ] = ej+2 for all j ≥ 3. We compute in this article the bracket structure on H(m2;m2), H (m2;m2) and in relation to this, we establish that there are only finitely many true deformations of m2 in each weight by constructing them explicitely. It tur...

Results The point prevalence of AD in our cohort was 18.7% (299/1597) at 6 months and 15.52% (232/1494) at 12 months. TEWL was lowest at birth, with mean reading 7.32 gwater/m2/hr (±3.33 gwater/m2/hr). It rose between birth and 2 months, mean 10.97 gwater/m2/hr (±7.98 gwater/m2/hr) where it plateaued at 6 months with mean reading 10.71 gwater/m2/hr (±7.10 gwater/ m2/hr). A raised TEWL at 2 mont...