Hemodialysis Removes Uremic Toxins That Alter the Biological Actions of Endothelial Cells

Chronic kidney disease is linked to systemic inflammation and to an increased risk of ischemic heart disease and atherosclerosis. Endothelial dysfunction associates with hypertension and vascular disease in the presence of chronic kidney disease but the mechanisms that regulate the activation of the endothelium at the early stages of the disease, before systemic inflammation is established remain obscure. In the present study we investigated the effect of serum derived from patients with chronic kidney disease either before or after hemodialysis on the activation of human endothelial cells in vitro, as an attempt to define the overall effect of uremic toxins at the early stages of endothelial dysfunction. Our results argue that uremic toxins alter the biological actions of endothelial cells and the remodelling of the extracellular matrix before signs of systemic inflammatory responses are observed. This study further elucidates the early events of endothelial dysfunction during toxic uremia conditions allowing more complete understanding of the molecular events as well as their sequence during progressive renal failure

Gothic Revival Architecture Before Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill

The Gothic Revival is generally considered to have begun in eighteenth-century Britain with the construction of Horace Walpole’s villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, in the late 1740s. As this chapter demonstrates, however, Strawberry Hill is in no way the first building, domestic or otherwise, to have recreated, even superficially, some aspect of the form and ornamental style of medieval architecture. Earlier architects who, albeit often combining it with Classicism, worked in the Gothic style include Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Kent and Batty Langley, aspects of whose works are explored here. While not an exhaustive survey of pre-1750 Gothic Revival design, the examples considered in this chapter reveal how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gothic emerged and evolved over the course of different architects’ careers, and how, by the time that Walpole came to create his own Gothic ‘castle’, there was already in existence in Britain a sustained Gothic Revivalist tradition

Water sorption properties of room-temperature ionic liquids over the whole range of water activity and molecular states of water in these media

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