OBJECTIVE High blood pressure and diabetes mellitus account for over 50% of annual visits to health facilities in Trinidad and Tobago. This study investigates the ability of various absolute and relative body composition variables to predict elevated fasting blood sugar (FBS) and blood pressure (BP). SUBJECTS AND METHODS Participants had overnight fasting finger-stick blood glucose analysed w...

AIMS Intercellular interactions between cardiomyocytes (CMs) and cardiofibroblasts (FBs) are important in the physiological and pathophysiological heart. Understanding such interactions is important for developing effective heart disease therapies. However, until recently, little has been known about these interactions. We aimed to investigate structural and functional connections between CMs a...

Bleaching of polymeric materials can be achieved by blending or surface treatment with fluorescent brighteners, FBs [1]. In both cases the FB migrates with time, and the degree of whiteness decreases. The introduction of polymerizable groups into the FB makes it applicable in the copolymerization process with vinyl monomers, resulting in the formation of covalent bonds in the polymer molecule. ...

Fetal bovine serum (FBS) and fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-2 are key supplements for the culture of stromal vascular fraction (SVF) cells from adipose tissue, both for typical monolayer (2D) expansion and for streamlined generation of osteogenic-vasculogenic grafts in 3D perfusion culture. The present study investigates whether factors present in human platelet lysate (PL) could substitute for...

OBJECTIVE Brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity (baPWV), as an indicator of atherosclerosis in impaired fasting glucose (IFG), was studied in 232 subjects randomly selected from inhabitants of two rural communities in Japan. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS BMI, systolic blood pressure (SBP), fasting blood glucose (FBS), lipid parameters, ankle brachial pressure index (ABI), and baPWV were measured i...

In the present study, we examined the effect of different two-steps and sequential culture systems, which involve the use of different culture media for early cleavage and later stage embryos, on the development, quality and gene expression profile of bovine embryos generated by in vitro fertilization. Presumptive zygotes were randomly allocated to four different medium treatments without co-cu...

There are 190,600 cases of acute lung injury/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ALI/ARDS) each year in the United States, and the incidence and mortality of ALI/ARDS increase dramatically with age. Patients with ALI/ARDS have alveolar epithelial injury, which may be worsened by high-pressure mechanical ventilation. Alveolar type II (ATII) cells are the progenitor cells for the alveolar epithe...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Yacon (Samallanthus sonchifolius), a common edible plant grown throughout the world, is well known for its antidiabetic properties. It is also known to have several other pharmacological properties including anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-allergic, and anti-cancer effects. To date, the effect of yacon on gliomas has not been studied. In this study, we investigated t...

The effects of recombinant human erythropoietin (Ep). granulocyte/macrophage (GM) and granulocyte (G) cobny-stimulating factors (CSF). and interleukin-3 (lL-3) on erythroid burst and GM colony growth have been studied in fetal bovine serum (FBS)-supplemented and FBS-deprived culture. Sources of progenitor cells were nonadherent or nonadherent T-lymphocyte-depleted marrow or periphoral blood cel...

A new type of floating breakwaters (FBs) is introduced by changing the longitudinal section of π-shaped FBs into a stepwise shape. The hydrodynamic performance of so-called step floating breakwaters (SFBs) is evaluated through 144 experiments on SFBs of different types as well as π-shaped FBs. Initially, using the experimental data, the performance of SFBs was evaluated by comparison against π-...