29 research outputs found
Burn Injury Reduces Neutrophil Directional Migration Speed in Microfluidic Devices
Thermal injury triggers a fulminant inflammatory cascade that heralds shock, end-organ failure, and ultimately sepsis and death. Emerging evidence points to a critical role for the innate immune system, and several studies had documented concurrent impairment in neutrophil chemotaxis with these post-burn inflammatory changes. While a few studies suggest that a link between neutrophil motility and patient mortality might exist, so far, cumbersome assays have prohibited exploration of the prognostic and diagnostic significance of chemotaxis after burn injury. To address this need, we developed a microfluidic device that is simple to operate and allows for precise and robust measurements of chemotaxis speed and persistence characteristics at single-cell resolution. Using this assay, we established a reference set of migration speed values for neutrophils from healthy subjects. Comparisons with samples from burn patients revealed impaired directional migration speed starting as early as 24 hours after burn injury, reaching a minimum at 72β120 hours, correlated to the size of the burn injury and potentially serving as an early indicator for concurrent infections. Further characterization of neutrophil chemotaxis using this new assay may have important diagnostic implications not only for burn patients but also for patients afflicted by other diseases that compromise neutrophil functions
Influence of carbohydrate ingestion on salivary immunoglobulin A following resistance exercise
A dimensional summation account of polymorphous category learning
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via the DOI in this record.Data and code availaibility: The data and code for all analyses for all experiments are available at the OSF addresses
given in each Results section. The stimuli are available at the same locations.Polymorphous concepts are hard to learn, and this is perhaps surprising because
they, like many natural concepts, have an overall similarity structure. However, the dimensional summation hypothesis (Milton & Wills, 2004) predicts this difficulty. It also makes a
number of other predictions about polymorphous concept formation, which are tested here.
In Experiment 1 we confirm the theoryβs prediction that polymorphous concept formation
should be facilitated by deterministic pretraining on the constituent features of the stimulus.
This facilitation is relative to an equivalent amount of training on the polymorphous concept itself. In Experiments 2β4, the dimensional summation account of this single feature
pretraining effect is contrasted with some other accounts, including a more general strategic
account (Experiment 2), seriality of training and stimulus decomposition accounts (Experiment 3), and the role of errors (Experiment 4). The dimensional summation hypothesis
provides the best account of these data. In Experiment 5, a further prediction is confirmed
β the single feature pretraining effect is eliminated by a concurrent counting task. The
current experiments suggest the hypothesis that natural concepts might be acquired by the
deliberate serial summation of evidence. This idea has testable implications for classroom
learning.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC
Localization of nitric oxide synthase immunoreactivity in mast cells of human nasal mucosa
Decreased salivary immunoglobulin A secretion rate after intense interval exercise in elite kayakers
The effect of the weight reduction on the salivary cortisol levels of judo players
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of weight reduction prior to a competition on the salivary cortisol level for first-rate judo players. Subjects were divided into three groups by the weight reduction rate. On the day before the competition, the cortisol levels of the low- and high-weight reduction group showed a tendency to decrease and were significantly lower than that of the non-weight reduction group (p<0.05). However, with regard to the change in the stress indices, there was a difference between the high- and low-weight reduction groups. In the high-weight reduction group alone, there was a significant increase in the stress indices on the day before the competition (p<0.05). These findings suggest that the HPA axis is affected during the relatively early stage of weight reduction and mental stress is increased at the higher weight reduction rate