BACKGROUND HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, such as simvastatin, have been shown to exhibit pronounced immunomodulatory effects independent of lipid lowering but to date have not been used to treat severe inflammatory disease such as sepsis. We thus approached the question of whether treatment with simvastatin might improve cardiovascular function and survival in sepsis. METHODS AND RESULTS Mice...

Sepsis remains a common clinical problem with significant mortality. Activation of the Kupffer cells during sepsis is associated with systemic inflammatory response and multiple organ failure. Kupffer cell activation also leads to structural changes in the liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) during endotoxemia. However, these effects remain to be elucidated in caecal-ligation and punctur...

xvii 1 CLP–MILP: Introduction 1 1.1 Preliminary Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Thesis’ Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 CLP–MILP: Overview of Main Characteristics 7 2.

BACKGROUND Sepsis remains a major clinical challenge in intensive care units. The difficulty in developing new and more effective treatments for sepsis exemplifies our incomplete understanding of the underlying pathophysiology of it. One of the more widely used rodent models for studying polymicrobial sepsis is cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). While a number of CLP studies investigated the en...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effects of phosphocreatine (PCr) depletion on myocellular energetics. DESIGN Randomized controlled study. SETTING University laboratory. MATERIALS Thirty-eight adult male Wistar rats (110-121 g). METHODS The poorly metabolized creatine analogue beta-guanidinopropionic acid, (beta-GPA, 2% of a gel diet) was fed to the rats for 14 days to replace (75%) endogenou...

We have investigated sequential changes in skeletal muscle and hepatic protein synthesis following sepsis, and their relationship to changes in circulating and tissue glutamine concentrations. Male Wistar rats underwent caecal ligation and puncture (CLP) or sham operation, with starvation, and were killed 24, 72 or 96 h later. A group of non-operated animals were killed at the time of surgery. ...

Cross-lingual plagiarism (CLP) occurs when texts written in one language are translated into a different language and used without acknowledging the original sources. One of the most common methods for detecting CLP requires online machine translators (such as Google or Microsoft translate) which are not always available, and given that plagiarism detection typically involves large document com...

Acute renal failure (ARF) is frequently associated with polyuria and urine concentration defects and it is a severe complication of sepsis because it increases the mortality rate. Inhibition of NF-kappaB activation has been suggested to provide a useful strategy for the treatment of septic shock. However, the impact on sepsis-induced ARF is still unclear. Therefore, we examined the effect of py...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to elucidate the possible beneficial effects of AcF on acute lung injury (ALI) in a rat model of sepsis. MATERIALS AND METHODS Male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into the following four experimental groups (n = 10 per group): animals undergoing a sham cecal ligature puncture (CLP) (Sham group); animals undergoing CLP (control group); or anim...