BACKGROUND Radiocontrast nephropathy (RCN) is a major complication after radiographic examination. The precise mechanisms underlying RCN are not well understood. Renal tubular cell apoptosis is a feature of RCN, but hyperosmolality cannot fully explain the cytotoxicity of contrast media. There is accumulating evidence that reactive oxygen species (ROS) is involved in the pathophysiology of RCN,...

The metabolic potential of the lung has been generally unrecognized. As this organ receives half the cardiac output, small changes in its metabolism could have profound effects on whole body fuel homeostatis. The lung has previously been considered to be unresponsive to insulin (Moxley & Longmore, 1975, Life Sciences. 17, 921). We have reexamined the effects of insulin using an improved in situ...

BACKGROUND The disrespect and abuse of women during the process of childbirth is an emergent and global problem and only few studies have investigated this worrying issue. The objective of the present study was to describe the prevalence of disrespect and abuse of women during childbirth in Pelotas City, Brazil, and to investigate the factors involved. METHODS This was a cross-sectional popul...

CONTEXT Elevated nonfasting triglycerides indicate the presence of remnant lipoproteins, which may promote atherosclerosis. OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis that very high levels of nonfasting triglycerides predict myocardial infarction (MI), ischemic heart disease (IHD), and death. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A prospective cohort study of 7587 women and 6394 men from the general popu...

The study of gut patterning provides a paradigm for the dissection of mechanisms involved in organogenesis. In mice and chick, the gut is derived from two endodermal folds, first the anterior intestinal portal and then later the caudal intestinal portal, that fuse ventrally and move towards each other, joining at the yolk stalk level (Grapin-Botton and Melton, 2000; Roberts, 2000). Concomitantl...

BACKGROUND The Maldives faces challenges in the provision of health services to its population scattered across many small islands. The government commissioned two separate reproductive health surveys, in 1999 and 2004, to inform their efforts to improve reproductive and sexual health services. METHODS A stratified random sample of islands provided the study base for a cluster survey in 1999 ...

Narrow-row soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] production in corn [Zea mays L.]–soybean rotations results in various distances of soybean rows from previous corn rows, yet little is known about soybean responses to proximity to prior corn rows in no-till systems. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impacts of preceding corn rows on potassium (K) nutrition and yield of subsequent no-til...

Vaccination with Mycobacterium bovis bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) remains the only prophylactic vaccine against tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), but gives variable protection against pulmonary disease. The generation of host Th1 responses following BCG vaccination is accepted as the major mechanism of protection against Mtb infection. Early production of IL-17 in the ...

In this paper, a unique approach for road extraction utilizing pixel spectral information for classification and image segmentation-derived object features was developed. In this approach, road extraction was performed in two steps. In the first step, support vector machine (SVM) was employed merely to classify the image into two groups of categories: a road group and a non-road group. For this...