Body composition, insulin sensitivity, and cardiovascular disease profile in healthy Europeans.

Objective: To assess whether insulin sensitivity can explain the associations of leg-fat mass (LFM) and trunk-fat mass (TFM) with the cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk profile in healthy European men and women.

Methods And Procedures: We studied 142 healthy men and women of a multicenter European study on insulin sensitivity, aged 30-60 years, from the centres in Hoorn, the Netherlands and Rome, Italy. Whole-body dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) was used to determine fat and lean soft tissue mass in the trunk and legs.

Determination of the sequential degradation of myelin proteins by macrophages.

Demonstration of different myelin proteins (myelin basic protein [MBP], proteolipid protein [PLP] and myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein [MOG]) is used as a tool to determine the stage of MS lesions in autopsy tissue. Since such tissue can never be obtained at well-defined stages of lesion formation, the time course of myelin degradation in MS lesions can only be estimated. In order to obtain a more precise indication on the sequence of events of myelin degradation in MS lesions, the breakdown of human myelin by human monocytes was studied in vitro.