Expression of smooth-muscle actin in cultured cells from human plasmacytoid myoepithelioma

BACKGROUND: Endoscopic sclerotherapy (ST), widely used as treatment of bleeding esophageal varices, might cause motility disturbances of the esophagus as well as mucosal damage. We performed this study to evaluate the long-term effects of repeated sclerotherapy on esophageal motility and mucosa. METHODS: Ten patients with liver cirrhosis and bleeding esophageal varices treated with repeated ST were evaluated after the last ST, median 52 months, by esophageal manometry and gastroscopy where forceps biopsies were taken. RESULTS: We found a significant difference in the distal esophageal sphincter intraabdominal length. The distal esophageal sphincter pressure was somewhat lower in the ST group although the difference did not reach statistical significance. There was infiltration of neutrophil leukocytes in biopsies from four patients and normal findings in the rest. CONCLUSIONS: Long-term follow-up evaluation showed statistically longer distal esophageal intraabdominal length in the ST group. No mucosal alterations were found at the histopathological investigation.     

A PET study of the neural systems of stuttering

The cause of stuttering is unknown. Failure to develop left-hemispheric dominance for speech is a long-standing theory although others implicated the motor system more broadly, often postulating hyperactivity of the right (language nondominant) cerebral hemisphere. As knowledge of motor circuitry has advanced, theories of stuttering have become more anatomically specific, postulating hyperactivity of premotor cortex, either directly or through connectivity with the thalamus and basal ganglia. Alternative theories target the auditory and speech production systems. By contrasting stuttering with fluent speech using positron emission tomography combined with chorus reading to induce fluency, we found support for each of these hypotheses. Stuttering induced widespread overactivations of the motor system in both cerebrum and cerebellum, with right cerebral dominance. Stuttered reading lacked left-lateralized activations of the auditory system, which are thought to support the self-monitoring of speech, and selectively deactivated a frontal-temporal system implicated in speech production. Induced fluency decreased or eliminated the overactivity in most motor areas, and largely reversed the auditory-system underactivations and the deactivation of the speech production system. Thus stuttering is a disorder affecting the multiple neural systems used for speaking.     

The effect of partial substitution of nb for v on austenite grain size and hardness of a tool steel

In the present work, the composition of H- 13 tool steel was modified with respect to the vanadium content to include an addition of niobium to obtain improved austenite grain size control without altering the tempering response of the steel. Optical metallography and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observation of extraction replicas showed that the new steel had a smaller austenite grain size and a finer carbide size distribution than the vanadium steel, which indicates a higher potential toughness.     

Lyapunov equation for infinite-dimensional discrete bilinear systems

Mean-square stability for discrete systems requires that uniform convergence is preserved between input and state correlation sequences. Such a convergence preserving property holds for an infinite-dimensional bilinear system if and only if the associate Lyapunov equation has a unique strictly positive solution.     

Electrical and magnetic properties of Polystyrene doped with Iron nanoparticles

Summary Polymer composites have recently received a considerable amount of scientific and technological interest, because their properties can be properly controlled, choosing the adequate doped particles, their size and concentrations, and the synthesis conditions. In this work we report the synthesis and characterization of a polystyrene (PS) matrix doped with different concentrations of iron nanoparticles. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy were used to characterize the structure of the samples. The behaviour of the d.c. electrical conductivity (σ_dc) and the complex permittivity (ε*=ε^′-iε^′′) as a function of frequency (100 Hz–10 MHz) reflects the important effect of the iron nanoparticles concentration in the sample properties. A percolation threshold in the conductivity was observed at a critical concentration of iron nanoparticles. A noticeable increase in the saturation magnetization and coercivity is observed with the rise of the iron nanoparticles concentration, being thisbehaviour also noticed in the remanent magnetization. A rise of the initial a.c. susceptibility with the iron concentration is also observed.     

Scale‐up and Spouting of Two‐Dimensional Beds

The objective of this paper is to present an analysis on the scale‐up procedure of two‐dimensional spouted beds. The task was carried out with three different beds measuring 0.15, 0.30 and 0.80 in width. The conditions of scale‐up were studied through geometrical similitude analysis. Some parameters of scale were adimensionalised, tested and validated in order to propose relationships capable of predicting values of dependent properties. Those relationships should be followed in a prototype of an equipment of industrial scale. The study permitted the development of correlations to predict values of maximum pressure drop, minimum spout velocity and maximum height of spouting.     

The Gender Congruency Effect and the Selection of Freestanding and Bound Morphemes: Evidence From Croatian.

The authors report 3 picture-word interference experiments in which they explore some properties of the agreement process in speech production. In Experiment 1, Croatian speakers were asked to produce utterances in which the noun's gender value had an impact on the selection of gender-marked freestanding morphemes (pronouns) while ignoring the presentation of same- or different-gender distractor words. In Experiments 2 and 3, Croatian speakers were asked to name the same pictures using noun phrases in which the noun's gender value surfaced as an inflectional suffix. Different-gender distractors interfered more than same-gender distractors (the gender congruency effect) in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 and 3. These contrasting results show that the cause of the gender congruency effect is not at the level where lexical-grammatical information is selected but at the level of selection of freestanding morphemes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sporadic visceral myopathy with inclusion bodies. A light-microscopic and ultrastructural study

We report the clinical and pathologic findings of two patients with sporadic visceral myopathy. Both presented with chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction that necessitated colectomy. Microscopically, typical changes of primary visceral myopathy were present, including variable fibrous replacement of the muscularis externa and vacuolar degeneration of myocytes. In addition, the muscle cells contained cytoplasmic inclusions that have only been recently reported in visceral myopathy. These inclusions were numerous and easily visible in routine hematoxylin-eosin-stained sections but greatly enhanced by periodic acid-Schiff staining. They were reactive immunohistochemically at their periphery and were seen to be myofibrils at various stages of degeneration on electron microscopy. Inclusions were present in both muscularis externae and muscularis mucosae and were identified in mucosal biopsy specimens, providing a means of diagnosing this type of myopathic change on endoscopic biopsies.