Shisha (waterpipe) smoking is becoming a more prevalent form of tobacco consumption, and is growing worldwide, particularly among the young generation in the Middle East. This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the effects of shisha smoking on lung functions and Fractional Exhaled Nitric Oxide (FeNO) among Saudi young adults. We recruited 146 apparently healthy male subjects (73 control a...

The role of airway inflammation in ventilated preterm newborns and the risk factors associated with the development of chronic lung disease are not well understood. Our objective was to analyze the association of the airway inflammatory response in ventilated preterm infants by serial measurements of TNF-alpha and IL-10 in tracheobronchial lavage (TBL) with perinatal factors and lung function m...

BACKGROUND Decreasing exposure to airborne particulates was previously associated with reduced age-related decline in lung function. However, whether the benefit from improved air quality depends on genetic background is not known. Recent evidence points to the involvement of the genes p53 and p21 and of the cell cycle control gene cyclin D1 (CCND1) in the response of bronchial cells to air pol...

Forced expiratory flow (FEF) at low lung volumes are supposed to be better at detecting lung-function impairment in asthmatic children than a forced volume. The aim of this study was to examine whether FEF results could modify the interpretation of baseline and post-bronchodilator spirometry in asthmatic schoolchildren in whom forced expiratory volumes are within the normal range. Spirometry, w...

A cascade of neuronal signals precedes each saccadic eye movement to targets in the visual scene. In the cerebral cortex, this neuronal processing culminates in the frontal eye field (FEF), where neurons have bursts of activity before the saccade. This presaccadic activity is typically considered to drive downstream activity in the intermediate layers of the superior colliculus (SC), which rece...

BACKGROUND To elucidate the role of prenatal, neonatal and early postnatal variables in influencing the achievement of full enteral feeding (FEF) in very low birth weight (VLBW) infants and to determine whether neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) differ in this outcome. METHODS Population-based retrospective cohort study using data on 1,864 VLBW infants drawn from the "Emilia-Romagna Perina...

Macaque frontal eye fields (FEF) and the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) are high-level oculomotor control centers that have been implicated in the allocation of spatial attention. Electrical microstimulation of macaque FEF elicits functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activations in area LIP, but no study has yet investigated the effect of FEF microstimulation on LIP at the single-cell...

This paper proposes the Fixed Effects Filtered (FEF) and Fixed Effects Filtered instrumental variable (FEF-IV) estimators for estimation and inference in the case of time-invariant effects in static panel data models when N is large and T is fixed. The FEF-IV allows for endogenous time-invariant regressors but assumes that there exists a suffi cient number of instruments for such regressors. It...

The primate visual system consists of at least two processing streams, one passing ventrally into temporal cortex that is responsible for object vision, and the other running dorsally into parietal cortex that is responsible for spatial vision. How information from these two streams is combined for perception and action is not understood. Visually guided eye movements require information about ...