Benchmarks Microarrays are a powerful tool for functional studies at the molecular level (1,2). Depending on the experiment, users have a variety of commercial and homemade choices. Most commercially available microarrays come with protocols already optimized for repro-ducibility and sensitivity. However, despite continued reductions in the cost of microarrays, commercially available labeling k...

To the Editor: Arterial stiffness is an independent predictor of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. 1 It should come as no surprise that researchers are currently looking for measures of arterial stiffness that are easy to record even under ambulatory conditions. In this Journal, Gosse and colleagues 2 recently compared three indexes, derived from individual ambulatory blood pressure (BP) ...

Some factors influencing absorption rates of the digestion products of protein and carbohydrate from the proximal jejunum of man and their possible nutritional implications Ideal requirements of dietary energy (calories) and protein and its amino-acid ratio are difficult to determine'. At least one essential ingredient is frequently present in an inadequate concentration in the diet of a vast p...

The absorption of vitamin B12 can be determined by several methods based on the measurement of the radioisotope-labelled vitamin in serum, faeces, and urine, and by external counting over the liver. In general these test procedures distinguish clearly between normal values and those obtained in individuals with pernicious anaemia, but it has been claimed that serial tests by the Schilling urina...

associated with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: report of two cases. The liver in systemic lupus erythematosus: pathological analysis of 52 cases and review of Japanese autopsy registry data. Hum Pathol. In press. Sir: The article of Cooper et al, on repro-ducibility of radiological assessment of the knee joint in osteoarthritis,' considers a subject integral to the science of rheumatology. The ...

Is this issue of the journal, Kim et al. 1) aimed to explain the association between epicardial fat thickness (EFT) and neutro-phil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) as systemic inflammatory markers in hypertensive patients according to diurnal variation of blood pressure (BP). They concluded that EFT and NLR are independently associated with impaired diurnal variation of BP in hypertensive patients. R...

As cardiovascular death remains major cause of death worldwide , there are growing needs for risk evaluation for cardiovas-cular event. Arterial stiffness, which refers to the rigidity of arterial wall, increases in the elderly person as well as patients with atherosclerotic disease. Based on the belief that increased vascular stiffness precedes atherosclerotic vascular event, there were attemp...

To the Editor: In response to the Letter by Eross et al. (1): we appreciate their comments on our work with glycated hemoglobin (gHb) from blood samples dried on filter paper (2, 3) but we believe that some important points in our paper were missed. We, too, have had extensive experience with the thiobarbituric acid (TBA) method (4-7) and have used it with blood samples dried on glucose oxidase...

For a large class of Markov operators on trees we prove the formula HD = h=l connecting the Hausdorr dimension of the harmonic measure on the tree boundary, the rate of escape l and the asymptotic entropy h. Applications of this formula include random walks on free groups, conditional random walks, random walks in random environment and random walks on treed equivalence relations. 0. Introducti...

Editorial In recent years various classes of drugs have been studied as agents to aid in anesthesia and analgesia that were not originally designed for these therapeutic uses. One example is the use of ␣ 2-adrenergic agonists as analgesic/anesthetic adjuvants (1). Since these drugs (e.g., clonidine) were primarily developed for the treatment of cardiovascular disorders, it is not surprising tha...