Adv Exp Med Biol
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Biography Historical Article
Fire-air and dephlogistication. Revisionisms of oxygen's discovery.
Americans are taught that Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen in 1774 and promptly brought that news to Lavoisier. Lavoisier proved that air contained a new element, oxygen, which combined with hydrogen to make water. He disproved the phlogiston theory but Priestley called it dephlogisticated air until his death 30 years later. ⋯ In the new time-lapse play "Oxygen" set in Stockholm in both 18th and 21st centuries, in 1774, blame falls on Lavoisier's wife who hid Scheele's letter in hopes of giving her husband sole credit for discovering oxygen. In 2001, four Nobel committee panelists cannot agree which should receive the first "Retro-Nobel Prize" for the greatest discovery of all time: Priestley, Scheele or Lavoisier or all three. The audience is asked to choose.
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In summary, therapy with opioids is an exciting new development for arthritis especially since there is the potential for fewer side effects from molecules which act outside the CNS. We found kappa-opioid drugs to be powerfully anti-inflammatory, reducing disease severity by as much as 80%; attenuating arthritis in a dose-dependent, stereoselective, antagonist-reversible manner. By contrast opioids acting at other receptors were only therapeutic at near toxic doses. ⋯ The increased potency of kappa-opioids in females is likely to be a significant advantage for treatment of inflammatory disease with these agents. Thus our work supports the findings of Stein's group, that opioids do indeed have powerful actions in the periphery via specific receptors at that site. Peripherally acting opioids may prove to be a potent new treatment for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers in the future.
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Since some important forms of brain injury in premature infants are caused in considerable part by disturbances in cerebral blood flow (CBF), it is important to be able to detect whether the cerebrovascular autoregulation, the mechanism by which CBF is maintained constant despite alterations in mean arterial blood pressure (MAP), is working properly. A recent study suggested that concordant changes in MAP and cerebral intravascular oxygenation (HbD), measured non-invasively by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) as the difference between the concentration changes of oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO2) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (Hb), reflect impaired cerebrovascular autoregulation. ⋯ The concordance between MAP and HbD was quantitated using three different measures, among which a newly developed measure that looks for similarity of the dynamics between signals. Some preliminary results obtained from the measured data are given.