Sweet and Sour

Sweet and sour: unraveling diabetic vascular disease.

Diabetes is the epidemic of the 21st century.1 Rare in the past, diabetes has grown into an increasingly common disease both in developed countries and most recently also in the third world. The most important factor for this unforeseen trend appears to be the increase in body weight around the world attributable to the changes in lifestyle over the last decades.2 It is likely that the increasi...

A less sour sweet; blocking galectin.

Tight glucose control: sweet or sour?

Introduction: The debate about the potential benefi ts of tight glucose control in intensive care patients has been ongoing since the exciting initial single-center study by Van den Berghe et al. [1], which demonstrated reduced mortality in patients managed according to a protocol aimed at maintaining blood glucose between 80 and 110 mg/dL compared with the then-standard goal of less than 215 m...

The sweet and sour of serological glycoprotein tumor biomarker quantification

Aberrant and dysregulated protein glycosylation is a well-established event in the process of oncogenesis and cancer progression. Years of study on the glycobiology of cancer have been focused on the development of clinically viable diagnostic applications of this knowledge. However, for a number of reasons, there has been only sparse and varied success. The causes of this range from technical ...

Sweet and sour: the impact of sugars on disease.

The clinical relevance of glycobiology has become the focus of considerable research, as the role of glycosylation in the development, regulation and progression of disease is, slowly but surely, being unveiled. Recent strides in the design and refinement of analytical techniques-sugar profiling, glyco-arrays and functional studies-have helped us gain a better understanding of the complexity an...