BACKGROUND When treating mentally ill criminal offenders, improving medication adherence is essential to achieving goals, such as long-term stabilization of symptoms and the prevention of recidivism. Most subjects who are treated under the Medical Treatment and Supervision Act have schizophrenia, which is considered a particularly difficult disorder for which to improve medication adherence. Fo...

We recently reported that induction of NOD2 by human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) resulted in virus inhibition and upregulation of antiviral and inflammatory cytokines. Here we investigated the effects of muramyl dipeptide (MDP), a bacterial cell wall component that activates NOD2, on HCMV replication and antiviral responses. HCMV infection of human foreskin fibroblasts induced NOD2, the downstream r...

N-Acetyl-muramyl-L-alanyl-D-isoglutamine (MDP), a structurally defined fragment of bacterial peptidoglycan, stimulated significant release of previously incorporated 45Ca from fetal rat bones in tissue culture over the concentration range of 0.1 to 10.0 micrograms/ml. MDP-Stimulated bone resorption was not inhibited by the addition of the prostaglandin synthetase inhibitor indomethacin to the c...

Breast metastasis arising from non mammary malignancy is very rare and occurs in malignant melanomas, sarcomas, lung cancers, ovarian tumors, renal and thyroid carcinomas. Few cases of breast metastasis from myxoid liposarcoma have been reported in the worldwide literature. We report herein a case of a 51-year-old woman with 2-year history of a slowly growing, painless mass of the right proxima...

N-Acetylmuramyl-l-alanyl-d-isoglutamine (MDP) induced the chemotaxis of human blood monocytes without mediation of serum complement. Specificity (dependency on chemical structure) of the chemotactic activity of MDP was evidenced by a negligible activity of analogs lacking most of the immunomodulating activities of MDP.

Background. False-positive pulmonary radioactive iodine uptake in the followup of differentiated thyroid carcinoma has been reported in patients with certain respiratory conditions. Patient Findings. We describe a case of well-differentiated papillary thyroid carcinoma treated by total thyroidectomy and radioiodine ablation therapy. Postablation radioiodine whole body scan and subsequent diagno...

The nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain (NOD)2/CARD15 protein, which senses muramyl dipeptide (MDP), a product of bacterial peptidoglycan, appears to play an important role in regulating intestinal immunity. Although the liver is exposed to gut-derived MDP, the influence of NOD2 ligation on hepatic APC, in particular dendritic cells (DC), is unknown. Freshly isolated mouse liver and splee...

This note re-visits the rolling-horizon control approach to problem of Markov decision process (MDP) with infinite-horizon discounted expected reward criterion. Distinguished from classical value-iteration approaches, we develop an asynchronous on-line algorithm based on policy iteration integrated a multi-policy improvement method switching. A sequence monotonically improving solutions forecas...

When modeling real-world decision-theoretic planning problems in the Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework, it is often impossible to obtain a completely accurate estimate of transition probabilities. For example, natural uncertainty arises in the transition specification due to elicitation of MDP transition models from an expert or estimation from data, or non-stationary transition distribut...

We investigated the influence of muramyl dipeptide (MDP), a cell wall component of Gram-positive bacteria, on cytokine-induced nitric oxide (NO) production in rat primary astrocytes. MDP alone did not induce NO release in astrocyte cultures. However, MDP increased astrocyte NO production and subsequent nitrite accumulation triggered by IFN-gamma. IFN-gamma-activated expression of mRNA for induc...