amyloid protein. The aetiology of PH in this patient is still unclear. She was sero-negative for human immunodeficiency virus, and lacked the clinical symptoms that would indicate systemic sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus. She did not have preexisting chronic lung and liver disease or congestive heart disease. Direct association of MM with PH is unlikely in this case because dyspnoea ...

The topics discussed in this conference represent great scientific opportunity that we will exploit in the future. The objectives of the research programs at NIEHS have been to understand how chemicals interact with living material, cell metabolism, function, and structure. If these mechanisms are understood, it is easier to make judgments about potential health effects and to suggest ways to a...

REFERENCES 1 Andreas S, Anker SD, Scanlon PD, Somers VK. Neurohumoral activation as a link to systemic manifestation of chronic lung disease. Chest 2005; 128: 3618–3624. 2 Kanazawa H, Okamoto T, Hirata K, Yoshikawa J. Deletion polymorphisms in the angiotensin converting enzyme gene are associated with pulmonary hypertension evoked by exercise challenge in patients with chronic obstructive pulmo...

The Solt-Farber resistant hepatocyte (RH) and Reddy (dietary peroxisome proliferator) hepatocarcinogenesis protocols were utilized to induce both preneoplastic and neoplastic nodules in male F-344 rats. Total cellular polypeptides from normal liver, ciprofibrate (CP)-induced and RH nodules were analyzed for both qualitative and quantitative changes using computer-assisted, high resolution two-d...

Uncontrolled pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) results in right ventricular (RV) hypertrophy (RVH), progressive RV failure, and low cardiac output leading to increased morbidity and mortality (McLaughlin VV, Archer SL, Badesch DB, Barst RJ, Farber HW, Lindner JR, Mathier MA, McGoon MD, Park MH, Rosenson RS, Rubin LJ, Tapson VF, Varga J. J Am Coll Cardiol 53: 1573-1619, 2009). Although the e...

Smoking Bans Yield Long-Term Benefits When it comes to linking cigarette smoke to heart attacks, one might assume that such a link would apply only as long as one is smoking or being exposed to secondhand smoke. That’s not necessarily true, however, at least according to a follow-up study of people living in and around Pueblo, Colorado. In the 2 January 2009 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Wee...

We propose a refinement of the Ray-Singer torsion, which can be viewed as an analytic counterpart of the refined combinatorial torsion introduced by Turaev. Given a closed, oriented manifold of odd dimension with fundamental group Γ, the refined torsion is a complex valued, holomorphic function defined for representations of Γ which are close to the space of unitary representations. When the re...

Cancer is second only to heart disease as the leading cause of death among Americans (1). Age-adjusted cancer mortality rates have declined over the last decade, reversing the upward trend of earlier years (2). Notwithstanding, cancer might soon be the leading cause of death in the U.S. because mortality rates from heart disease have declined even faster due to control of hypertension, hypercho...

Smoking Bans Yield Long-Term Benefits When it comes to linking cigarette smoke to heart attacks, one might assume that such a link would apply only as long as one is smoking or being exposed to secondhand smoke. That’s not necessarily true, however, at least according to a follow-up study of people living in and around Pueblo, Colorado. In the 2 January 2009 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Wee...

The Pediatric Oncology Group (POG) phase 3 trial 9404 was designed to determine the effectiveness of high-dose methotrexate (HDM) when added to multi-agent chemotherapy based on the Dana-Farber backbone. Children with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) or advanced lymphoblastic lymphoma (T-NHL) were randomized at diagnosis to receive/not receive HDM (5 g/m² as a 24-hour infusion) at we...