BACKGROUND The processes observed in interstitial lung disease are associated with the production, deposition, and proteolysis of the extracellular matrix (ECM), which may lead to irreversible pulmonary structural remodeling or to appropriate repair without fibrosis. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and a tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) are known to regulate remodeling of the ECM...

Carbon monoxide poisoning (COP) causes hypoxic injury and inflammatory and immunological reactions in the brain and local organs including the pancreas. Therefore, it is plausible that COP may increase the risk for developing diabetes mellitus (DM), but studies on this possible association are limited. We conducted a nationwide study in Taiwan to fill the data gap. We used the Nationwide Poison...

BACKGROUND Orthostatic hypotension (OH), a blood pressure drop after postural change, is associated with impaired standing balance and falls in older adults. This study aimed to assess the association between blood pressure (BP) and a measure of quality of standing balance, i.e. Center of Pressure (CoP) movement, after postural change from supine to standing position in geriatric outpatients, a...

A technique (recurrence quantification analysis; RQA) for analyzing center of pressure (COP) signals is presented and applied to data obtained by having participants stand with the head forward or sideways and with eyes open or closed. RQA is suitable for short, nonstationary signals and quantifies dynamical (deterministic) structure and nonstationarity. Results indicated that vision affects th...

In this paper, we show that beta COP is present on endosomes and is required for the formation of vesicles which mediate transport from early to late endosomes. Both the association of beta COP to endosomal membranes as well as transport vesicle formation depend on the lumenal pH. We find that epsilon COP, but not gamma COP, is also associated to endosomes, and that this association is also lum...

BACKGROUND The association of Kikuchi Fujimoto disease (KFD) with cryptogenic organizing pneumonia (COP) is extremely rare. We report a case of simultaneous diagnosis of KFD and COP. CASE PRESENTATION A 33-year-old male presented with a 1-month cough illness and fever lasting for 5 days. The chest radiograph revealed double lower lobe infiltrate, which was unresponsive to antibiotics. A cervi...

BACKGROUND One of the most restricting factors remaining in heart transplantation is the limited myocardial ischemia time. A new approach towards the prolongation of this time is the combination of primary cardioplegic arrest followed by continuous coronary oxygen persufflation (COP) with gaseous oxygen. METHODS This technique was applied in pig hearts, which we transplanted orthotopically af...

We consider k-cop-win graphs in the binomial random graph G(n, 1/2). It is known that almost all cop-win graphs contain a universal vertex. We generalize this result and prove that for every k ∈ N, almost all k-cop-win graphs contain a dominating set of cardinality k. From this it follows that the asymptotic number of labelled k-cop-win graphs of order n is equal to (1+o(1))(1−2−k)−k ( n k ) 2 ...

Background The aim of this study was to compare centre of pressure (COP) characteristics between healthy adults with normal, planus or cavus feet who were allocated to groups based on reliable foot posture measurement techniques. Methods Ninety-two healthy adult participants (aged 18 to 45) were recruited and classified as either normal (n = 35), pes planus (n = 31) or pes cavus (n = 26) base...