STUDY DESIGN Multicenter, prospective, consecutive clinical series. OBJECTIVE To report on neural complications in a prospective cohort study of 1301 children undergoing spinal fusion and instrumentation for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA The incidence of neural complications for spinal deformity surgery has been reported to be 0.26% to 17%. However, most ...

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression in granulosa cells is associated with the thecal vasculature growth during ovarian follicular development. We hypothesized that injection of VEGF gene fragments directly into the rat ovary would induce production of a large number of ovulatory follicles and that these follicles would ovulate. To test this hypothesis, we treated immature femal...

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are firmly implicated as intra-ovarian regulators of follicle development and steroidogenesis. Here we report a microarray analysis showing that treatment of cultured bovine theca cells (TC) with BMP6 significantly (>twofold; P < 0.01) up- or down-regulated expression of 445 genes. Insulin-like peptide 3 (INSL3) was the most heavily down-regulated gene (-43-fo...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Anesthesiologists are reluctant to consider higher levels for spinal anesthesia, largely due to direct threats to the spinal cord. The goal of this study is to investigate, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the distances between the relevant structures of the spinal canal (spinal cord, thecal tissue, etc.) to determine modal anatomical positions for neuraxial anes...

To examine timed changes in the morphology of theca interna and granulosa cells of rabbit preovulatory follicles, mature female rabbits were injected with100 IU per kg of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) and follicles larger than1mn in diameter were excised for light and electron microscopic studies before and3, 6, 9and 12hr after hCG injection. Spindle-shaped theca interna cells had been tra...

BACKGROUND Spinal tuberculosis presents in various pathological patterns. The clinical presentation and often the management depend on exact pathological findings. Objective of study was to evaluate the Pathology of spinal tuberculosis as depicted by MRI findings in 119 consecutive cases of spinal TB. METHODOLOGY It was a cross sectional and observational study conducted at Civil Hospital, Ka...

Inhibitor of differentiation (Id) proteins act during embryogenesis and development to repress gene transcription required for lineage commitment, while promoting cell growth. Growth factors belonging to the TGFbeta superfamily of signaling molecules, notably the bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) and activin, can regulate Id expression in these tissues. Id expression and function in adult phys...

INTRODUCTION Focal ossification of the ligamentum flavum (OLF) is a rare cause of thoracic myelopathy. The lower thoracic spine is most frequently affected and the patients present initially with posterior column disturbances followed by progressively increasing spastic paraparesis. The pathogenesis of OLF has not been conclusively established. MATERIALS AND METHODS Five patients with thoraci...

The membranous structure separating the granulosa from theca cells in the developing ovarian follicles of birds is generally perceived as a genuine basement membrane (BM). Previously, we suggested that this membrane is unusual in that it lacks several typical BM components, e.g. collagen IV, laminin B, perlecan, and fibronectin (Hummel, S., Osanger, A., Bajari, T. M., Balasubramani, M., Halfter...