The impact of hepatocyte-specific deletion of hypoxia-inducible factors on the development of polymicrobial sepsis with focus on GR and PPARα function.

Introduction: Polymicrobial sepsis causes acute anorexia (loss of appetite), leading to lipolysis in white adipose tissue and proteolysis in muscle, and thus release of free fatty acids (FFAs), glycerol and gluconeogenic amino acids. Since hepatic peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARα) and glucocorticoid receptor (GR) quickly lose function in sepsis, these metabolites accumulate (causing toxicity) and fail to yield energy-rich molecules such as ketone bodies (KBs) and glucose. The mechanism of PPARα and GR dysfunction is not known.

Causes of hypereosinophilia in 100 consecutive patients.

Background: Hypereosinophilia (HE, persistent peripheral blood eosinophilia > 1.5 × 10 /L) and hypereosinophilic syndrome (HES, HE with end-organ damage) are classified as primary (due to a myeloid clone), secondary (due to a wide variety of reactive causes), or idiopathic. Diagnostic evaluation of eosinophilia is challenging, in part because secondary causes of HE/HES such as lymphocyte-variant HES (L-HES) and vasculitis are difficult to diagnose, and emerging causes such as immunoglobulin G4-related disease (IgG4-RD) have rarely been examined.

Canadian anaplastic lymphoma kinase study: a model for multicenter standardization and optimization of ALK testing in lung cancer.

Introduction: Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) is currently the standard for diagnosing anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-rearranged (ALK+) lung cancers for ALK inhibitor therapies. ALK immunohistochemistry (IHC) may serve as a screening and alternative diagnostic method. The Canadian ALK (CALK) study was initiated to implement a multicenter optimization and standardization of laboratory developed ALK IHC and FISH tests across 14 hospitals.

Adaptive noise suppression for a dual-microphone hearing aid.

An adaptive beamformer for behind-the-ear dual-microphone hearing aids has been optimized for speech intelligibility enhancement in the presence of disturbing sounds or noise. The noise reduction approach is based on the scheme presented by Vanden Berghe and Wouters (1998). A real-time implementation of the signal processing is realized in Audallion, a wearable, small digital signal processing (DSP) platform.