BACKGROUND Use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and especially CAM practitioners, has continued to rise in recent years. Although several motivators of CAM use have been identified, little is known about how and if the motivations for using CAM have changed over time. The purpose of the current study was to compare the reasons for consulting CAM practitioners in consumers in 199...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to determine, among the Indian community of Chatsworth, South Africa, the prevalence and utilisation patterns of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), attitudes associated with CAM use and communication patterns of CAM users with their primary care doctors. METHODS Face-to-face structured interviews were conducted in Chatsworth, a suburb of Dur...

Use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM; bǔ chōng yǔ tì dài yī xué) in Parkinson disease (PD) ranged 40-70%. The objective of this study was to determine the frequency, types and factors associated with the use of CAM in Indian PD patients. PD patients, fulfilling UKPD-Society brain-bank diagnostic-criteria, attending Movement-disorders clinic of a tertiary-care teaching hospital in ...

The endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) is regulated by diverse protein kinase pathways, yet eNOS activity ultimately depends on the ubiquitous calcium regulatory protein calmodulin (CaM). In these studies, we establish that CaM itself undergoes phosphorylation in endothelial cells and that CaM phosphorylation attenuates eNOS activation. Using [(32)P]orthophosphoric acid biosynthetic labeling, we fo...

BACKGROUND In the Netherlands, public trust in conventional medicine is relatively high. There is reason to believe that public trust in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is rated lower. The aim of this study is to gain insight into public trust in CAM and the determinants that lie at the root of it. We hypothesized that public trust in CAM is related to (perceived) institutional gua...

Calmodulin (CaM) activates the skeletal muscle ryanodine receptor (RyR1) at nanomolar Ca(2+) concentrations but inhibits it at micromolar Ca(2+) concentrations, indicating that binding of Ca(2+) to CaM may provide a molecular switch for modulating RyR1 channel activity. To directly examine the Ca(2+) sensitivity of RyR1-complexed CaM, we used an environment-sensitive acrylodan adduct of CaM. Th...

BACKGROUND There has been a marked increase in the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the UK population in recent years. Surveys of doctors' perspectives on CAM have identified a variety of views and potential information needs. While these are useful for describing the proportions of doctors who hold particular attitudes towards CAM, they are less helpful for understanding ...

OBJECTIVES This study was undertaken in order to determine the extent of the use of CAM in a UK headache clinic. DESIGN Ninety-two patients attending a headache clinic were given a questionnaire containing questions regarding their headaches and their use of CAM for headaches. SETTING Outpatient headache clinic, Birmingham, UK. Main outcome measures. The use of complementary and alternative...

Calmodulin (CaM) is the major component of calcium signaling pathways mediating the action of various effectors. Transient increases in the intracellular calcium level triggered by a variety of stimuli lead to the formation of Ca(2+)/CaM complexes, which interact with and activate target proteins. In the present study the role of Ca(2+)/CaM in the regulation of the ligand-dependent activation o...

Previous work indicated that changes in Ca(2+)/calmodulin (CaM) signaling pathway are involved in the control of proliferation and survival of immortalized lymphocytes from Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. We examined the regulation of cellular CaM levels in AD lymphoblasts. An elevated CaM content in AD cells was found when compared with control cells from age-matched individuals. We did not...