BACKGROUND Ventricular assist devices (VAD) are implanted in patients with end-stage heart failure for bridging the time until heart transplantation, resulting in hemodynamic unloading of the failing heart, improved cardiac contractile and mitochondrial function, and reversal of cardiac hypertrophy. It is unknown whether VAD unloading may affect the cardiac endothelin (ET) system, which has bee...

introduction: acute leukemia covers a broad spectrum of hematological clonal diseases originating from the malignant transformation of stem cells. current chemotherapeutic methods result in an incomplete response to primary regimens in 30-40% of cases. methods: 20 patients who had been diagnosed with acute leukemia and who had displayed defined criteria in order to enter our study, were assesse...

Granulysin is a newly described cytolytic molecule released by CTL and NK cells via granule-mediated exocytosis. It shares homology with saposin-like proteins, including NK-lysin and amoebapores, and has been implicated in the lysis of tumor cells and microbes. In the present study we show that recombinant granulysin alone induces apoptosis of Jurkat cells. This apoptosis is associated with a s...

In this letter, a robust voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm is presented. This proposed VAD algorithm makes use of the perceptual wavelet-packet transform and the Teager energy operator to compute a robust parameter called voice activity shape for VAD. The main advantage of this algorithm is that the preset threshold values or a priori knowledge of the SNR usually needed in conventional V...

OBJECTIVE In recent years, claims have proliferated in cyberspace that wind turbines cause a large variety of symptoms and diseases. One of these, "vibroacoustic disease" (VAD) is frequently mentioned. The aim of this study is to examine the quality of the evidence on how VAD came to be associated with wind turbine exposure by wind farm opponents. METHODS Searches of the web (Google advanced)...

OBJECTIVES We examined the effect of mechanical unloading with ventricular assist device (VAD) therapy on myocardial inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) expression and cardiomyocyte apoptosis in patients with end-stage heart failure (HF). BACKGROUND Despite advances in medical therapy, HF continues to be a progressive and ultimately fatal disorder. High levels of iNOS expression are presen...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the diagnostic value of brief cognitive tests in differentiating vascular dementia (VaD) from Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHOD Fifteen patients with mild VaD, 15 patients with mild probable AD and 30 healthy controls, matched for age, education and dementia severity, were submitted to the following cognitive tests: clock drawing (free drawing and copy), category and l...

The ETSI AMR-2 VAD is rigorously evaluated in clean and noisy conditions. The VAD is then simplified and optimized for porting to an ultra low-resource DSP system using a fast oversampled DFT filterbank. The parameters of the low-resource VAD are optimized using two speakers and 6 types of noise at SNRs from –10 to 20 dB. The VAD is then tested by employing sentences from two other speakers and...