BACKGROUND Cervical laminoplasty (CLP) and posterior cervical laminectomy and fusion (CLF) are well-established surgical procedures used in the treatment of cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM). In situations of clinical equipoise, an influential factor in procedural decision making could be the economic effect of the chosen procedure. The object of this study is to compare and analyze the tot...

Background: Sepsis is a life-threatening complication of infections. Despite improvement in the management of septic patients, none of the current therapies are entirely effective. Ghrelin has been shown to possess anti-inflammatory properties together with prokinetic activity. The aim of this work was to study the effect of administration of ghrelin on outcome of sepsis induced by cecal ligati...

The present study addressed the role of IL-12 in a murine model of septic peritonitis, induced by cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). Although CLP surgery induced IL-12 production at 6 and 24 h after surgery, IL-12 immunoneutralization was clearly deleterious in this model: 54% of CLP mice receiving preimmune serum survived, whereas mice administered IL-12 antisera prior to CLP experienced a 25%...

Defective cardiac function during sepsis has been referred to as "cardiomyopathy of sepsis." It is known that sepsis leads to intensive activation of the complement system. In the current study, cardiac function and cardiomyocyte contractility have been evaluated in rats after cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). Significant reductions in left ventricular pressures occurred in vivo and in cardiom...

We propose to use Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) for the specification and implementation of Qualitative Reasoning (QR) problems that are specialized Constraint Satisfaction Problems . The use of CLP has two advantages : (i) CLP gives a well defined and understood logical framework for the problem specification, and (ii) CLP is not only a logical framework, it is also a family oflanguages s...

Homing of bone marrow (BM)-derived progenitors to the thymus is essential for T cell development. We have previously reported that two subpopulations of common lymphoid progenitors, CLP-1 and CLP-2, coexist in the BM and give rise to lymphocytes. We demonstrate that CLP-2 migrate to the thymus more efficiently than any other BM-derived progenitors. Short-term adoptive transfer experiments revea...

Clp-controlled proteolysis in Bacillus subtilis seems to play a substantial role, particularly under stress conditions. Calibrated Western blot analyses were used to estimate the approximate numbers of heat-inducible Clp molecules within a single cell. According to these numbers, the different Clp ATPases do not seem to compete for the proteolytic subunit ClpP. Coimmunoprecipitation experiments...

In this paper we propose a complete scheme for automatic exploitation of independent and-parallelism in CLP programs. We first discuss the new problems involved because of the different properties of the independence notions applicable to CLP. We then show how independence can be derived from a number of standard analysis domains for CLP. Finally, we perform a preliminary evaluation of the effi...

OBJECTIVES To establish a Community-Based Model for Speech Therapy in Thailand and to implement it. MATERIALS AND METHOD The development of a Community-Based Model for Speech Therapy was based on the principles of primary healthcare, community-based rehabilitation and institutional sharing. Workshops for speech and language pathologists (SLPs), including "Training for Trainers" and six "Smart...