Children have unusual patterns of exposure to environmental chemicals, and they have vulnerabilities that are quite distinct from those of adults. Increasingly, children's exposures to chemicals in the environment are understood to contribute to the causation and exacerbation of certain chronic, disabling diseases in children including asthma, cancer, birth defects, and neurobehavioral dysfunct...

Background: Occupational noise-induced hearing loss (ONIHL) is a hearing disorder that affects workers all over the world. Preconditioning with several mild or less potent stressors will effectively prevent the development of noise-induced hearing loss. This study investigated the possible preventive effects of normobaric hyperoxia preconditioning on preventing the noise-induced hearing impairm...

Previous evidence reviewed in Schizophrenia Bulletin suggests the importance of a range of different environmental factors in the development of psychotic illness. It is unlikely, however, that the diversity of environmental influences associated with schizophrenia can be linked to as many different underlying mechanisms. There is evidence that environmental exposures may induce, in interaction...

Objective(s): Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is the major cause of acquired hearing loss.  Celecoxib, a cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitor, is a non- steroidal anti- inflammatory drug (NSAID) with known antioxidant and antineoplastic activity. Therefore, we monitored the extent of temporary noise- induced threshold shifts (TTS) and cochlear damage caused by high level 4- kHz noise exposure t...

In the present study, interactions between lead exposure with nitric oxide precursor (L-arginine) or nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitor (L-NAME) on naloxone-induced jumping and diarrhea in morphine-dependent mice were examined. Chronic lead acetate (0.05%) exposure altered naloxone-induced jumping and diarrhea in mice. Jumping was decreased after 7 days and was unchanged 14 and 28 days after...

A well-quasi-order is an order which contains no infinite decreasing sequence and no infinite collection of incomparable elements. In this paper, we consider graph classes defined by excluding one graph as contraction. More precisely, we give a complete characterization of graphs H such that the class of H-contraction-free graphs is well-quasi-ordered by the contraction relation. This result is...

In this paper we focus on problems which do not admit a constant-factor approximation in polynomial time and explore how quickly their approximability improves as the allowed running time is gradually increased from polynomial to (sub-)exponential. We tackle a number of problems: For Min Independent Dominating Set, Max Induced Path, Forest and Tree, for any r(n), a simple, known scheme gives an...

If the permutation action ρI is transitive, all factors Xi are quasiisometric to each other, and the restricted quasi-actions Gi y Xi are quasi-conjugate (when identifying different stabilizers Gi by inner automorphisms of G). The main result of this note is that in this case any of the quasi-actions Gi y Xi determines ρ up to quasi-conjugacy, and moreover any quasi-conjugacy class may arise as...