Mind Over Gut: Psychosocial Management of Pediatric Functional Abdominal Pain.

Introduction: Functional abdominal pain (FAP) refers to a common set of symptoms that characterizes abdominal pain for which there is no identifiable organic disease process. FAP is associated with functional disability, but understanding of its pathogenesis is incomplete. The condition appears to stem from an interaction between physical and psychological mechanisms.

Language differences between monolingual English and bilingual English-Spanish young children with autism spectrum disorders.

Bilingualism is common worldwide and increasingly prevalent, but there is little information about bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder. The goal of the study was to compare expressive and receptive language skills in monolingual English and bilingual English-Spanish children with autism spectrum disorder. A review of the multidisciplinary evaluations done in toddlers who were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at a university-affiliated center between 2003 and 2010 was performed.

Ambulance notes of a Bellevue Hospital intern: May 1938.

In 1938, as a New York University/Bellevue Hospital intern, I recorded notes on the 384 cases I saw during my 1-month ambulance duty. Although I intended to use them to follow up the clinical course of patients I admitted to Bellevue, the long hours and pressure of work made this ambitious goal unachievable. Sixty years later, after retirement from academic medicine and medical practice at New York University School of Medicine, I found the long-lost notes among my papers.

Nicotine enhances expression of the neutrophil elastase gene and protein in a human myeloblast/promyelocyte cell line.

The pathogenesis of emphysema is considered to be an imbalance of protease and antiprotease activity in the lower respiratory tract leading to uninhibited degradation of lung interstitium by elastolytic enzymes. An increased amount of the serine protease neutrophil elastase (NE) is though to play a major role in this degradation. Because the expression of NE is limited to neutrophil precursors in the bone marrow, we hypothesized that nicotine, which is readily absorbed from lung and distributed to tissue, including bone marrow, would increase expression of the NE gene and protein.

Antioxidant activity of serum ceruloplasmin and transferrin available iron-binding capacity in smokers and nonsmokers.

We investigated in 39 healthy smokers (20 female, 19 male) and 38 healthy nonsmokers (18 female, 20 male): the impact of smoking and smoking-related factors on the concentration of serum ceruloplasmin, transferrin, transferrin available iron-binding capacity (AIBC), and serum antioxidant activity (AOA); the relative contribution of serum ceruloplasmin and AIBC to serum AOA; the association and possible interactive effects of serum ceruloplasmin, AIBC, and smoking with serum AOA; and the relation of pulmonary function in healthy smokers to serum AOA, ceruloplasmin, and AIBC. We found that: as compared with healthy nonsmokers, healthy smokers had higher serum ceruloplasmin concentration, similar serum transferrin and AIBC concentration, and lower serum AOA; ceruloplasmin, AIBC, and smoking acted additively, accounting for about 60% of the variability of serum AOA; the impact of AIBC on serum AOA was significantly greater than that of ceruloplasmin; and pulmonary function in the smokers was not significantly related to serum AOA, ceruloplasmin, or AIBC. Our findings suggest that: serum AIBC has a greater role in serum AOA than has previously been attributed to it; suppression of the AOA of serum constituent(s) other than those we measured may account for the significantly lower serum AOA in healthy smokers than in healthy nonsmokers; and normal air flow in healthy cigarette smokers is unrelated to serum AOA, ceruloplasmin, or AIBC concentration.