OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to determine whether a decrease in sexual desire is more prevalent among women using hormonal contraception than among women using hormone-free contraception, and whether a decrease increases the risk of changing to another contraceptive method. METHODS A validated questionnaire was posted to 3740 women (aged 22, 25 or 28 years) living in Sweden. Descriptiv...

BACKGROUND Mean duration of recent infection (MDRI) and misclassification of long-term HIV-1 infections, as proportion false recent (PFR), are critical parameters for laboratory-based assays for estimating HIV-1 incidence. Recent review of the data by us and others indicated that MDRI of LAg-Avidity EIA estimated previously required recalibration. We present here results of recalibration effort...

The nature and spectroscopic expression of external surface sites zeolites, in particular ZSM-5, is a long-debated question. Herein, we use three cutting-edge techniques: Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) with Fourier self-deconvolution (FSD), high magnetic field proton NMR under fast magic-angle spinning (MAS) periodic boundary Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations to study...

Nearly 30% of women with early-stage breast cancer develop recurrent disease attributed to resistance to systemic therapy. Prevailing models of chemotherapy failure describe three resistant phenotypes: cells with alterations in transmembrane drug transport, increased detoxification and repair pathways, and alterations leading to failure of apoptosis. Proliferative activity correlates with tumor...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Capture-recapture (CRC) analysis is recommended for estimating the prevalence of problem drug use or people who inject drugs (PWID). We aim to demonstrate how naive application of CRC can lead to highly misleading results, and to suggest how the problems might be overcome. METHODS We present a case study of estimating the prevalence of PWID in Bristol, UK, applying CRC to ...

The inducible arginine decarboxylase of Escherichia coli, a pyridoxal-P enzyme, has been purified to a specific activity of 410 pmoles of COz per min per mg. It can be crystallized from ammonium sulfate solutions without increase in specific activity, sediments as a single species in the analytical ultracentrifuge, and shows only slight impurities on acrylamide gel electrophoresis. Its preferre...

Background: Thoracic aortic aneurysm (TAA) is an aortopathy that predisposes to life-threatening dissection. Autosomal dominant disorders associated with TAA include Marfan syndrome (FBN1), Loeys-Dietz (TGFBR1/2, SMAD3, TGFB2), and vascular type Ehlers-Danlos (COL3A1). Our objective was identify single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in these six genes within the transcriptomes of primary cells acqu...

KAT1 is a voltage-dependent inward rectifying K+ channel cloned from the higher plant Arabidopsis thaliana [Anderson, J. A., Huprikar, S. S., Kochian, L. V., Lucas, W. J. & Gaber, R. F. (1992) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 89, 3736-3740]. It is related to the Shaker superfamily of K+ channels characterized by six transmembrane spanning domains (S1-S6) and a putative pore-forming region between S5 ...

AIMS Recent secondary prevention trials have failed to demonstrate a beneficial effect of n-3 fatty acids on cardiovascular outcomes, which may be due to the growing use of statins since the mid-1990s. The aim of the present study was to assess whether statins modify the effects of n-3 fatty acids on major adverse cardiovascular events in patients with a history of myocardial infarction (MI). ...

Background: In previous reports, the patients are described to have transient symptoms from physiologic rotation or extension of the cervical spine, resulting from a cervical osteophyte compressing the vertebral artery and causing vertebral artery insufficiency, known as Bow Hunter syndrome. Methods: An 85-year-old female presented with new onset occipital headaches, nausea, vomiting and vertig...