48 research outputs found

    Pharmacokinetics, safety, and tolerability of a depot formulation of naltrexone in alcoholics: an open-label trial

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    BACKGROUND: Naltrexone is an effective medication for treatment of alcohol dependence, but its efficacy is limited by lack of adherence to the oral dosage form. A long-acting depot formulation of naltrexone may increase adherence. METHODS: A single site, 6-week open label study was conducted with 16 alcohol dependent subjects each receiving 300 mg of Naltrexone Depot by intramuscular injection. The main outcomes were safety and tolerability of the Naltrexone Depot formulation, blood levels of naltrexone and its main metabolite 6-beta naltrexol, and self-reported alcohol use. All subjects received weekly individual counseling sessions. RESULTS: The medication was well tolerated with 88% of subjects completing the 6-week trial. The most common side effect experienced was injection site complications. There were no serious adverse events. Subjects had naltrexone and 6-beta-naltrexol concentrations throughout the trial with mean values ranging from 0.58 ng/mL to 2.04 ng/mL and 1.51 ng/mL to 5.52 ng/mL, respectively, at each sampling time following administration. Compared to baseline, subjects had significantly reduced number of drinks per day, heavy drinking days and proportion of drinking days. CONCLUSION: Naltrexone Depot is safe and well tolerated in alcoholics and these findings support the further investigation of its utility in larger double-blind placebo controlled trials

    Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

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    Characterization of duplex coating system (HVOF plus PVD) on light alloy substrates

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    Light metals such as aluminium or magnesium alloys play an important role in many different industrial applications. However, aluminium and especially magnesium alloys show relatively poor resistance to sliding wear, low hardness and load bearing capacity, so that surface performance improvement is recommended, often by PVD processes. This study evaluates the tribological improvement achieved by applying a duplex coating on AW-7022 aluminium alloy or AZ91 magnesium alloy substrates, consisting of a thick coating interlayer, deposited by High Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF), followed by a PVD (TiN, TiAlN) or PE-CVD (DLC) hard top layers. The deposition of thermal sprayed HVOF coatings, as primary layer, leads to improvement of the load bearing capacity of the substrates and allows reducing the tendency of hard thin top layer to cracking and delamination when it is directly deposited on a softer substrate. The number of laps to failure, in the pin-on-disc wear tests, of TiN and TiAlN PVD coatings deposited on the harder interlayer HVOF coating were significantly higher (3000 and 1400 laps, respectively) than the values measured for these coatings deposited directly on the aluminium substrate (140 and 120 laps, respectively). The best combination of properties was obtained with the DLC top layer deposited on the thermally sprayed coatings, with a significant reduction of friction coefficient (< 0.10), which remains almost unchanged even after 40,000 laps in the pin-on-disc wear tests.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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