The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of different auto-antibodies in adult, French cystic fibrosis (CF) patients and to look for a correlation between autoimmunity, patient characteristics and survival. The sera of 144 patients were screened for a wide range of antibodies. Clinical, biological and bacteriological characteristics and the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance...

A n 80-year-old man presented with chronic pain in the epigastrium. An upper gastrointestinal endoscopy with esophageal biopsy was performed. Histopathologic sections showed Barrett’s mucosa (panel A; original magnification 320, hematoxylin and eosin stain) with marked plasmacytic infiltrate laden with numerous Russell bodies in the lamina propria (panel B; original magnification 340, hematoxyl...

The presence of RFID technology in every-day life is expected to become a reality in the near future. Yet, as RFID tags enter consumer households and threaten to identify their owners’ belongings, whereabouts and habits concerns arise about the maintenance of privacy. People are afraid of being ‘scanned’ or tracked with the help of a technology that is invisible to them and not under their cont...

This paper analyzes the dispute between Thailand and the United States regarding the method of calculating the anti-dumping duty on polyethylene retail carrier bags from Thailand. In December 2006, after a series of WTO Appellate Body reports, the United States ceased zeroing in original investigations. The United States implemented the policy change prospectively, that is only for future cases...

All tumor cell lines that have been tested are defective for Myc auto-repression, and have high levels of Myc produced from wild type loci and re-arranged loci. Like mammalian Myc auto-repression, Myc protein represses the expression of its gene, dmyc, in Drosophila. This activity requires Polycomb (Pc), since RNAi for Pc in the embryo eliminates Myc auto-repression. We have observed that upon ...

Patients undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT) with reduced intensity conditioning (RIC) for multiple myeloma (MM) experience a high frequency of extra-medullary relapses (EMR) (20–37%). This study aims at determining factors predictive for EMR after allo-SCT, prognosis of EMR and efficacy of salvage therapies. We retrospectively analyzed a continuous cohort of 79 patients ...

To assess the ability of traditional Chinese medicine Cistanches Herba extract (CHE) to prevent bone loss in the ovariectomized (OVX) rat, Cistanches Herba extract (CHE) was administered intragastrically to the rats. Female rats were anesthetized with pentobarbital sodium (40 mg kg(-1), i.p.), and their ovaries were removed bilaterally. The rats in the sham-operated group were anesthetized, lap...

The differential diagnosis across different variants of degenerative diseases is sometimes controversial. This study aimed to validate a qualitative scoring method for the pentagons copy test (QSPT) of Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) based on the assessment of different parameters of the pentagons drawing, such as number of angles, distance/intersection, closure/opening, rotation, closing-...

AIMS The newer insertable loop recorder device (Reveal Plus 9526, Medtronic Inc, Minneapolis MN, U.S.A.) is equipped with auto-activation capabilities. In this study we investigated whether the new device encounters sensitivity problems in the form of oversensing or undersensing. We also tested whether body position changes influence the sensed electrogram's amplitude, therefore affecting the d...