Episodes of hypoxia and hypoxia/reoxygenation during foetal development have been associated with increased risk of neurodevelopmental conditions presenting in later life. The mechanism for this is not understood; however, several authors have suggested that the placenta plays an important role. Previously we found both placentas from a maternal hypoxia model and pre-eclamptic placentas from patients release factors lead to a loss of dendrite complexity in rodent neurons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThree-dimensional (3D) tissue constructs consisting of human cells have opened a new avenue for tissue engineering, pharmaceutical and pathophysiological applications, and have great potential to estimate the dynamic pharmacological effects of drug candidates, metastasis processes of cancer cells, and toxicity expression of nano-materials, as a 3D-human tissue model instead of in vivo animal experiments. However, most 3D-cellular constructs are a cell spheroid, which is a heterogeneous aggregation, and thus the reconstruction of the delicate and precise 3D-location of multiple types of cells is almost impossible. In recent years, various novel technologies to develop complex 3D-human tissues including blood and lymph capillary networks have demonstrated that physiological human tissue responses can be replicated in the nano/micro-meter ranges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResurfacing arthroplasty has fallen out of favour in recent years due to unfavourable survivorship in joint registries and alarming reports of soft tissue reactions around metal on metal prostheses. Our aim was to assess the effect of head size, implant design and component positioning on metal production by resurfacing arthroplasties. We measured whole blood cobalt and chromium and component position in matched populations implanted with two designs of resurfacing arthroplasty over a two-year period.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe increasing use of nanoparticles in medicine has raised concerns over their ability to gain access to privileged sites in the body. Here, we show that cobalt-chromium nanoparticles (29.5 +/- 6.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans are exposed to metals from industry, the environment and from wear debris from worn orthopaedic joint replacements. Patients exposed to worn cobalt chrome hip replacements show an increase of chromosome aberrations in the bone marrow adjacent to the implant and an increase of chromosome translocations and aneuploidy in the peripheral blood. This study has tested whether particles of surgical cobalt chrome alloy are able to induce similar DNA damage and chromosome aberrations in human cells in vitro.
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