BACKGROUND Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is associated with severe cardiovascular complications. The T50 score is a novel functional blood test quantifying calcification propensity in serum. High calcification propensity (or low T50) is a strong and independent determinant of all-cause mortality in various patient populations. METHODS A total of 168 patients with ≥ 4 American College of ...

Renal interstitial fibrosis and arterial lesions predict loss of function in chronic kidney disease. Noninvasive estimation of interstitial fibrosis and vascular lesions is currently not available. The aim of the study was to determine whether phosphocalcic markers are associated with, and can predict, renal chronic histological changes. We included 129 kidney allograft recipients with an avail...

Medial arterial calcification is accelerated in patients with CKD and strongly associated with increased arterial rigidity and cardiovascular mortality. Recently, a novel in vitro blood test that provides an overall measure of calcification propensity by monitoring the maturation time (T50) of calciprotein particles in serum was described. We used this test to measure serum T50 in a prospective...

BACKGROUND Calciprotein particles (CPPs) may play an important role in the calcification process. The calcification propensity of serum (T50) is highly predictive of all-cause mortality in chronic kidney disease patients. Whether T50 is therapeutically improvable, by high-flux hemodialysis (HD) or hemodiafiltration (HDF), has not been studied yet. METHODS We designed a cross-sectional single ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of low blood glucose on thrombin generation and fibrin clot properties in type 2 diabetes (T2DM). METHODS In 165 patients with T2DM and high cardiovascular risk, we measured ex vivo plasma fibrin clot permeation [Ks], turbidity and efficiency of fibrinolysis including clot lysis time [t50%], together with thrombin generation and platelet activation markers ...

Morphological and physiological alterations occur in the digestive system of weanling piglets, compromising the performance in subsequent phases. This experiment aimed at verifying the influence of glutamine, glutamate and nucleotides on the carbon turnover in the pancreas and liver of piglets weaned at 21 days of age. Four diets were evaluated: glutamine, glutamic acid or nucleotides-free diet...

Comparison of the linear coefficients from the regression analysis of 307 blast (Pyricularia grisea) disease progress curves of 42 rice genotypes, tested over a period of nine seasons, were made by fitting into the logistic and Gompertz models. The regression parameters Yintercept (a), regression coefficient (b), its standard error (SEb), coefficient of determination (R) and the time required f...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This study explored the correlation between duration of focal ischemia and infarct volume in spontaneously hypertensive rats as a measure of outcome after neuroprotective intervention. METHODS We used 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride staining to discriminate infarcted tissue and calculate infarct volume 24 hours after temporary tandem common carotid/middle cerebral a...

A 2(3) factorial experimental design has been used to quantitatively study individual and interaction effects of the nature of binder (N), binder concentration (c) and relative density of tablet (d) on the disintegration time (DT) and dissolution times, t1, t50 and t90, of paracetamol tablet formulations. The factorial design was also used to study the quantitative effects of pregelatinization ...