Sulpicio G. Soriano, MD, FAAP‡ “All models are wrong, some models are useful” This quote by the statistician George E. P. Box seems to have relevance for the current preeminent controversy in pediatric anesthesiology, namely, developmental neuroapoptotic cell death after an anesthetic exposure in the immature brain. Worldwide, general anesthetics and sedatives are used in hundreds of thousands ...

Purpose: Saposin C is a multifunctional protein known to activate lysosomal enzymes and induce membrane fusion in an acidic environment. Excessive accumulation of lipid-coupled saposin C in lysosomes is cytotoxic. Because neoplasms generate an acidic microenvironment, caused by leakage of lysosomal enzymes and hypoxia, we hypothesized that saposin C may be an effective anticancer agent. We inve...

We count the number of nonisomorphic geometric minimum spanning trees formed by adding a single point to an n-point set in d-dimensional space, by relating it to a family of convex decompositions of space. The O(n log 2−d n) bound that we obtain significantly improves previously known bounds and is tight to within a polylogarithmic factor. The minimum Steiner tree of a point set is the tree of ...

Healthy People 2010, 1 which lays out goals for the health of the U.S. population in the next decade, establishes two overarching aims: (1) to increase the quality and years of healthy life, and (2) to eliminate health disparities. Unfortunately, these aims are often in conflict. Many improvements in health care, including preventive care, that increase quality and years of healthy life will in...

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) have been isolated from about 50 Japanese patients since the first incidence in 1996 (1, 6; N. Fujita, M. Yoshimura, T. Komori, K. Tanimoto, and Y. Ike, Letter, Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 42:2150, 1998). A connection between Japanese outbreaks and imported chickens has been suggested (5; Y. Ozawa, T. Nomura, T. Murata, K. Tanimoto, S. Fujimoto, and Y. I...

I n the late 19th century, William Osler notoriously quipped that treating infants with cardiac defects was futile, thereby encouraging Maude Abbott to pursue her rigorous studies of pathologic heart specimens. Ultimately, this work resulted in The Atlas of Congenital Cardiac Disease, which is widely regarded as the first systematic catalogue of cardiovascular malformation (CVM) and therefore t...

Cardiac remodeling is an adaptive response to chronically increased wall stress. Adaptive remodeling of the myocardium, caused either by increased workload or ionotropic stress, requires mediators for the communication of cardiac cells with their surrounding extracellular matrix.1 Integrins are likely candidates that transduce increased mechanical force into the intracellular biochemical signal...

Convergence-retraction nystagmus is an irregular, jerky nystagmus in which both eyeballs rhythmically converge and retract into the orbit, particularly on attempting an upward gaze. In humans it is seen as part of Parinaud’s syndrome, also known as dorsal midbrain syndrome, in which a lesion of dorsally located midbrain structures (the ventral pretectum, the periaqueductal area, and the medial ...

IT IS HAS BEEN OVER TWO DECADES since Murry and colleagues (15) published their seminal study describing ischemic preconditioning, a phenomenon whereby brief antecedent periods of ischemia-reperfusion profoundly protect the heart against a subsequent lethal period of ischemia and reperfusion. This intrinsic cardioprotective mechanism has been demonstrated in every animal tested, including human...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has a number of defining characteristics that enables it to address questions that no other assessment tools can address. This chapter begins by demonstrating how the use of LCA in the late 2000s led to a drastic shift in the dominant perception that biofuels were “green”, “sustainable” or “carbon neutral”, which led to a change in biofuel policies. This is followed ...