End-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients usually develop extensive and progressive vascular calcification, lots of calcification inhibitors as well procalcifying factors are involved in the process. However, mechanisms ESRD still ill-defined. In present study, we found that plasma exosomes derived from (ESRD-Ex) promoted smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) significantly, while transplant recipients (RTR...

Two experiments compared alternative minimal group induction procedures involving (a) memorization of novel in-group names or (b) random categorization to (c) the traditional procedure based on ostensibly meaningful but deception-based categorization. Experiment 1 revealed comparable in-group attitude and identification effects across the three procedures on explicit measures, but significantly...

This article estimates the extent to which private insurance supplements affect use of services by Medicare enrollees. Three types of supplements to Medicare's coverage are examined--Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), medigap (MGP) plans, and employment-based indemnity (EBI) plans. While each kind of supplement reduces cost sharing on Medicare-covered services, only HMOs do so without inc...

Background: Ventilator management for children with hypoxemic respiratory failure may benefit from ventilator protocols, which rely on blood gases. Accurate non-invasive estimates for pH or PaCO2 could allow frequent ventilator changes to optimize lung protective ventilation strategies. If these models are highly accurate, they can facilitate the development of closed-loop ventilator systems. W...

BACKGROUND Ventilator management for children with hypoxemic respiratory failure may benefit from ventilator protocols, which rely on blood gases. Accurate noninvasive estimates for pH or P(aCO2) could allow frequent ventilator changes to optimize lung-protective ventilation strategies. If these models are highly accurate, they can facilitate the development of closed-loop ventilator systems. W...

Vitamin K is required for the carboxylation of Gla-proteins in the liver (coagulation factors) and extra-hepatic tissues, such as bone (osteocalcin, OC), and arterial wall (matrix Gla-protein, MGP). Although the coagulation factors are essentially fully carboxylated under normal conditions, 10-40 % of OC and MGP remains undercarboxylated. We were therefore interested to study the dose-response ...

To capture the potentially enormous and vital opportunity in the post sequence era of human genome research, the Japanese government on December 19, 1999 drew up the basic outlines of the 5-year Millennium Genome Project (MGP). The “Disease Gene” Team of MGP aims to establish genomebased personalized medical care and to seed a revolutionary drug development inspired by the new information and t...

We explore the capability of a network of extremely limited computational entities to decide properties about any of its subnetworks. We consider that the underlying network of the interacting entities (devices, agents, processes etc.) is modeled by a complete interaction graph and we devise simple graph protocols that can decide properties of some input subgraph provided by some preprocessing ...