Club cells and CC16: another “smoking gun”? (With potential bullets against COPD)

Club cells and CC16: another "smoking gun"? (With potential bullets against COPD).

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remains a challenge for clinicians and scientists, as no currently available treatment can significantly change the natural history of the disease. Accelerated lung function decline and recurrent episodes of exacerbations are thought to play critical roles in precipitating patients towards comorbid conditions, long-term oxygen supplementation depende...

Protective role for club cell secretory protein-16 (CC16) in the development of COPD.

Club cell secretory protein-16 (CC16) is the major secreted product of airway club cells, but its role in the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is unclear. We measured CC16 airway expression in humans with and without COPD and CC16 function in a cigarette smoke (CS)-induced COPD murine model. Airway CC16 expression was measured in COPD patients, smokers without COPD a...

Gravity’s Smoking Gun?

We present a new constraint on the biased galaxy formation picture. Gravitational instability theory predicts that the two-point mass density correlation function, ξ(r), has an inflection point at the separation r = ro, corresponding to the boundary between the linear and nonlinear regime of clustering, ξ ≃ 1. We show how this feature can be used to constrain the biasing parameter, b ≡ ξg(r)/ξ(...

The smoking gun of eugenics

Editorial: Aluminum – Alzheimer's Smoking Gun?

It is becoming apparent that with an aging population comes an increase in the incidence of mental impairment. In death certificates of people over 75 years of age, the number listed as having dementia has increased by a factor of 20 in the last 15 years (Forbes, Lessard, & Gentleman, 1995, appearing in the present issue). Most of this increase is probably the result of heightened diagnostic se...