While tremendous advances have improved the understanding of inflammatory bowel disease, with regard to environmental risk factors as well as the biochemical nature of the inflammatory process, a determination of primary etiology remains elusive. Numerous theories have been proposed in the past century concerning the cause of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis with implications for specific...

A compared study of the morphology of the alimentary tract and liver of seven selected species corresponding to the main clades of the Characidae family is presented herein. Three new set of characters corresponding to 1) alimentary tract gross anatomy, 2) alimentary tract histology and 3) liver gross anatomy are evaluated as potential sources of data for future phylogenetic studies of the Char...

Alimentary/Tract/Motility/ 1 SMOOTH MUSCLE Smooth muscle lines the walls of hollow organs (eg. intestine, uterus), the circulatory system (arteries and veins), and ducts of secretory glands. The primary role of smooth muscle is to regulate the diameter of the organ lumen which it surrounds. Although "smooth muscle" is used to categorize muscle components of these various tissues, there is a lar...

OBJECTIVES The retrosternal route has been an alternative for oesophageal reconstruction after oesophagectomy. But the longer route and the higher incidence for cervical anastomotic leakage compared with the posterior mediastinal approach have always hampered its wider use. However, with the recent work reported by Chen and colleagues, the anterior route has been confirmed to provide the shorte...

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are innate immune receptors expressed in all parts of the alimentary tract. However, analyses comparing expression in different segments and data on germ-free animals are lacking. Alimentary tract cancers show increased TLR expression. According to the field effect concept, carcinogenetic factors induce subtle cancer predisposing alterations in the whole organ. We stu...