OBJECTIVES To evaluate the risk of aortic aneurysm in patients with giant cell arteritis (GCA) compared with age-, gender- and location-matched controls. METHODS A UK General Practice Research Database (GPRD) parallel cohort study of 6999 patients with GCA and 41 994 controls, matched on location, age and gender, was carried out. A competing risk model using aortic aneurysm as the primary out...

MMP-12, a novel matrix metalloproteinase associated with giant cell arteritis SIR, Identification of specific mediators of arterial damage in GCA is crucial to understand its pathogenesis, and may have important clinical implications both for diagnosis and treatment. Thirty-two non-consecutive patients who underwent a temporal artery biopsy for evaluation of GCA were included in this study. Nin...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Thrombospondin-1(TSP1) is an inhibitor of angiogenesis and its promoter hypermethylation has been found resulting in gene silencing in some primary human carcinomas. This study was to investigate the promoter methylation of TSP1 and its correlation with TGF-beta1 level and T cell immunity in gastric cardia adenocarcinoma (GCA). METHODS Methylation specific polymerase ...

Gastric cardia adenocarcinoma (GCA)is one of the few malignancies with unexplained reasons that have increased sharply in developed countries. The purpose of this review was to determine the pathways in GCA to identify new biomarker. So by comparing gene expression in GCA group with normal control identified important pathways. Gene expression data were extracted from the beforehand investigati...

Volatile anaesthetics are known to increase leakage of calcium from the light fraction of skeletal sarcoplasmic reticulum (L-SR) which has no calcium release channels. To explore the role of the lipid environment, we have examined the effect of volatile anaesthetics on calcium conductance (gCa) of lipid membranes. Planar lipid bilayers were formed with a mixture of synthetic phospholipids and c...

Giant cell arteritis (GCA) is a granulomatous and occlusive vasculitis that causes blindness, stroke, and aortic aneurysm. CD4(+) T cells are selectively activated in the adventitia of affected arteries. In human GCA artery-severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) mouse chimeras, depletion of CD83(+) dendritic cells (DCs) abrogated vasculitis, suggesting that DCs are critical antigen-presenting ...

BACKGROUND The diagnosis of giant cell arteritis (GCA) is often confirmed by an early temporal artery (TA) biopsy of adequate length. Treatment of this condition with high-dose corticosteroids may be associated with significant morbidity, including osteoporosis. AIM To audit current management of patients with suspected GCA at Auckland Healthcare, a large teaching hospital. METHODS We perfo...