Acute silica toxicity: attenuation by amiodarone-induced pulmonary phospholipidosis.

Exposure to the toxic mineral dust silica has been shown to produce an acute inflammatory response in the lungs of both humans and laboratory animals. Coating silica with phospholipids reduces its toxicity when studied with in vitro systems. The drug amiodarone increases phospholipid within the cells, airways, and alveoli of the lungs. This increase in phospholipid is due to amiodarone\u27s ability to inhibit phospholipase activity within alveolar macrophages (AMs) and whole lung. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the amiodarone-induced increase in pulmonary phospholipid would protect the lungs from acute damage caused by the intratracheal instillation of silica. Treatment of male Fischer 344 rats with amiodarone for 14 days caused an increase in phospholipid content in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and AMs compared to vehicle-treated controls. The rats were then instilled with silica or saline vehicle. At both 1 and 14 days after silica exposure, pulmonary phospholipidosis was associated with a marked reduction in acute silica-induced pulmonary damage as assessed by biochemical parameters in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, however, the influx of neutrophils into the airspaces was not reduced. Four times more phospholipid was bound to the silica recovered from amiodarone-treated rats compared to controls. The results of these in vivo experiments indicate that pulmonary phospholipidosis attenuates the acute damage associated with the intratracheal instillation of silica in rats. By using an in vitro cell culture system, we demonstrated that, in contrast to control AMs, phospholipidotic AMs were significantly more resistant to the cytotoxicity of surfactant-coated silica.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS

Motivating citizens to participate in public policymaking: Identification, trust and cost-benefit analyses

Under what conditions do citizens of nations and states comply with governmental requests to participate in public policymaking? Drawing on the dual pathway model of collective action (Stürmer & Simon, 2004) but with a focus on compliance with the status quo, rather than participation in collective protest, two studies examined citizens’ motivation to participate in public policymaking. Study 1 (N = 169) was an MTurk hosted survey that recruited participants from California, while Study 2 (N = 198) was a field experiment that recruited participants in Sardinia, Italy. Study 1 measured cost-benefit analyses, societal identification, and willingness to participate in public policymaking. Study 2 repeated the same procedures except we manipulated costs of participation, and also measured participants’ trust in government. Study 1 confirmed our initial hypotheses – fewer costs predicted more willingness to participate, as did stronger state identification. However, Study 2 found an interactive effect of costs, identification, and trust on willingness to participate in public policymaking. Results confirm our hypotheses by showing both costs and identification independently influence willingness to participate in public policymaking. Results also add to the literature by showing these additive pathways can be influenced by trust in the source of governance

TEMPERATURE-DEPENDENCE OF DOMAIN-WALL COERCIVE FIELD IN MAGNETIC GARNET-FILMS

The coercive properties of magnetically uniaxial liquid-phase epitaxy garnet films were investigated between 10 K and the Neel temperature (T(N) less-than-or-equal-to 500 K). Two independent methods, the results of which are nearly identical (magnetical response of oscillating domain walls and the method of coercive loops measured in a vibrating sample magnetometer), were used. Besides the usual domain-wall coercive field, H(dw), the critical coercive pressure, p(dw), was also introduced as it describes in a direct way the interactions of the domain walls with the wall-pinning traps. Both H(dw) and p(dw) were found to increase exponentially with decreasing temperature. Three different types of wall-pinning traps were identified in the sample and their strength, their rate of change with temperature, and their temperature range of activity were determined

Immunohistochemical categorisation of ductal carcinoma in situ of the breast

The aim of this study is to analyse whether immunohistochemistry (IHC) applying a broad set of markers could be used to categorise ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) of the breast in distinct subgroups corresponding to the recently defined molecular categories of invasive carcinoma. Immunohistochemistry of pure DCIS cases constructed in tissue arrays was performed with 16 markers (oestrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), androgen receptor (AR), Bcl-2, p53, Her2, insulin-like growth factor receptor, E-cadherin, epithelial membrane antigen (EMA), CA125, keratins 5/6, 14, 19, epidermal growth factor receptor, S100, and CD31). Results in 163 cases were analysed by unsupervised hierarchical clustering. Histological classification was performed by review of whole tissue sections and identified 36 well-, 55 intermediately, and 72 poorly differentiated DCISs. Unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis categorised DCIS into two major groups that could be further subdivided into subgroups based on the expression of six markers (ER, PR, AR, Bcl-2, p53, and Her2). In the major predominantly ER/Bcl-2-positive (luminal) group, three subgroups (AR-positive (n=33), AR-negative (n=40), and mixed (n=34)) could be identified and included 34 well-differentiated DCISs. Within the major predominantly ER/Bcl-2-negative (nonluminal) group, a Her2-positive subgroup (n=34) was characterised by 31 poorly differentiated lesions. Eight triple-negative lesions, including one positive for keratin 5/6 and two positive for p53, were encountered. Intermediately differentiated DCIS shared a comparable IHC staining pattern with well-differentiated DCIS that was distinct from poorly differentiated DCIS (P<0.001). Ductal carcinoma in situ could be categorised by IHC into two major groups and five subgroups using six markers. Morphologically, intermediately differentiated DCIS seems to have more biological similarities with well-differentiated lesions as compared to poorly differentiated lesions

Relevant Component Analysis for static facial expression classification

This paper addresses the issue of automatic classification of the six universal emotional categories (joy, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness) in the case of static images. Appearance parameters are extracted by an active appearance model(AAM) representing the input for the classifi- cation step. We introduce Relevant Component Analysis (RCA) in the context of facial expression recognition framework and we test this method against several other classi- fication techniques, including LDA, GDA and SVM, on the Cohn-Kanade database