Aims: To study plasma levels of serum amyloid A protein and C-reactive protein in pregnant women with and without preeclampsia and non-pregnant women. Plasma levels of haptoglobin, orosomucoid and ceruloplasmin were also analyzed. Methods: The study included 295 women with uncomplicated pregnancies, 57 women diagnosed with preeclampsia, and 58 healthy non-pregnant women. Plasma concentrations of a

Structural compromise of the tumor suppressor gene, PTEN occurs in 10% of melanoma specimens and loss of PTEN expression through DNA methylation of the PTEN promoter region has also been reported in a number of other malignancies. However, the role of PTEN promoter methylation in melanoma is not well understood. We thus sought to elucidate the prevalence of PTEN promoter methylation in melanoma sp

Despite the spatially homogenous summer temperaturepattern in Fennoscandia, there are large spreadsamong the many existing reconstructions, resulting in anuncertainty in the timing and amplitude of past changes.Also, there has been a general bias towards northernmostFennoscandia. In an attempt to provide a more spatiallycoherent view of summer (June–August, JJA) temperaturevariability within the l

A new stream cipher, Grain-128, is proposed. The design is very small in hardware and it targets environments with very limited resources in gate count, power consumption, and chip area. Grain-128 supports key size of 128 bits and IV size of 96 bits. The design is very simple and based on two shift registers, one linear and one nonlinear, and an output function

Several ribonucleases of the RNase A family function as antibacterial, anti-parasitic and anti-viral agents. In this work, we have shown that mRNAs encoding five of the six known human ribonucleases of the RNase A family are expressed in cultured human monocytes, and that ribonucleases are released by adherent monocytes in culture. Using a polyclonal antiserum prepared against recombinant protein,

In this paper we address link dimensioning and routing problems related to the area of resilient network design. We present two network design problems that assume different flow restoration schemes used to cope with network failures. In both cases we allow bifurcation of traffic flows in the normal (failure-less) network state. In the case of a failure, we assume that affected primary flows (i.e.

An industrial PI controller with dead-time compensation is presented. The advantage of the new controller compared with other dead-time compensating controllers is that it contains only three adjustable parameters; the gain, the integral time, and the dead time. The simple parametrization is obtained by calculating the process model needed for the dead-time compensation from the controller paramet

Background: Global climate change is already increasing the average temperature and direct heat exposure in many places around the world. Objectives: To assess the potential impact on occupational health and work capacity for people exposed at work to increasing heat due to climate change. Design: A brief review of basic thermal physiology mechanisms, occupational heat exposure guidelines and heat

The prevalence of neurologic and psychiatric diseases has been increasing for decades and, given the moderate therapeutic efficacy and safety profile of existing pharmacological treatments, there is an urgent need for new therapeutic approaches. Nutrition has recently been recognized as an important factor for the prevention and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. The omega-3 polyunsaturated

Introduction: We have previously adapted a clinical linear accelerator (Elekta Precise, Elekta AB) for ultra-high dose rate (UHDR) electron delivery. To enhance reliability in future clinical FLASH radiotherapy trials, the aim of this study was to introduce and evaluate an upgraded beam control system and beam tuning process for safe and precise UHDR delivery. Materials and Methods: The beam contr

Bulk-wave-acoustofluidic devices provide strong acoustic fields and high device efficiency, thereby offering high-throughput capability when processing biological samples. Such devices are typically driven by lead zirconate titanate (PZT) transducers, which contain a high content of lead, inevitably resulting in environmental and biocompatibility issues. Replacing PZT with lead-free piezoelectric

Background and objective:This study aims to enhance the performance of a closed-loop anesthetic depth control system by fusing noise-corrupted clinical measurements with a non-perfect pharmacological model.Methods:We implement a Kalman filter to constitute a trade-off between model prediction and measurement signal dependence for depth of hypnosis (DoH) control using a previously evaluated PID con