Changes in salivary physiological stress markers induced by muscle stretching in patients with irritable bowel syndrome.

Background: Psychophysiological processing has been reported to play a crucial role in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) but there has been no report on modulation of the stress marker chromogranin A (CgA) resulting from muscle stretching. We hypothesized that abdominal muscle stretching as a passive operation would have a beneficial effect on a biochemical index of the activity of the sympathetic/adrenomedullary system (salivary CgA) and anxiety.

Methods: Fifteen control and eighteen untreated IBS subjects underwent experimental abdominal muscle stretching for 4 min.

Real time 3-D echocardiography in cardiac surgery.

Objective: Real time 3-D echocardiography provides real time live images of intracardiac anatomy. We evaluate its clinical application for intraoperative echocardiography.

Method: The "xStream"3-D architecture designed with "xMatrix array" using approximately 3,000 transducer elements achieves live digital volume imaging in real time 3-D echocardiography (SONOS 7500, Philips Medical Systems, Inc.

Effects of bilateral auricular acupuncture stimulation on body weight in healthy volunteers and mildly obese patients.

We investigated the effects of auricular acupuncture stimulation on non-obese healthy volunteers and mildly obese patients. Subjects (n = 55 and 5, respectively) averaged 34.5 years old, and BMI was 24.

Unexpected roles of a Dictyostelium homologue of eukaryotic EF-2 in growth and differentiation.

EF-2 is believed to be indispensable for polypeptide chain elongation in protein synthesis and therefore for cell proliferation. Surprisingly, we could isolate ef2 null cells from Dictyostelium discoideum that exhibited almost normal growth and protein synthesis, which suggests that there is another molecule capable of compensating for EF-2 function. The knock-out of Dictyostelium EF-2 (Dd-EF2H; 101 kDa phosphoprotein) impairs cytokinesis, resulting in formation of multinucleate cells.