PURPOSE Although case-control studies have evaluated the role of variant inflammatory-related loci in prostate cancer, their impact is virtually unknown among men of African descent. To address this, we evaluated the impact of inflammatory cytokine single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on prostate cancer risk for men of African descent. METHODS Forty-four SNPs in inflammatory cytokine-associ...

OBJECTIVE To explore the possible link between ozone and asthma through analyzing Th1/Th2 differentiation of T cells following incubation with conditioned medium from the BEAS-2B cells exposed to ozone in vitro. METHOD Bronchial epithelial cell line, BEAS-2B, was cultured using an air-liquid interface culture system in a CO2 incubator and exposed to 0 or 0.16 or 0.25 mg/m3 of ozone for 8 h. T...

BACKGROUND Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Nearly 50% of patients with stages I and II non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) will die from recurrent disease despite surgical resection. No reliable clinical or molecular predictors are currently available for identifying those at high risk for developing recurrent disease. As a consequence, it is not po...

Many components of the CHIEF (Convergence of Hormones, Inflammation, and Energy Related Factors) pathway could influence survival given their involvement in cell growth, apoptosis, angiogenesis, and tumor invasion stimulation. We used ARTP (Adaptive Rank Truncation Product) to test if genes in the pathway were associated with colorectal cancer-specific mortality. Colon cancer (n = 1555) and rec...

OBJECTIVE Interleukin-8 (IL-8) receptors IL8RA and IL8RB (IL8RA/B) on neutrophil membranes bind to IL-8 with high affinity and play a critical role in neutrophil recruitment to sites of injury and inflammation. This study tested the hypothesis that administration of rat pulmonary arterial endothelial cells (ECs) overexpressing IL8RA/B can accelerate the adhesion of ECs to the injured lung and i...

Porphyromonas gingivalis lipopolysaccharide (Pg-LPS) circulates systemically in over 50% of periodontal disease (PD) patients and is associated with increased matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-9. We hypothesized that low systemic Pg-LPS would stimulate an inflammatory response in the left ventricle (LV) through MMP-9, leading to a decrease in cardiac function. Wild-type (WT) and MMP-9 null mice (4...