AIM To assess serum Hepatocyte Growth Factor (HGF) levels in individuals with anxiety and to test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between HGF levels and zinc therapy. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Serum from 19 individuals with anxiety and 19 controls were tested for serum HGF using ELISAs. HGF serum concentration in individuals with anxiety before zinc and anti-oxidant therapy was compare...

Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) is a pluripotent cytokine with mitogenic, motogenic, and morphogenic activity for mainly epithelial and endothelial target cells. We previously demonstrated that the specific HGF receptor, MET, is induced in stimulated peripheral blood monocytes. In this study, we analyzed the functional consequences of MET activation in primary cultures of peripheral blood monocy...

Resection is the only curative treatment for liver metastasis of colorectal cancers. Despite the supreme regenerative potential of the liver, major hepatectomy sometimes leads to liver failure, and the limitation of resectable liver volumes makes advanced tumors inoperable. This study was attempted to promote liver regeneration using hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) gene transfection by venous-ad...

It was recently reported that gene therapy using hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) has the potential to preserve cardiac function after myocardial ischemia. We speculated that this HGF gene therapy could also prevent ventricular arrhythmia. To investigate this possibility, we examined the antiarrhythmic effect of HGF gene therapy in rat acute and old myocardial infarction models. Myocardial ischem...

Intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) is involved in the accumulation and activation of leukocytes in inflammatory diseases such as periodontitis. As reported previously, ICAM-1 is up-regulated on cultured human gingival fibroblasts (HGF) by exposure to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), suggesting a specific LPS recognition mechanism. We therefore investigated the role of CD14, an LPS receptor, in...

The change in tissue uptake clearance of125I-labeled hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) after an intravenous injection of an excess (120 μg/kg) of unlabeled HGF was examined in rats. The heparin-washable component of the hepatic uptake clearance of125I-HGF was only slightly changed, whereas the heparin-resistant component was significantly reduced 30 min after injection of excess HGF, followed by g...

BACKGROUND Paracrine signaling of the hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) cytokine plays an important role in survival and invasion ability of placental trophoblasts. However, the intracellular factors and biological pathways underlying these responses remain unclear. METHODS This study investigated whether HGF affected the expression of homeobox gene HLX1, which is principally expressed in reprod...

OBJECTIVES We examined whether ultrasonic microbubble destruction (US/MB) enables therapeutic myocardial gene transfer of hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) for acute myocardial infarction (MI). BACKGROUND Hepatocyte growth factor gene transfer provides cardioprotective effects in MI, which requires direct intramyocardial injection or special vectors. Although US/MB was used in myocardial gene tr...