Ventilator-induced lung injury and ventilator-induced diaphragmatic dysfunction are major complications in mechanically ventilated patients with acute respiratory failure. Invasive ventilation adds a further burden by increasing the risk of infections. An approach that protects both lung and diaphragm is pivotal. Mirabella and colleagues compared conventional controlled ventilation with a mode ...

Another “Brick in the Wall” The latest innovation for advancing diabetes care is not a new pharmacologic class; it represents a new “twist” on one of the oldest pharmacologic agents known for treatment of diabetes. After 80 years of clinical use and after many years of research for alternative means of delivery (including dermal, nasal, and oral approaches), insulin delivered by pulmonary inhal...

T he belief that a genetic susceptibility to the development of sarcoidosis exists is supported by several lines of evidence: 1) monozygotic twins are more often concordant for the disease than dizygotic twins; 2) sarcoidosis patients are more likely than healthy subjects to report a sibling or parent affected with the disease; 3) prevalence, incidence and severity of sarcoidosis vary widely am...

In this work we review, in the framework of the so-called brick wall model, the divergence problem arising in the one loop calculations of various thermody-namical quantities, like entropy, internal energy and heat capacity. Particularly we find that, if one imposes that entanglement entropy is equal to the Bekenstein-Hawking one, the model gives problematic results. Then a proposal of solution...

IL-20 and Atherosclerosis : Another Brick In the Wall Print ISSN: 1079-5642. Online ISSN: 1524-4636 Copyright © 2006 American Heart Association, Inc. All rights reserved. Greenville Avenue, Dallas, TX 75231 is published by the American Heart Association, 7272 Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology doi: 10.1161/01.ATV.0000237564.81178.bb 2006;26:1929-1930 Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Bio...

We have considered the divergence structure in the brick-wall model for the statistical mechanical entropy of a quantum field in thermal equilibrium with a rotating BTZ black hole. Especially, the contribution to entropy from superradiant modes is carefully incorporated, leading to a very different result from known ones in the literature. That is, it is positive and also has a leading order di...

Prehistory It is possible to trace the history of studies on cell walls back to the time of Nehemiah Grew, who dissected plant organs and tissues, under both the naked eye and a microscope, and exhibited his observations to the Royal Society of London from May 15, 1672 to April 2, 1674 (Grew 1682). He described plant organs as being composed of cells in the same way that a tower is constructed ...

Multiple studies have shown that the cytokine leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) is protective of the myocardium in the acute stress of ischemia-reperfusion. All three major intracellular signaling pathways that are activated by LIF in cardiac myocytes have been linked to actions that protect against oxidative stress and cell death, either at the level of the mitochondrion or via nuclear transcri...

After a long debate, due to conflicting data from clinical studies, homocysteine is now largely accepted as a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases including stroke. To date, the role of elevated homocysteine levels in stroke recurrences has not been evaluated. In the present issue of Clinical Science, Zhang and co-workers prove that Chinese patients with high homocysteine levels have an incr...

Since Bekenstein introduced the thermodynamical analogy in black hole physics and Hawking discovered thermal radiation from a black hole confirming this analogy , it is an intriguing problem as to what degrees of freedom are counted by the entropy of a black hole. Equivalently, what (if any) statistical mechanics is responsible for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy? According to ’t Hooft the stati...