OBJECTIVES Patulous Eustachian tube (PET) is a challenging clinical problem with limited medical and surgical options. The current study systematically reviews the literature to determine the safety and efficacy of surgical treatments for PET. DATA SOURCES Medline, Google Scholar, and Cochrane databases. METHODS Studies evaluating the surgical management of PET were extracted based on defin...

Synopsis Patients with unprovoked VTE have a higher risk of recurrence than those with a provoked event. This is the first study to evaluate extended anticoagulation beyond six months for patients with unprovoked PE. The authors enrolled adults (N = 371), 18 years or older, who received six months of therapy with a vitamin K antagonist following their first episode of symptomatic unprovoked PE....

Despite high vaccine coverage, pertussis has re-emerged as a public health concern in many countries. One hypothesis posed for re-emergence is the waning of immunity. In some disease systems, the process of waning immunity can be non-linear, involving a complex relationship between the duration of immunity and subsequent boosting of immunity through asymptomatic re-exposure. We present and anal...

Dengue is a vector-borne disease transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. It has been observed that its incidence is strongly influenced by temperature and other abiotic factors like rainfall and humidity. In this work we compare the effects of seasonality in temperature that affect the entomological parameters of the mosquito with precipitation that affects the hatchery capacity. We also ana...

The Drosophila wing imaginal disc is a sac-like structure that is composed of two opposing cell layers: peripodial epithelium (PE, also known as squamous epithelia) and disc proper (DP, also known as pseudostratified columnar epithelia). The molecular mechanism of cell morphogenesis has been well studied in the DP but not in the PE. Although proper Dpp signalling activity is required for proper...

The secreted proteins from a cell constitute a natural biologic library that can offer significant insight into human health and disease. Discovering new secreted proteins from cells is bounded by the limitations of traditional separation and detection tools to physically fractionate and analyze samples. Here, we present a new method to systematically identify bioactive cell-secreted proteins t...

The elucidation of the genomic sequence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis revealed the presence of a novel multigene family designated PE/PE_PGRS that encodes numerous, highly related proteins of unknown function. In this study, we demonstrate that a transposon insertion in a PE_PGRS gene (1818(PE_PGRS)) found in Mycobacterium bovis BCG Pasteur, which is the BCG homologue of the M. tuberculosis H37...

Although preproenkephalin mRNA is abundant in the heart, the myocardial synthesis and processing of proenkephalin is largely undefined. Isolated working rat hearts were perfused to determine the rate of myocardial proenkephalin synthesis, its processing into enkephalin-containing peptides, their subsequent release into the coronary arteries, and the influence of prior sympathectomy. Enkephalin-...

Bovine adrenal medulla 22 (BAM22), an endogenous opioid peptide, is one of the cleavage products of proenkephalin A. It potently activates opioid receptors and sensory neuron-specific receptor (SNSR). The present study was aimed at investigating the effect of BAM22 on morphine tolerance. Intrathecal (i.t.) administration of morphine for 7 d produced morphine tolerance in rats. Then the rats wer...

Pharmacological and biochemical evidence has implied that a widespread opioid peptide system exists within the cerebral cortex to mediate a variety of opiate effects. However, immunocytochemical detection of opioid peptides in the cortex has been limited. Using antisera to enkephalin and bovine adrenal medullary peptide, both fragments of proenkephalin, and an antiserum to dynorphin A, a fragme...