INTRODUCTION Despite some evidence that anxiety may affect length of stay (LOS), relatively little inquiry exists regarding this in neurosurgical literature. OBJECTIVE To determine the influence of anxiety on LOS after elective lumbar decompression and fusion (LDF) surgery. METHODS The medical records of 307 patients who consecutively underwent elective LDF surgery from October 1, 2010, thr...

Dear Sir: Knowledge of the longterm effect of weight loss on adipose tissue blood flow (ATBF) is scarce. We read with great interest the paper by Rossi et al. [3], reporting the results of a study using laser-Doppler flowmetry (LDF), where baseline thigh ATBF was lower in morbidly obese subjects compared to ageand sex-matched controls (4.8 vs. 79.9 perfusion units /PU). These results confirm se...

The present study aimed to evaluate adipose tissue blood flow (ATBF) by means of laser-Doppler flowmetry (LDF) in humans. Lower body negative pressure (LBNP) and straining known to affect epidermal blood flow through the autonomic nervous system were performed in 11 lean and 11 obese female volunteers. ATBF changes were compared between both groups and also discriminated from skin blood flow (S...

The etiology of stroke in sickle cell disease is unclear, but may involve abnormal red blood cell (RBC) adhesion to the vascular endothelium and altered vasomotor tone regulation. Therefore, we examined both the adhesion of sickle (SS)-RBCs to cerebral microvessels and the effect of SS-RBCs on cerebral blood flow when the nitric oxide (NO) pathway was inhibited. The effect of SS-RBCs was studie...

We study the semileptonic branching fraction of B-meson into higher resonance of charmed meson D by using the Bjorken sum rule and the heavy quark effective theory(HQET). This sum rule and the current experiment of B-meson semileptonic decay into D and D predict that the branching ratio into Dlνl is about 1.7%. This predicted value is larger than the value obtained by the various theoretical ha...

We compared the responses of finger blood flow to local and/or whole body warming, as measured by laser Doppler flowmetry (PERIFLUX PF-1d) (LDF), and by venous occlusion plethysmography (BF). The subject's hands were immersed in a bath of water whose temperature (Tw) was initially set at 25 degrees C. The tested hand was kept at about 10 cm above heart level to facilitate the drainage of finger...

OBJECTIVES Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is characterized by altered microvascular structure and function. Nailfold videocapillaroscopy (NVC) is the tool to evaluate capillary morphological structure and laser-Doppler Blood flowmetry (LDF) can be used to estimate cutaneous blood flow of microvessels. The aim of this study was to investigate possible relationships between capillary morphology and blo...

We investigated, using a direct, intravital microscopic technique, whether nitric oxide (NO) from neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) plays a role in the cerebral capillary flow response to acute hypoxia. Erythrocyte flow in subsurface capillaries of the frontoparietal cortex of adult Sprague-Dawley rats was visualized using epifluorescence videomicroscopy after fluorescent labeling of red bl...