Gamma tocopherol-enriched supplement reduces sputum eosinophilia and endotoxin-induced sputum neutrophilia in volunteers with asthma

Background: We and others have shown that the gamma tocopherol (γT) isoform of vitamin E has multiple anti-inflammatory and antioxidant actions and that γT supplementation reduces eosinophilic and endotoxin (LPS)-induced neutrophilic airway inflammation in animal models and healthy human volunteers. Objective: We sought to determine whether γT supplementation reduces eosinophilic airway inflammation and acute neutrophilic response to inhaled LPS challenge in volunteers with asthma. Methods: Participants with mild asthma were enrolled in a double-blinded, placebo-controlled crossover study to assess the effect of 1200 mg of γT daily for 14 days on sputum eosinophils, mucins, and cytokines. We also assessed the effect on acute inflammatory response to inhaled LPS challenge following γT treatment, focusing on changes in sputum neutrophilia, mucins, and cytokines. Mucociliary clearance was measured using gamma scintigraphy. Results: Fifteen subjects with mild asthma completed both arms of the study. Compared with placebo, γT notably reduced pre-LPS challenge sputum eosinophils and mucins, including mucin 5AC and reduced LPS-induced airway neutrophil recruitment 6 and 24 hours after challenge. Mucociliary clearance was slowed 4 hours postchallenge in the placebo group but not in the γT treatment group. Total sputum mucins (but not mucin 5AC) were reduced at 24 hours postchallenge during γT treatment compared with placebo. Conclusions: When compared with placebo, γT supplementation for 14 days reduced inflammatory features of asthma, including sputum eosinophils and mucins, as well as acute airway response to inhaled LPS challenge. Larger scale clinical trials are needed to assess the efficacy of γT supplements as a complementary or steroid-sparing treatment for asthma

Revisiting the Mamlūk empire : political action, relationships of power, entangled networks, and the sultanate of Cairo in late medieval Syro-Egypt

This chapter’s questions the commonly assumed link between political practices of integration and integrity on the one hand – which appear as empirical realities from many sources and studies – and the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate of Cairo (13th-16th centuries) as a dominant, autonomous and imperial historical actor on the other. It problematizes in particular the holistic nature of these assumptions, their merely descriptive value for understanding the region’s history, and the potentially misleading consequences of their normative character. At the same time, this chapter proposes to reflect further on the powerful idea of the Sultanate as an empire. It actually considers this notion of “empire” as a useful way out of this predicament, because it invites to engage with insights from other fields of historical research and to define valuable analytical tools, including from social network theory, to further and refine current assumptions about and understandings of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political action. Confronting such tools with various cases from the center and the peripheries of that Syro-Egyptian political action, this chapter argues that the imperial appearances of the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate were always constructed in the micro-history of people and their negotiation of particular cultural, socio-economic and political relationships, which were extremely fluid and multivalent, permeable, and continuously organized around the court in Cairo