Heparin coating modifies complement activation during extracorporeal circulation much more effectively than systemically administered heparin. This rabbit study was undertaken to address possible mechanisms responsible for this difference. We evaluated the effect of heparin coating on complement activation and subsequently the release of leukocyte inflammatory mediators during extracorporeal ci...

During routine addition of penicillinase (beta-lactamase) to patients sera, we found that the capacity of some of these sera to kill serum-sensitive gram-negative organisms was significantly decreased. Further controlled studies showed that penicillinase decreased both the bactericidal activity of normal human sera and the total hemolytic activity (CH50) of complement in these sera. The decreas...

In experimentally induced malnutrition in rats, there was no significant difference between the measured level of complement activity of the classical pathway (50% hemolytic complement [CH50]) and that of the alternative pathway (ACH50), although the levels of complement components C1, C4, C2, and C3 were depressed significantly. The complement activity showed a temporary elevation with a peak ...

and pleuritic and joint symptoms. Proteinuria fell from 13 to 8 g in 24 hours, but immune complex levels rose again within hours of each session. CH50 fell, but later recovered. Free Clq did not appear. She relapsed after eight weeks, and two plasmaphereses were performed with FFP to increase serum complement. Immune complex levels now continued to fall for several days after exchange, with a s...

Levels of IgG, IgA, IgM, the total haemolytic complement (CH50), and the individual components C1q, C3, C4, C6, and C7 were measured in 29 pleural effusions. Of these, 18 were associated with carcinoma of the bronchus and 11 were non-malignant effusions including empyemas. The level of IgG was significantly lower in the malignant group when compared with non-malignant effusions. The usefulness ...

BACKGROUND The challenge of reconstructing a sparse medical magnetic resonance image based on compressed sensing from undersampled k-space data has been investigated within recent years. As total variation (TV) performs well in preserving edge, one type of approach considers TV-regularization as a sparse structure to solve a convex optimization problem. Nevertheless, this convex optimization pr...

A lupus patient with a clinically quiescent disease stage will be described who had severely depressed C4 levels while levels of C3 en CH50 were normal. Additional testing revealed a homozygous C4A isotype deficiency as the cause of the very low C4 levels. It should be emphasized that in SLE, a (very) low C4 level does not always means (subclinical) disease activity.

Interaction of the human complement system in normal human serum (NHS) with serum-resistant and -sensitive Neisseria gonorrhoeae was evaluated to better understand the mechanism of serum-resistance. Complement activity (CH50) was depleted from NHS in a dose-dependent fashion by both serum-resistant and -sensitive N. gonorrhoeae. No detectable CH50 remained in NHS incubated with 10(9) colony-for...