PURPOSE The use of morning basal serum cortisol levels as an alternative to dynamic testing for assessment of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has previously been reported. The purpose of this study was to determine the lower and upper cutoff values that would obviate subsequent HPA axis testing. METHODS A single-centre, retrospective study from a tertiary care endocrinology clinic w...

[1] Changes in tropospheric water vapor over the Arctic are examined for the period 1979 to 2010 using humidity and temperature data from nine high latitude radiosonde stations north of 70 N with nearly complete records, and from six atmospheric reanalyses, emphasizing the three most modern efforts, MERRA, CFSR and ERA-Interim. Based on comparisons with the radiosonde profiles, the reanalyses a...

Biochemistry and genetics of PKU The normal route for Phe metabolism is its hydroxylation to tyrosine, catalyzed by PAH and requiring tetrahydrobiopterin as a cofactor. The human PAH gene is located on chromosome 12q23.2 and contains 13 exons. More than 500 disease-causing mutations have been identified in patients with PKU or hyperphenylalaninaemia (HPA), 67% of them being missense mutations. ...

ackground: Knowing the human platelet antigens (HPA) and genes frequency in different populations is important not only for population studies but also for clinical transfusion practice. HPA genes frequency in Iran is not evaluated, so we investigated the HPA-2, HPA-3, and HPA-5 frequency and their polymorphism. Materials and Methods: DNA from 120 Iranians (99 Iranian blood donors and 21 patie...

introduction dust storms, one type of dust event, are in most cases the result of turbulent winds, including convective haboobs, which raise large quantities of dust from desert surfaces and reduce visibility to less than 1 km. this dust reaches concentrations in excess of 6000 mg m3 in severe events. the major dust source regions are areas of arid and hyper-arid, with mean annual rainfalls of ...