Effectiveness of offering tailored text message, self-help smoking cessation support to pregnant women who want information on stopping smoking: MiQuit3 randomised controlled trial and meta-analysis.

Aims: To test the efficacy of 'MiQuit', a tailored, self-help, text message stop smoking programme for pregnancy, as an adjunct to usual care (UC) for smoking cessation in pregnancy.

Design: Multicentre, open, two-arm, parallel-group, superiority randomised controlled trial (RCT) and a trial sequential analysis (TSA) meta-analysis combining trial findings with two previous ones.

Setting: Twenty-four English hospital antenatal clinics.

Pre-notification and personalisation of text messages to increase questionnaire completion in a smoking cessation pregnancy RCT: an embedded randomised factorial trial.

Low completion rates of questionnaires in randomised controlled trials can compromise the reliability of the results, so ways to boost questionnaire completion are often implemented. Although there is evidence to suggest that sending a text message to participants increases completion, there is little evidence around the timing or personalisation of these text messages.  Methods:  A two-by-two factorial SWAT (study within a trial) was embedded within the MiQuit-3 trial, looking at smoking cessation within pregnant smokers.

Progressive structural modification to a zinc-actuated photoinduced electron transfer (PeT) switch in the context of intracellular zinc imaging.

Photoinduced electron transfer (PeT)-type fluorescent molecular switches are often applied in ion-selective sensors. Zinc-targeting sensors that contain an anilino-based electron donor (aka, the PeT 'switch') have multiple advantages over those with an aliphatic amino switch. In addition to the lower pK value of an aniline than that of a comparably substituted aliphatic amine, which reduces the interference of pH on the spectral properties of the attached fluorophore, the oxidation potentials of anilino groups are lower than those of aliphatic amino counterparts, which make them better electron donors in PeT.

Expression of muscarinic M2 receptors in cultured human airway smooth muscle cells.

[3H]-inositol phosphate formation and the inhibition of isoproterenol-induced [3H]-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (AMP) formation in response to the muscarinic agonist carbachol were studied in cultured human airway smooth muscle cells. Stimulation with carbachol produced concentration-dependent inhibition of isoproterenol (1 microM)-induced cyclic AMP formation (EC50, 0.15 microM; maximal inhibition, 60%).

Control of histamine induced inositol phospholipid hydrolysis in cultured human tracheal smooth muscle cells.

[3H]Inositol phosphate responses to histamine and a range of other agonists were studied in cultured human tracheal smooth muscle cells. Histamine (EC50 6.5 microM), bradykinin (EC50 9.