background: cigarette smoking has been linked with the suppression of immune responses and increased susceptibility to numerous infections in humans. tetanus is also a major public health problem in many countries. the aim of the present study was to evaluate the serum levels of anti-tetanus toxin antibodies in c igarette smoking and healthy non-smoking people .   materials and methods: a total...

To evaluate quantitative hepatitis B surface antigen (qHBsAg) as a diagnostic marker for inactive carriers (ICs) and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) seroclearance in hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)-negative chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients. We retrospectively studied 300 HBeAg-negative CHB patients with initial serum hepatitis B virus (HBV) Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) levels <2000 IU/mL. Se...

Under high altitude conditions, the effects of vitamin E (α-tocopherol) on growth performance, intestinal morphology (villus size and type), and absorptive surface area of broiler chickens were evaluated. Chickens were fed diets supplemented with 0, 100, 200 or 400 IU/kg vitamin E for 42 days. On days 14, 28 and 42, birds were sacrificed and three segments of small intestine were dissected. The...

this paper provides an optimality-theoretic account of dissimilation in standard persian as well as some other accents and dialects of persian. as such, this work starts by introducing optimality theory (henceforth ot) and its basic concepts and then it investigates dissimilation in this framework. it argues for the superiority of ot over derivational approaches regarding a case in which both d...

background: oxytocin (ot) is a paracrine hormone with various biological activities and many sex organs in both sexes, as well as many tumor cells have shown to have related receptors. in this study the development of a receptor imaging tracer for possible tumor imaging has been described. materials and methods: ot was successively labeled with [67ga]-gallium chloride after conjugation with fre...

We investigated the effect of PCB-77, -126 or -153 (10 or 100 ng/ml) on free intracellular calcium concentrations([Ca2+]i) in bovine myometrial cells from days 1-5 of the estrous cycle. Cells were incubated with or without PCBs for 48 h (38 degrees C, aerated atmosphere) and thereafter [Ca2+]i was measured by means of fluorescent calcium indicator Fura-2. PCBs increased basal concentrations of ...

This paper presents a procedure for quantitatively comparing the performance of two image understanding algorithms using real images. We compare each algorithm’s reconstructed points with the “ground truth” object points acquired with a laser 3–D position digitizer. This procedure is necessary because qualitative comparisons are not precise enough to identify small errors and synthetic images d...