Prevalence and clinical characteristics of body dysmorphic disorder in an adult inpatient setting.

Objective: Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a distressing or impairing preoccupation with an imagined or slight defect in appearance, is an often-severe, understudied disorder. We determined BDD's prevalence and clinical features on a general adult psychiatric inpatient unit. To our knowledge, only one previous prevalence study has been done in this setting.

Telomerase contributes to tumorigenesis by a telomere length-independent mechanism.

Once immortalized, human cells are susceptible to transformation by introduction of an oncogene such as ras. Several lines of evidence now suggest that the maintenance of telomere length is a major determinant of replicative lifespan in human cells and thus of the immortalized state. The majority of human tumor cells acquire immortality through expression of the catalytic subunit of telomerase (hTERT), whereas others activate an alternative mechanism of telomere maintenance (ALT) that does not depend on the actions of telomerase.