The emergence of leeches in modern medicine proves that they can be a useful treatment for many conditions. Bloodletting was practiced for millennia, with leeches being used for this purpose since the Stone Age. Leeches were misused until the discovery of germs. Leeches are now used in microsurgery to aid circulation. They have also been used in pain management for osteoarthritis. The chemicals...

Neuropharmacological and neurophysiological studies have been undertaken on both the longitudinal muscle and on the segmental ganglionic neurones of the leech, Hirudo medicinalis. The longitudinal muscle of the leech was developed by Minz (1932) from the initial observations of Fuehner (1918) as an assay procedure for acetylcholine. More recently this same preparation has been used as an assay ...

BACKGROUND Human leech infestation is a disease of the poor who live in rural areas and use water contaminated with leeches. Like any other body orifices, vagina can also be infested by leech when females use contaminated water for bathing and/or douching. Although this condition is very rare in postmenopausal women, it causes morbidities and mortalities. CASE DETAILS A 70 year old Para X (al...

Considering blood-sucking habits of leeches from surviving strategy of view, it can be hypothesized that leech saliva has analgesia or anesthesia functions for leeches to stay undetected by the host. However, no specific substance with analgesic function has been reported from leech saliva although clinical applications strongly indicated that leech therapy produces a strong and long lasting pa...

In the leech, synapse regeneration in adults and synapse formation during embryonic development can be studied in single, identifiable cells that make precise connections with their targets. Certain cellular components, such as synaptic targets and glia, were selectively destroyed to study how the regenerating axons locate their targets, what triggers axons to start growing and what stops them....

The Leech lattice is the exceptional lattice in dimension 24. Soon after its discovery by Leech [9], it was conjectured that it is extremal for several geometric problems in R: the kissing number problem, the sphere packing problem, and the sphere covering problem. In 1979, Odlyzko and Sloane and independently Levenshtein solved the kissing number problem in dimension 24 by showing that the Lee...

The Retzius neuron from the leech, growing in culture on the plant lectin concanavalin A as substrate, produces broad flat growth cones and thick bundles of processes. The same cell extends fine straight processes with numerous branches when grown on a laminin-like substrate extracted from leech central nervous system extracellular matrix, referred to as "leech laminin extract." Cells growing o...

Animals house a community of bacterial symbionts in their digestive tracts that contribute to their well being. The medicinal leech, Hirudo verbana, has a remarkably simple gut population carrying two extracellular microbes in the crop where the ingested blood is stored. This simplicity renders it attractive for studying colonization factors. Aeromonas veronii, one of the leech symbionts, can b...

BACKGROUND Leeches have been used clinically to help salvage venous-congested skin flaps since 1960. Numerous articles have described their success in benefitting the survival of local, regional, and free flaps. However, the clinical application remains imprecise. The theory behind leech therapy is that leech bites decrease venous congestion in compromised skin flaps. Venous congestion is detri...

a nine month old infant was taken to a rural medical center due to hematemesis and melena. the bleeding persisted in spite of active management with gastric lavage, intravenous cimetidine, antiacid therapy and blood transfusion for four days' duration. the patient was referred to our center for further evaluation and management. on arrival he was pale and ill looking with active bleeding f...