OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS We investigated how study design affects the rate of recovery in Bell's palsy. STUDY DESIGN Prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicenter trial. METHODS Data were extracted from the Scandinavian Bell's palsy study, which included 829 patients. The study design was factorial; 416 patients given prednisolone, 413 not given prednisolone, 413 patie...

OBJECTIVE To review evidence relating to the consumption of whole grains and healthy body weight (BW). DESIGN Systematic review and analysis of observational studies reporting whole-grain consumption and measures of BW and adiposity, including the effect on macronutrient intakes and lifestyle factors. SETTING Medline and other databases were searched for the period 1990 to 2006 to produce a...

Autoimmune disease occurs when a specific adaptive immune response is mounted against self-antigen(s) and immune-mediated tissue damage sustained until the self-antigen eliminated. We recently identified immunogenic cell death via necroptosis in hair follicle (HF) epithelium as primary initiating mechanism alopecia areata (AA). Here, we aimed to identify major target cells of T cell-mediated cy...

BACKGROUND Recently, there have been a few reports of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) cases with anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene fusion. In this study, we screened consecutively resected RCCs from a single institution for ALK protein expression by immunohistochemistry, and then we performed fluorescence in situ hybridization to confirm the ALK gene alteration in ALK immunohistochemistry-positi...

Mutations in PKD1 (85%) or PKD2 (15%) account for almost all cases of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD). The ADPKD proteins, termed as polycystin-1 (PC1) and polycystin-2 (PC2), interact via their C-termini to form a receptor-ion channel complex whose function and regulation are not fully understood. Here, we report the first phosphorylated residue (Ser(829)) in PC2, whose de...

heterogeneity in intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. Gut 2003;52:1025–9. 24 Mullenbach R, Bennett A, Tetlow N, Patel N et al. ATP8B1 mutations in British cases with intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. Gut 2005;54:829–34. 25 Ch’ng CL, Morgan M, Kingham JG. Obstetric cholestasis in South Wales. Gut 2002;50(Suppl II):A114. 26 Williamson C, Hems LM, Goulis DG, Walker I et al. Clinical outcome...

the Sand R-enantiomer, has been used as an anticoagulant agent. The anticoagulant activity of S-warfarin is 3—5 times as great as that of R-warfarin. Warfarin is highly bound to Site I, a warfarin binding site, in the human serum albumin (HSA) molecule (97—99%). The unbound fraction of warfarin is increased by the displacement of the binding site caused by the coadministration of several drugs....