Differential scanning calorimetry of blood plasma for clinical diagnosis and monitoring

Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) provides a useful method to study the unfractionated plasma proteome. Plasma from healthy individuals yields a reproducible signature thermogram which results from the weighted sum of the thermal denaturation of the most abundant plasma proteins. Further investigation of the thermogram for healthy individuals showed it to be sensitive to ethnicity and gender. DSC analysis of plasma from diseased individuals revealed significant changes in the thermogram which are suggested to result not from changes in the concentration of the major plasma proteins but from interactions of small molecules or peptides with these proteins. Closer examination of the diseased thermograms showed a thermogram characteristic of each disease. For cervical cancer, the DSC method yields a progressively shifted thermogram as the disease advances from pre-invasive conditions to late stage cancer. Our application of the DSC method has provided a potential tool for the early diagnosis, monitoring and screening of cancer patients.     

Recommendations for the practice of travel medicine

Travel Medicine has emerged as a distinct entity over the last two decades in response to a very substantial increase in international travel and is now forging its own identity, remit and objectives for care of the traveller. Crucial to the formation of any speciality is the definition of recommendations for its practice. This is particularly important and needed for travel medicine as it overlaps with and forms part of day-to-day work in a number of different medical specialities. This document defines a set of recommendations for the practice of travel medicine from the Faculty of Travel Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Their objective is to help raise standards of practice and achieve greater uniformity in provision of services, better to protect those who travel. As travel medicine moves towards applying for speciality status, these standards will also contribute to that process.     

The Intermediate lactotroph: a morphologically distinct, ghrelin-responsive pituitary cell in the dwarf (dw/dw) rat

Profound somatotroph hypoplasia in the dwarf (dw/dw) rat is accompanied by an estrogen-dependent induction of prolactin secretion by the GH secretagogue, GHRP-6. Using electron microscopy, we demonstrated that the reduction in the somatotroph population in the dw/dw pituitary is accompanied by the presence of a morphologically distinct lactotroph subpopulation. In these cells, which did not coexpress GH, the size, shape, and number of the secretory granules were between those of the type I and type II lactotrophs. We therefore called these cells intermediate lactotrophs. The intermediate lactotrophs accounted for up to 30% of the total prolactin-positive cell population in dw/dw males and up to 12% in females. Using tannic acid to quantify the fusion of secretory granules, we have shown that the intermediate lactotrophs are unresponsive to either GH-releasing factor (GRF) or TRH but exhibit a sexually dimorphic secretory response to acute ghrelin treatment, granular fusions being 4-fold higher in females. No cell matching the morphology of the novel lactotroph subpopulation was observed in the pituitary of the GRF-insensitive lit/lit mouse. However, ablation of GRF neurons with neonatal monosodium glutamate treatment had no effect on the population of intermediate lactotrophs in the dw/dw rat. Thus, the presence of the intermediate lactotrophs in the dw/dw pituitary appears to be independent of the function of the GRF neurons.