BACKGROUND The airway muscles from allergen-sensitized animals in vitro show a heightened response to histamine, but not to carbachol. This study investigated whether the airway responsiveness to histamine in vivo is comparable to that of methacholine in human subjects with varying degrees of atopy. METHODS One-hundred-and-sixty-eight consecutive adult asthma patients or volunteers underwent ...

Much information has now accumulated which favors the idea that histamine participates in the peripheral sensory function. Kwiatkowski (1) has shown that sensory nerve fibers of the skin is more rich in histamine than the motor nerve fibers and has further demonstrated directly that histamine is liberated after antidromic stimulation of the sensory nerve trunks. Experimental evidences have been...

We examined subcellular histamine localizations in purified human basophils that were stimulated to degranulate with FMLP using an ultrastructural enzyme-affinity technique. Basophils were collected at early (0, 20 seconds, 1 minute) and late (10 minutes to 6 hours) time points poststimulation and were prepared for routine ultrastructural and diamine oxidase-gold (DAO-gold) cytochemical analysi...

Study was made of the developmental mechanism of histamine induced ulcers and inhibitory effects of receptor antagonists from the view point of gastric acidity and microvasculature of the gastric mucosa, and the following results were obtained. 1. In histamine induced ulcers, hypersecretion of gastric acid caused by histamine is not the primary developmental mechanism of the lesion. The main ca...

Histamine is capable of modulating CNS arousal states by regulating neuronal excitability. In the current study, histamine action in the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH), its related ionic mechanisms, and its possible facilitation by estrogen were investigated using whole cell patch-clamp recording in brain slices from ovariectomized female mice. Under current clamp, a bath application of histam...

The role of histamine in disease has long been a subject of speculation but until recently little was known about its metabolism because of difficulties in estimating the free, pharmacologically active form in body fluids (Gaddum, 1948, 1951). However, new methods for the separation and purification of histamine have made it possible to follow its excretion in the urine, where it occurs in free...

Measurements were made of the amounts of histamine extracted from patients with peptic ulcer disease and control subjects suffering from various gastrointestinal diseases. Patients with duodenal ulcer, gastric ulcer, or recurrent duodenal ulcer after proximal gastric vagotomy often had less gastric mucosal histamine than did normal controls. Cimetidine therapy increased the amounts of the hista...

Histamine is a mediator of allergic inflammation released mainly from mast cells. Although histamine strongly increases vascular permeability, its precise mechanism under in vivo situation remains unknown. We here attempted to reveal how histamine induces vascular hyperpermeability focusing on the key regulators of vascular permeability, blood flow and endothelial barrier. Degranulation of mast...