Low resting energy expenditure in middle-aged and elderly hemodialysis patients with poor nutritional status

Due to high resting energy expenditure (REE) in maintenance hemodialysis patients, an increase in energy intake is usually recommended to improve their nutritional status. However, some patients appear to have poor appetite and low energy intake. In such patients low energy metabolism is expected. We hypothesized that inmaintenance hemodialysis patients there are two types of the energy metabolism, high and low. This study was aimed at finding the energy metabolism in maintenance hemodialysis patients, especially in those with poor nutritional status. Subjects were hemodialysis out-patients (34 males and20 females, meanage 59.1±10.7y). REE was measured by an indirect calorimeter. Protein intake was obtained from normalized protein catabolic rate (nPCR), and physical activity level (PAL) was obtained by time study. Nutritional status assessed by serum albumin concentration was poor (3.7±0.2g/dL) in spite of the adequate protein intake (1.1±0.3g/kg per day). Only11%ofthesubjectshadappropriate serum albumin concentration. Mean REE was 24.6 kcal/kg per day which was lower than that of healthy Japanese (26.5kcal/kg per day). REE and PAL positively correlated with serum albumin concentration (plt0.01). The results suggest that maintenance hemodialysis patients with poor nutritional status may have low REE

Analysis of Expressed Sequence Tags from the Fungus Aspergillus oryzae Cultured Under Different Conditions

We performed random sequencing of cDNAs from nine biologically or industrially important cultures of the industrially valuable fungus Aspergillus oryzae to obtain expressed sequence tags (ESTs). Consequently, 21 446 raw ESTs were accumulated and subsequently assembled to 7589 non-redundant consensus sequences (contigs). Among all contigs, 5491 (72.4%) were derived from only a particular culture. These included 4735 (62.4%) singletons, i.e. lone ESTs overlapping with no others. These data showed that consideration of culture grown under various conditions as cDNA sources enabled efficient collection of ESTs. BLAST searches against the public databases showed that 2953 (38.9%) of the EST contigs showed significant similarities to deposited sequences with known functions, 793 (10.5%) were similar to hypothetical proteins, and the remaining 3843 (50.6%) showed no significant similarity to sequences in the databases. Culture-specific contigs were extracted on the basis of the EST frequency normalized by the total number for each culture condition. In addition, contig sequences were compared with sequence sets in eukaryotic orthologous groups (KOGs), and classified into the KOG functional categories

Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy in Two Patients without Any Cardiac Symptom on Maintenance Hemodialysis

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a disorder characterized by left ventricular apical ballooning and electrocardiographic changes in the absence of coronary artery disease. While reversible in many cases, the mechanism of this disorder remains unclear. The most frequent clinical symptoms of takotsubo cardiomyopathy on admission are chest pain and dyspnea, resembling acute myocardial infarction. Here, we describe two cases of takotsubo cardiomyopathy without chest pain or dyspnea in patients on maintenance hemodialysis. The asymptomatic nature of these two cases may be due to the patients being on hemodialysis. Periodic electrocardiograms (ECG) may be helpful in screening this population for asymptomatic takotsubo cardiomyopathy and in evaluating its incidence