Medical hypotheses
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Inhaled anesthetics can enhance the effect of neuromuscular blocker, but whether inhaled anesthetics such as sevoflurane have a direct effect on skeletal muscle contractility is unknown. Selectively blocking skeletal muscle may prevent the interference effect of central nervous system. So we decided to evaluate a local application of neuromuscular blocker (NMB) atracurium to prevent the general effect on skeletal muscle. ⋯ Neuromuscular function was recorded for the 4 groups. Neuromuscular function was assessed by acceleromyography measurement of evoked responses to train-of four (TOF) stimuli (2Hz for 2s applied every 12s) at the adductor pollicis using a TOF-Guard™ neuromuscular transmission monitor. If proven, our hypothesis would demonstrate the inhaled anesthetics have no direct effect on contractility but only by increasing the skeletal muscle sensitivity to NMB.
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Keloids and hypertrophic scars are fibroproliferative disorders (FPDs) of the skin that result from abnormal healing of injured or irritated skin. They can be called pathological or inflammatory scars. Common causes are trauma, burn, surgery, vaccination, skin piercing, folliculitis, acne, and herpes zoster infection. ⋯ Thus, primary scars are caused by congenital endothelial dysfunction (e.g., a mutation prevents endothelial gaps from closing smoothly) while secondary scars are caused by endothelial dysfunction that results from aging, arterial sclerosis, and/or repeated/very strong local mechanical forces. We expect that primary keloids develop at younger ages and tend to become severe, while secondary keloids are seen in all ages and can vary in clinical severity. Thus, abnormal blood vessel regulation may underlie keloid and hypertrophic scar pathogenesis, which suggests that inhibiting abnormal angiogenesis and vascular hyperpermeability may be an important therapeutic approach.
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According to recent surveys performed in United States and India, anesthesia care providers were observed to have sired female offspring in a higher proportion than male offspring as their firstborn progeny; however, the reasons for the skew are not clear. Our hypothesis is that the underlying biological evidence may be elucidated by unraveling differences (if any) between the concentrations of X-bearing sperms and Y-bearing sperms in the semen samples obtained from males exposed to varied levels of anesthetics in their lifetimes. ⋯ The expected outcomes would be (a) linear and positive correlation of the anesthetic gas usage (exposure) with increased X-bearing sperms/Y-bearing sperms ratio in post-anesthesia day 3 sample as compared to the baseline preoperative sample, (b) linear and positive correlation of the anesthetic gas usage (exposure) with increased X-bearing sperms/Y-bearing sperms ratio in post-rotation sample as compared to the baseline sample, and (c) observation of high X-bearing sperms/Y-bearing sperms ratio in the pediatric anesthesia care providers. In summary, effects (if any) of occupational or personal exposure to inhalational anesthetic gases on the X-bearing sperms and Y-bearing sperms ratio is a worthy project wherein lots of questions that have arisen over decades could find the path to their definitive answers, based on envisaged laboratory investigations into this uncharted domain.
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Addiction is a chronic compulsion and relapsing disorder. It involves several brain areas and circuits, which encode vary functions such as reward, motivation, and memory. Drug addiction is defined as a "pathological pattern of use of a substance", characterized by the loss of control on drug-taking-related behaviors, the pursuance of those behaviors even in the presence of negative consequences, and a strong motivated activity to assume substances. ⋯ Recently, it has been suggested that common neural systems may be activated by natural and pharmacological stimuli, raising the hypotheses that binge-eating disorders could be considered as addictive behaviors. The second goal of this study is to present evidences in order to highlight a possible psycho-bio-physiological superimposition between drug and "food addiction". Finally, interesting questions are brought up starting from last findings about a theoretical/psycho-bio-physiological superimposition between drug and "food addiction" and their possibly same transitionality along the same "temporal continuum" from use to abuse of addictive substances in order to investigate new therapeutic strategies based on new therapeutic strategies based on the individual moments characterizing the transition from the voluntary intake of substances to the maladaptive addictive behavior.
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In all mammalian species studied to date, the initiation of oocyte activation is orchestrated through alterations in intracellular calcium (Ca(2+)) signaling. Upon sperm binding to the oocyte plasma membrane, a sperm-associated phospholipase C (PLC) isoform, PLC zeta (PLCζ), is released into the oocyte cytoplasm. PLCζ hydrolyzes phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) to produce diacylglycerol (DAG), which activates protein kinase C (PKC), and inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3), which induces the release of Ca(2+) from endoplasmic reticulum (ER) Ca(2+) stores. ⋯ It is our hypothesis that AMPK activation represents a central node linking T cell activation-induced latent HIV-1 reactivation and both physiological and artificial oocyte activation. We further propose the novel observation that various compounds that have been shown to reactivate latent HIV-1 (e.g. PMA, ionomycin, metformin, bryostatin, resveratrol, etc.) or activate oocytes (PMA, ionomycin, ethanol, puromycin, etc.) either alone or in combination likely do so via stress-induced activation of AMPK.