The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis is a major neuroendocrine pathway that modulates the stress response. The glucocorticoid, cortisol, is the principal end product of the HPA axis in humans and plays a fundamental role in maintaining homeostasis and in fetal maturation and development. Antenatal administration of synthetic glucocorticoids (GCs) accelerates fetal lung maturatio...

[1] We quantify the vertical velocity and upward mass flux in the tropical lower stratosphere on the basis of accurate radiative heating rate calculations using 8-year Southern Hemisphere Additional Ozonesondes balloon-borne measurements of temperature and ozone and cryogenic frost-point hygrometer measured water vapor in the tropics (15 S—10 N). The impact of tropospheric clouds on the stratos...

Nicotine is a strong activator of the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis. Smoking of only two cigarettes consistently activates the HPA axis of habitual smokers. However, while being a habitual smoker only induces small changes of basal HPA axis activity, smoking induces an attenuated responsiveness of the HPA axis to psychological stress, but not to injection of corticotropin releasing ...

Regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is critical for adaptation to environmental changes. The principle regulator of the HPA axis is corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH), which is made in the parventricular nucleus and is an important target of negative feedback by glucocorticoids. However, the molecular mechanisms that regulate CRH are not fully understood. Disruption ...

Within this study we present a robust method for generating precipitation time series for the Anas catchment in North Western India. The method employs a multivariate stochastic simulation model that is driven by a time series of objectively classified circulation patterns (CPs). In a companion study (Zehe et al., 2006) it was already shown that CPs classified from the 500 or 700 Hpa levels are...

Background: Asthma is recognized as a common cause of disability, of great economic cost, and of preventable deaths. In this study we aimed to test our hypothesis to evaluate the relationship between the Human Platelet Antigen-1(HPA-1) polymorphism and bronchial asthma and its severity, which would suggest genetic variances that may be responsible for expression or activation of these receptors...

Exposure to stress during critical periods in development can have severe long-term consequences, increasing overall risk on psychopathology. One of the key stress response systems mediating these long-term effects of stress is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis; a cascade of central and peripheral events resulting in the release of corticosteroids from the adrenal glands. Activation...

Sir, Platelets and neutrophil antigen systems play important roles in immune-mediated disorders, since the respective alloantibodies and autoantibodies mediate immune thrombocytopenia and granulocytopenia. Serologic typing for human platelet antigen (HPA) and neutrophil-antigen (NA) systems is well developed but good quality sera are available only in a few specialized laboratories while DNA ba...