BACKGROUND Obesity can affect the cardiac autonomic modulation, blood lipid levels and the physical capacity. OBJECTIVE To study the effect of obesity on the heart rate variability (HRV), blood lipid levels and physical capacity of obese children. METHODS Thirty children aged 9 to 11 years were studied, divided in two groups: a) 15 obese children (O) aged 10.2 +/- 0.7 years and body mass in...

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a useful clinical tool for autonomic function assessment and cardiovascular diseases diagnosis. It is traditionally calculated from a dedicated medical electrocardiograph (ECG). In this paper, we demonstrate that HRV can also be extracted from photoplethysmograms (PPG) obtained by the camera of a smartphone. Sixteen HRV parameters, including time-domain, frequenc...

The iron-binding protein lactoferrin (Lf) present in blood is metabolized by the liver. Isolated rat hepatocytes vigorously endocytose bovine Lf via recycling Ca2(+)-dependent binding sites, but the uptake of iron from Lf by hepatocytes has not been examined. In this study, isolated rat hepatocytes were incubated with radiolabelled bovine Lf (125I-Lf, 59Fe-Lf or 125I-59Fe-Lf) at 37 degrees C, t...

This study focuses on the interplay between mean sea level pressure (MSLP), sea surface temperature (SST), and wind and cloudiness anomalies over the Indian Ocean in seasonal composite sequences prior to, during, and after strong, near-global El Niño and La Niña episodes. It then examines MSLP and SST anomalies in the 2–2.5-year quasi-biennial (QB) and 2.5–7-year low-frequency (LF) bands that c...

We select a close “major-merger candidate” galaxy pair sample in order to calculate the Ks luminosity function (LF) and pair fraction representative of the merger/interaction component of galaxy evolution in the local universe. The pair sample (projected separation 5 h kpc ≤ r ≤ 20 h kpc, Ks-band magnitude difference ∆Ks ≤ 1 mag) is selected by combining the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) wi...

The high-cadence survey of Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has completely dominated the discovery tidal disruption events (TDEs) in past few years and resulted largest sample TDEs with optical/UV light curves well-sampled around their peaks, providing us an excellent opportunity to construct a peak luminosity function (LF) flares (TDFs). new construction is necessary particularly considering th...