Celastrol, a major active ingredient of Chinese herb Tripterygium wilfordii Hook. f. (thunder god vine), has exhibited a broad spectrum of pharmacological activities, including anti-inflammation, anti-cancer and immunosuppression. In the present study, we used animal models of inflammatory pain and neuropathic pain, generated by carrageenan injection and spared nerve injury (SNI), respectively,...

Equation of state, phase stability, and amorphization of SnI_{4} at high pressure and temperature. " Physical Review B 81.9 (2010): 094101. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits ...

Recent evidence suggests that endothelial dysfunction and pathology of pulmonary vascular responses may serve as a precursor to smoking-associated emphysema. Although it is known that emphysematous destruction leads to vasculature changes, less is known about early regional vascular dysfunction which may contribute to and precede emphysematous changes. We sought to test the hypothesis, via mult...

We tested the hypothesis that epigenetic mechanisms in the brain and the immune system are associated with chronic pain. Genome-wide DNA methylation assessed in 9 months post nerve-injury (SNI) and Sham rats, in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as well as in T cells revealed a vast difference in the DNA methylation landscape in the brain between the groups and a remarkable overlap (72%) between diff...

The Ramsey number for a graph G versus a graph H, denoted by R(G, H), is the smallest positive integer n such that for any graph F of order n, either F contains G as a subgraph or F contains H as a subgraph. In this paper, we investigate the Ramsey numbers for union of trees versus small cycle and small wheel. We show that if ni is odd and 2ni+1 ≥ ni for every i, then R( Sk i=1 Tni , W4) = R(Tn...

Proinflammatory cytokines, such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF) and interleukin-1beta (IL-1 ), impairs long-term potentiation (LTP) in hippocampus, a synaptic model of memory, while in spinal dorsal horn TNFis found to induce LTP of C-fiber evoked field potentials in rats with nerve injury. In the present work the role of IL-1 in the spinal LTP of C-fiber evoked field potentials, which is ...

Neuropathic pain is a major health issue and is frequently accompanied by allodynia (painful sensations in response to normally non-painful stimulations), and unpleasant paresthesia/dysesthesia, pointing to alterations in sensory pathways normally dedicated to the processing of non-nociceptive information. Interestingly, mounting evidence indicate that central glial cells are key players in all...