Tattoos and piercings are increasing, especially among youths, but the risk of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection from these practices has not been adequately assessed and there are conflicting findings in the literature. We evaluated the risk of HCV infection from tattooing and piercing using the Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) guidelines. Studies that specified t...

Purpose:Biofilms on oral piercingsmay serve as a bacterial reservoir and lead to systemic bacteremia or local transmission of pathogenic microbiota. The use of piercing materials which are less susceptible to biofilm accumulation could contribute to prevention of problems. The present study investigated whether there are microbiological differences in bacterial samples collected from tongue pie...

BACKGROUND Cutting and piercing injuries are among the leading causes of unintentional injury morbidity in developed countries. In New Zealand, cutting and piercing are second only to falls as the most frequent cause of unintentional home injuries resulting in admissions to hospital among people aged 20 to 64 years. Alcohol intake is known to be associated with many other types of injury. We us...

Intraoral piercing has increased in popularity in the last few years. This type of jewelry has been associated with periodontal and muco-gingival defects such as attachment loss and gingival recession. This case report described a 25-year-old female presented to the clinic of Periodontics at Witten/Herdecke University in Witten, Germany, with a tongue stud placed through the mid-dorsum of her t...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the prevalence and consequences of body art application. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to provide US tattooing and body piercing prevalence, societal distribution, and medical and social consequence data. METHODS Random digit dialing technology was used to obtain a national probability sample of 253 women and 247 men who were 18 to 50 years of age. RESULTS Of our ...

A four-helix bundle is a well-characterized motif often used as a target for designed pharmaceutical therapeutics and nutritional supplements. Recently, we discovered a new structural complexity within this motif created by a disulphide bridge in the long-chain helical bundle cytokine leptin. When oxidized, leptin contains a disulphide bridge creating a covalent-loop through which part of the p...

Given a finite family F of axis-parallel boxes in R such that F contains no k + 1 pairwise disjoint boxes, and such that for each two intersecting boxes in F a corner of one box is contained in the other box, we prove that F can be pierced by at most ck log log(k) points, where c is a constant depending only on d. We further show that in some special cases the upper bound on the number of pierc...

It is shown that for every k and every p ≥ q ≥ d + 1 there is a c = c(k, p, q, d) < ∞ such that the following holds. For every family H whose members are unions of at most k compact, convex sets in R in which any set of p members of the family contains a subset of cardinality q with a nonempty intersection there is a set of at most c points in R that intersects each member of H. It is also show...

The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of life-style practices in adolescents and their association with nickel allergy. Upper secondary school pupils (n = 4,376; 15-23 years) were patch-tested for nickel aller-gy, follow-ing completion of a questionnaire (answered by 6,095). Almost 86% girls and 21% of boys reported piercing. More girls (6%) than boys (3%) had a tattoo. Twenty-si...

Male bed bugs pierce females through the body wall and inseminate directly into the body cavity. It has previously been shown that such traumatic insemination carries costs for females, and sexual conflict regarding the mode of insemination should thus propel male-female coevolution. Since males accumulate sexually antagonistic adaptations, females should evolve counter-adaptations that efficie...