Exiles in British sociology

We have all seen them, foreheads wrinkled like a ploughed field, pastel-shaded check summer shirts worn in winter, desks festooned with yellowed index cards covered in hieroglyphics, books like yours only in plainer covers and read more carefully, filthy cigarettes, an accent growing thicker with age. But we have all seen them too, the luxuriant thatch at seventy, the jacket and tie, the tidy desk, the London club and the house in the country, the pipe, the disdain for small talk made all the more intimidating by an English acquired somewhere between grammar school and Oxford. Self-contained in a way only the uprooted can be, mysterious because you never knew what questions to ask them, emissaries from worlds they have lost and you have never known: the Polish gentry, the central European peasantry, Jewish merchants, German workers and, most puzzling of all, the continental European middle class

Constitutional Flavonoids Derived from Epimedium Dose-Dependently Reduce Incidence of Steroid-Associated Osteonecrosis Not via Direct Action by Themselves on Potential Cellular Targets

Intravascular-thrombosis and extravascular-lipid-deposit are the two key pathogenic events considered to interrupt intraosseous blood supply during development of steroid-associated osteonecrosis (ON). However, there are no clinically employed agents capable of simultaneously targeting these two key pathogenic events. The present experimental study demonstrated that constitutional flavonoid glycosides derived from herb Epimedium (EF, composed of seven flavonoid compounds with common stem nuclear) exerted dose-dependent effect on inhibition of both thrombosis and lipid-deposition and accordingly reducing incidence of steroid-associated ON in rabbits, which was not via direct action by themselves rather by their common metabolite on potential cellular targets involved in the two pathogenic pathways. The underlying mechanism could be explained by counteracting endothelium injury and excessive adipogenesis. These findings encourage designing clinical trials to investigate potential of EF in prevention of steroid-associated ON

A Mathematical Model of the Growth of Uterine Myomas

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11538-014-0045-5Uterine myomas or fibroids are common, benign smooth muscle tumours that can grow to 10 cm or more in diameter and are routinely removed surgically. They are typically slow- growing, well-vascularised, spherical tumours that, on a macro-scale, are a structurally uniform, hard elastic material. We present a multi-phase mathematical model of a fully vascularised myoma growing within a surrounding elastic tissue. Adopting a continuum approach, the model assumes the conservation of mass and momentum of four phases, namely cells/collagen, extracellular fluid, arterial and venous phases. The cell/collagen phase is treated as a poro-elastic material, based on a linear stress–strain relationship, and Darcy’s law is applied to describe flow in the extracellular fluid and the two vascular phases. The supply of extracellular fluid is dependent on the capillary flow rate and mean capillary pressure expressed in terms of the arterial and venous pressures. Cell growth and division is limited to the myoma domain and dependent on the local stress in the material. The resulting model consists of a system of nonlinear partial differential equations with two moving boundaries. Numerical solutions of the model successfully reproduce qualitatively the clinically observed three-phase “fast–slow–fast” growth profile that is typical for myomas. The results suggest that this growth profile requires stress-induced resistance to growth by the surrounding tissue and a switch-like cell growth response to stress. Analysis of large-time solutions reveal that while there is a functioning vasculature throughout the myoma, exponential growth results, otherwise power-law growth is predicted. An extensive survey of the effect of parameters on model solutions is also presented, and in particular, the enhanced growth caused by factors such as oestrogen is predicted by the model