Since first being described as such by Galen of Pergamum (130–200 ad), the thymus has remained an “organ of mystery” throughout the 2000-year history of medicine. The thymus reaches its maximum weight in puberty and subsequently undergoes involution, and thus is hardly an eye-catching structure on imaging studies performed in healthy adults. However, once there has been involvement of the thymu...

Pairs of forward and reverse primers and TaqMan probes specific to each of 173 human solute carrier (SLC) transporters were prepared. The mRNA expression level of each target transporter was analyzed in total RNA from single and pooled specimens of various human tissues (adrenal gland, bladder, bone marrow, brain, colon, heart, kidney, liver, lung, mammary gland, ovary, pancreas, peripheral leu...

Specimens from the Harderian gland, the lacrimal gland and bursa of Fabricius in ducks with chlamydiosis were processed by the classical histological methods and permanent preparations were obtained. On single and serial histological cross-sections from material fixed in non-aqueous fixator, histochemical tests for PAS reactivity, staining with alcian blue at pH 1.0 and 2.5 as well as staining ...

BACKGROUND Graves' disease (GD) is commonly associated with other autoimmune conditions, and there is also a rare but well documented association between GD and thymic hyperplasia (TH). It is hard to say the real frequency of this latter association because most cases remain asymptomatic and are consequently not thoroughly investigated. MATERIALS AND METHODS We reviewed the literature on GD-r...

Radiological evidence of a mass in the anterior mediastinum may provide a difficult problem in diagnosis. Disorders of the thymus, particularly thymomas, are frequently the cause of such mass lesions. Although modest thymic enlargement occurs in many patients with Graves's disease,' rarely is the enlargement great enough to lead to a clinical diagnostic dilemma.2 We report here two patients wit...

Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) was long thought to be an enzyme found specifically at the sites of nerve synapses and neuromuscular junctions. It has also been found to occur, however, in cells that are not involved with neurotransmission. This study presents the ultrastructural localization of AChE activity in human thymus cells, using the indirect thiocholine method. Cytochemical demonstration o...

popularity of hand sanitizer and antibiotics shows how we feel about bacteria: an enemy that's bad for our health. Emerging data, however, suggest just the opposite-that exposures to certain kinds of bacteria are beneficial for a long and healthy life, at least in part by inhibiting a wasting syndrome termed cachexia [1]. Cachexia, a condition defined as muscle wasting associated with chronic d...

While there is an intimate anatomical and embryological relationship between the inferior parathyroid gland and thymus, concurrent pathology is rare. Three cases have been reported in the literature of a parathyroid adenoma in conjunction with a thymoma. We present a case report of a 60-year-old female with a past medical history of hypercalcemia subsequently found to have primary hyperparathyr...

Subtraction suppression hybridization was used with high throughput screening to identify transcripts of genes that are differentially expressed in nasal epithelium following lesioning of the olfactory bulb, termed bulbectomy. We isolated the rat homologue of plunc, a murine gene highly expressed in lung and nasopharyngeal regions, by this method. Rat plunc encodes a 270-amino acid protein cont...