OBJECTIVE Inflammation and complement activation initiated by mannose-binding lectin (MBL) may be implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetic vascular complications. We investigated serum MBL levels in type 2 diabetes with diabetic nephropathy (DN) and with persistent normoalbuminuria. METHOD Serum MBL levels were determined in 242 type 2 diabetes with overt nephropathy and 242 type 2 diabetes...

There is now growing evidence supporting the association between renal insufficiency and accumulation of plasma homocysteine (Hcy). However, the role of Hcy in the development of diabetic nephropathy (DN) in type 2 diabetic patients is not clearly elucidated. To this end, we performed a prospective observational study in 208 patients and 49 controls. We show that baseline level of Hcy is signif...

BACKGROUND Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is associated with hypertension, expanded extracellular volume and impaired renal Na(+) excretion. It was hypothesized that aberrant glomerular filtration of serine proteases in DN causes proteolytic activation of the epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) in the kidney by excision of an inhibitory peptide tract from the γ subunit. METHODS In a cross-sectional d...

The disjointly non-singular (DN-S) operators T∈L(E,Y) from a Banach lattice E to space Y are those which strictly singular in no closed subspace generated by disjoint sequence of non-zero vectors. When is order continuous with weak unit, can be represented as dense ideal some L1(μ) space, and we show that each T∈DN-S(E,Y) admits an extension T‾∈DN-S(L1(μ),PO), where PO certain derive both T T⁎⁎...

Neoplastic melanocytes may exhibit certain differentiation characteristics of other neural-crest derivatives. We aimed to study the expression of microtubule-associated protein 2 (MAP-2) in different types of melanocytic skin lesions. Paraffin-embedded sections of 42 benign nevi (BN), 22 dysplastic nevi (DN), 45 superficial spreading melanomas (SSMs), and 15 subcutaneous melanoma metastases wer...

OBJECTIVE The role of hypercoagulability in the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy (DN) remains elusive. We recently reported the increased infiltration of macrophages expressing tissue factor in diabetic kidney glomeruli; tissue factor activates coagulation factor X (FX) to FXa, which in turn stimulates protease-activated receptor 2 (PAR2) and causes inflammation. APPROACH AND RESULTS Here...

Double network (DN) gels are anomalously robust but soft and wet materials, whose maximum stress in compression reaches 30MPa and surface friction coefficient reaches 0.001 simultaneously. The DN gels also have shock absorbency, permeability, and biocompatibility. Thus it is expected that the DN gels will be applied to artificial joints, artificial cartilages, and artificial blood vessels. In t...

BACKGROUND Invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells develop in the thymus and branch off from the maturation pathway of conventional T cell at the DP stage. While different stages of iNKT cellular development have been defined, the actual time that iNKT cell precursors spend at each stage is still unknown. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDING Here we report on maturation dynamics of post-selection DN...

Point mutations in methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) and hyperhomocysteinemia were implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy (DN) in many ethnic groups. This study addressed the association of C677T and A1298C single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of MTHFR gene with DN in Tunisian type 2 diabetes (T2DM) patients. Study subjects comprised 93 DN patients, 267 patients with...