Correspondence to: Professor F De Ponti, Department of Pharmacology, University of Bologna, Via Irnerio, 48, I-40126 Bologna BO, Italy; fabrizio.deponti@ unibo.it _________________________ SUMMARY The pharmacology of serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT) in the gut has been the centre of intense interest and research for several decades. Although it is now recognised that 5-HT is contained in...

CONTEXT Medical centers worldwide report an increased frequency of Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT) and thyroid cancer (TC), two environmentally influenced diseases. In Sicily, data on HT are available for the province of Messina (1975-2005); data on TC are available for the whole island (2002-2004), with the volcanic province of Catania having the highest incidence. OBJECTIVE To replicate in Cat...

Introduction: Although international clinical practice guidelines recognize a continued role for menopausal hormone therapy (HT), particularly symptomatic women <60 years of age or within 10 menopause, safety and tolerability concerns have discouraged HT use due to potential links with perceived increased risk hormone-dependent cancers, an established stroke venous thromboembolism. There is the...

PURPOSE Hormonal therapy (HT) is the current mainstay of systemic treatment for prostate specific antigen (PSA) only recurrence (PSAR), however, there is virtually no published literature comparing HT to observation in the clinical setting. The goal of this study was to examine the Department of Defense Center for Prostate Disease Research observational database to compare clinical outcomes in ...

OBJECTIVES To develop criteria for classifying databases in relation to their potential use in health technology (HT) assessment and to apply them to a list of databases of relevance in the UK. To explore the extent to which prioritized databases could pick up those HTs being assessed by the National Coordinating Centre for Health Technology Assessment (NCCHTA) and the extent to which these dat...

Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT) is an organ-specific T-cell mediated disease. It is a complex disease, with a strong genetic component. To date, significant progress has been made towards the identification and functional characterization of HT susceptibility genes. In this review, we will summarize the recent advances in our understanding of the genetic input to the pathogenesis of HT.

OBJECTIVE AND METHOD A review of the literature on the serotonin syndrome in animals and human beings was conducted, and 12 reports of 38 cases in human patients were then analyzed to determine the most frequently reported clinical features and drug interactions, as well as the incidence, treatment, and outcome of this syndrome. FINDINGS The serotonin syndrome is most commonly the result of t...

Despite significant advances have been made in the recent years regarding organ-specific therapies, there is no approved 'disease-modifying' antifibrotic drug for systemic sclerosis (SSc) available to date. Although non-selective immunosuppressive agents are routinely used to treat patients with SSc, large well-controlled studies are lacking for almost all immunosuppressive agents and further e...

BACKGROUND Hypertension (HT) is a common complication of anti-angiogenic therapy. Its incidence, treatment and complications are undefined. PATIENTS AND METHODS Retrospective review of patients treated with bevacizumab (BV) from 2003-5. Common toxicity criteria (CTC) for adverse events version 3.0 were used. RESULTS Fifty-five out of the 154 patients treated with BV (35%) experienced HT. El...

Clozapine is the prototype atypical antipsychotic drug, producing little or no extrapyramidal side effects, while improving negative symptoms of psychosis. Clozapine's high affinity for serotonin receptors has been hypothesized to confer the unique antipsychotic properties of this drug. Recently, we demonstrated that both typical and atypical antipsychotic drugs are inverse agonists at constitu...