Sacrococcygeal dysgenesis.

Congenital sacrococcygeal dysplasia is an uncommon though important cause of neuropathic bladder disease leading to progressive renal damage. In 2 cases described herein and featuring long-standing incontinence and recurrent infections, the concomittant musculoskeletal abnormalities had been treated for years, while the urinary tract condition had been largely neglected until urinary diversion or unilateral nephrectomy were required.     

Pten constrains centroacinar cell expansion and malignant transformation in the pancreas

To determine the role of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3-K) pathway in pancreas development, we generated a pancreas-specific knockout of Pten, a negative regulator of PI3-K signaling. Knockout mice display progressive replacement of the acinar pancreas with highly proliferative ductal structures that contain abundant mucins and express Pdx1 and Hes1, two markers of pancreatic progenitor cells. Moreover, a fraction of these mice develop ductal malignancy. We provide evidence that ductal metaplasia results from the expansion of centroacinar cells rather than transdifferentiation of acinar cells. These results indicate that Pten actively maintains the balance between different cell types in the adult pancreas and that misregulation of the PI3-K pathway in centroacinar cells may contribute to the initiation of pancreatic carcinoma in vivo.     

“In vitro” studies on the fate of diphenylhydantoin in uremia

“In vitro” studies were undertaken to evaluate the fate of DPH in blood of uremic patients.DPH incubated for 18 h at 37°C disappears from plasma in the presence of erythrocytes and more when the blood underwent hemolysis. This phenomenon was more pronounced in uremic blood.These findings suggest not only that DPH is absorbed onto the erythrocyte membrane, but also that it is bound by erythrocyte contents.It could be possible that, because of a low binding capacity of the albumin carrier in uremic blood, the drug penetrates more easily the erythrocyte membrane and is bound there. An intraery throcyte enzymatic metabolism of DPH is not excluded.     

Learned irrelevance is disrupted in first-episode but not chronic schizophrenia patients

Learned irrelevance (LIrr) is a pre-exposure effect in which uncorrelated presentations of a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US) retard subsequent CS-US association. LIrr is closely related to the phenomenon of latent inhibition (LI). LI refers to the retarding effects of inconsequential stimulus pre-exposure on subsequent conditioning to that stimulus, and is considered to reflect the organism's capacity to ignore irrelevant stimuli. LI is disrupted in schizophrenia patients, due to faster learning of the association between the preexposed CS and the US. A new within-subject target-recognition LIrr procedure was applied. The target was either cued by a priming signal or appeared at random, and priming signals were novel or preexposed cues. Schizophrenia patients were compared to age- and sex-matched control subjects. Normal subjects (n = 24) have shown robust LIrr, namely, faster cue-target associations of novel compared to preexposed cues. Schizophrenia patients at the early stages of their first episode (n = 7) showed LIrr disruption, namely, cue-target associations to preexposed cues were as fast as for novel cues. Chronic patients during an acute phase (n = 18) did not show LIrr as they failed to learn the cue-target association. In addition to the LIrr paradigm the same subjects were tested in a covert-orientation task. No differences were observed between the groups on this task. The possible advantages of the new LIrr paradigm are discussed.     

Positive tertiary appraisals and posttraumatic stress disorder in U.S. male veterans of the war in Vietnam: the roles of positive affirmation, positive reformulation, and defensive denial

A 70.9% majority of the U.S. male veterans in a nationwide sample appraised the impact of their service in Vietnam on their present lives as mainly positive. A substantial minority, 41.7%, judged the effects to be highly salient. With controls on level of exposure to war-zone stressors measured with data from military records, the valence and salience of these appraisals are investigated in relation to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other indicators of wartime and postwar functioning. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that mainly positive tertiary appraisals are affirmations of successful wartime and postwar adaptation rather than defensive denials related to maladaptive outcomes. The possibility that mainly positive tertiary appraisals also contribute to successful postwar adaptation is discussed.