Sex differences in limb vasoconstriction responses to increases in transmural pressures

Women compared with men are more likely to have orthostatic intolerance. The purpose of this study was to examine whether sex affects limb vasoconstrictor response to increases in transmural pressure. Brachial and femoral mean blood velocity (MBV) and diameter (Doppler Ultrasound) were measured in 10 women and 10 men as transmural pressure was altered by applying local suction (−25, −50, −75, and −100 mmHg) via pressurized-limb tanks for 1 min to a single arm and leg. With the abrupt application of forearm suction (−75 and −100 mmHg), women compared with men had a greater initial rise in MBV (peak), followed by a quicker dynamic rate of velocity reduction. In the leg, women had a tendency for higher peak MBV but had similar dynamic velocity reductions compared with men. After 60 s of suction, women compared with men had attenuated reductions in brachial flow and conductance (−8.05 ± 1.71 vs. −16.25 ± 1.71 ml/min; −0.12 ± 0.03 vs. −0.20 ± 0.03 ml·min−1·mmHg−1; main effect, P < 0.05), as well as attenuated femoral flow and conductance to sustained leg negative pressure at −100 mmHg (P < 0.05). When the data were expressed as percent change, women compared with men continued to have attenuated brachial flow responses (−24 ± 2 vs. −36 ± 2%, main effect, P < 0.05), with a trend toward attenuation at the highest leg pressure (−25 ± 11 vs. −46 ± 4%; P = 0.08). These sex differences remained after normalizing the flow responses by limb volume (percent change). Our findings suggest that young women compared with men have attenuated brachial and femoral vasoconstrictor responses to increases in transmural pressure, which may have implications for the greater incidence of orthostatic intolerance in women

JavaRAG: A Java Library for Reference Attribute Grammars

Reference attribute grammars (RAGs) is a powerful formalism for developing modular extensible compilers and program analysis tools. This paper presents JavaRAG, an implementation of RAGs as a Java library that is independent of the abstract syntax tree structure. This makes it possible to extend legacy compilers implemented in Java with RAG computations. We have evaluated the approach by integrating with EMF, ANTLR, and hand-built abstract syntax trees, and we compare performance and specification size with JastAdd and Kiama which are other RAG-based tools. Our JavaRAG library is open source and is used in a compiler for the dataflow language CAL