Needle aspiration for treating iatrogenic pneumothorax after cardiac electronic device implantation: a pilot study.

Purpose: Pneumothorax (PTX) following cardiac implantable electronic device procedures is traditionally treated with chest tube drainage (CTD). We hypothesized that, in a subset of patients, the less invasive needle aspiration (NA) may also be effective. We compared the strategy of primary NA with that of primary CTD in a single-center observational study.

Membrane-bound estrogen receptor alpha initiated signaling is dynamin dependent in breast cancer cells.

Background: Although membrane-associated estrogen receptors (mERs) have been known to play important role in steroid-induced signal transmission, we still know little about their function in the estrogen-induced proliferation of breast cancer cells.

Methods: In our current work we tried to separate membrane-initiated estrogen receptor signaling from the overall estrogenic effect in MCF-7 breast carcinoma cells. Re-analyzing expression data from multiple microarray experiments, we selected a set of key regulatory genes involved in proliferation regulation and estrogen signaling to monitor estrogen-induced transcription changes.

Neighbours of cancer-related proteins have key influence on pathogenesis and could increase the drug target space for anticancer therapies.

Even targeted chemotherapies against solid cancers show a moderate success increasing the need to novel targeting strategies. To address this problem, we designed a systems-level approach investigating the neighbourhood of mutated or differentially expressed cancer-related proteins in four major solid cancers (colon, breast, liver and lung). Using signalling and protein-protein interaction network resources integrated with mutational and expression datasets, we analysed the properties of the direct and indirect interactors (first and second neighbours) of cancer-related proteins, not found previously related to the given cancer type.

17-β-estradiol Decreases Neutrophil Superoxide Production through Rac1.

Neutrophil granulocytes form the biggest free radical producing system of the human body. The importance of this system in atherosclerotic plaque formation and other free radical mediated disorders is confirmed by both in vivo and in vitro studies. Estrogen's effect on free radical production involves multiple estrogen receptors and occurs both on transcriptional and on protein phosphorylational level.

Antioxidant effect of the active metabolites of tibolone.

Certain steroidal compounds have an antioxidant effect in humans. Our aim was to test whether the synthetic steroid tibolone and its metabolites are also able to display such a property. For this, granulocytes from healthy men and women were incubated for two hours with different concentrations (10(-7), 10(-8), 10(-9 )M) of either estradiol, tibolone, 3α-hydroxytibolone, 3β-hydroxytibolone, Δ(4)-tibolone, 3α-sulfated-tibolone, 3α-17β-disulfated-tibolone, 3β-sulfated-tibolone or 3β-17β-disulfated-tibolone.