Increasing physical activity has been shown to reduce physiological markers of cardiovascular disease, such as high blood pressure, vascular endothelial cell reactivity and arterial stiffness. In this issue of Clinical Science, Hägg and colleagues have chosen the spontaneously hypertensive rat model to investigate the effect of exercise on vascular function. They found that spontaneous running ...

aortic dissection begins with the formation of a tear in the aortic intima, and it directly exposes an underlying diseased medial layer to the driving force of the intraluminal blood. this blood penetrates the diseased medial layer and cleaves the media longitudinally, thereby dissecting the aortic wall. herein, we report the case of a 38-year-old woman, who presented with chest pain and dyspne...

H orton disease or giant-cell arteritis (GCA) is a chronic systemic vasculitis involving typically medium and large arteries. Giant-cell arteritis is a panarteritis characterized by a granulomatous inflammation, with lymphocytes, macro-phages, and multinucleated giant cells related to autoimmune T-cell reactivity. 1 Compared with conventional imaging tools (ultrasound, computed tomography (CT),...

background and objective: alzheimer’s disease (ad) is a multifactorial disease with debilitating consequences and few therapeutic strategies exist for it. with regard to antioxidant capacity and anti-β-amyloid polymerization potential of ellagic acid, this study was conducted to evaluate the effect of this substance on enhanced acetylcholinesterase reactivity in an experimental model of alzheim...

background and objectives: brucella melitensis infection is still a major health problem for human and cattle in developing countries and the middle east. materials and methods: in this study, in order to screen immunogenic candidate antigens for the development of a brucella subunit vaccine, a cytoplasmic protein (dnak) and an outer membrane protein (omp31) of b. melitensis were cloned, expres...

background: several studies reported the clinical features of ige-mediated hypersensitivity after ingestion of melon. melon allergy is a common ige-mediated fruit allergy in iran. this prompted us to investigate immunochemical and molecular properties of the major allergen in melon fruit, to compare the ige-binding capacity of the natural protein with the recombinant allergen, and to determine ...

Chronic hypoxia (CH) is associated with a persistent reduction in systemic vasoconstrictor reactivity. Experiments on aortic ring segments isolated from CH rats suggest that enhanced vascular expression of heme oxygenase (HO) and resultant production of the vasodilator carbon monoxide (CO) may underlie this attenuated vasoreactivity after hypoxia. Similar to the aorta, small arteries from CH ra...

abstract background: renal insufficiency is a potential complication after infrarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm repair and is a significant risk factor for postoperative mortality and morbidity. the aim of this study was to analyze the effect of this risk factor, before and during operation. methods: in this prospective study, between 2003 and 2006, 45 patients underwent repair of an infrarenal...