Pioglitazone improves cardiac function and alters myocardial substrate metabolism without affecting cardiac triglyceride accumulation and high-energy phosphate metabolism in patients with well-controlled type 2 diabetes mellitus

0.001). CONCLUSIONS: In T2DM patients, pioglitazone was associated with improvement in some measures of left ventricular diastolic function, myocardial glucose uptake, and whole-body insulin sensitivity. The functional changes, however, were not associated with myocardial substrate and high-energy phosphate metabolis

Active Mg Estimation Using Thermal Analysis: A Rapid Method to Control Nodularity in Ductile Cast Iron Production

Appropriate nodularity in ductile iron castings is strongly associated with the presence of high enough not combined Mg dissolved in the melt to cast. However, the residual Mg which is commonly measured for production control accounts for both dissolved Mg and Mg combined as oxides and sulfides. To account for the uncertainties associated with such a control, it is quite usual to over treat the melt with the risk of porosity appearance. A new methodology based on thermal analysis has been developed in the present work so as to estimate the amount of free Mg dissolved in the melt ready for pouring. A combination of Te mixture and a new “reactive mixture” composed of sulfur plus a commercial inoculant has been prepared for this purpose. This reactive mixture is able to transform the magnesium remaining dissolved in the melt to combined forms of this element. Experiments performed both during start of production (when Mg overtreatment is usual) and during normal mass production indicate that important variations of free Mg occur without relevant changes in residual Mg content as determined by spectrometry. The method developed in the present work has shown to be highly effective to detect those melt batches where active Mg content is not high enough for guaranteeing a correct nodularity of castings. Selection of proper active Mg thresholds and a correct inoculation process are critical to avoid “false”-negative results when using this new method

Simultaneous Determination of Thermal Conductivity and Specific Heat for Refractory Materials

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66352/1/j.1151-2916.1990.tb07594.x.pd

Diabetic gastroparesis: Therapeutic options

Gastroparesis is a condition characterized by delayed gastric emptying and the most common known underlying cause is diabetes mellitus. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, abdominal fullness, and early satiety, which impact to varying degrees on the patient’s quality of life. Symptoms and deficits do not necessarily relate to each other, hence despite significant abnormalities in gastric emptying, some individuals have only minimal symptoms and, conversely, severe symptoms do not always relate to measures of gastric emptying. Prokinetic agents such as metoclopramide, domperidone, and erythromycin enhance gastric motility and have remained the mainstay of treatment for several decades, despite unwanted side effects and numerous drug interactions. Mechanical therapies such as endoscopic pyloric botulinum toxin injection, gastric electrical stimulation, and gastrostomy or jejunostomy are used in intractable diabetic gastroparesis (DG), refractory to prokinetic therapies. Mitemcinal and TZP-101 are novel investigational motilin receptor and ghrelin agonists, respectively, and show promise in the treatment of DG. The aim of this review is to provide an update on prokinetic and mechanical therapies in the treatment of DG

Local orbital analysis of the bonding of oxygen atoms on nickel (001) from self-consistent electronic structure

We have calculated self-consistently the electronic structure of a model of a c(2×2) oxygen overlayer on the nickel (001) surface using the linearized augmented-plane-wave method, obtaining good agreement with the experimentally measured electronic excitation spectra. Our purpose has been to analyze the charge density, wave functions, bond orders, local densities of states, and energy levels to obtain a picture of the bonding between the oxygen and the nickel surface. We find that the oxygen 2p states hybridize more strongly with the nickel 4s4p bands than with the 3d bands, and we demonstrate that the optimal local orbitals for the oxygen nucleus which span the resulting 2p-like bands centered at EF-5.5 eV resemble large oxygen 2p orbitals. Bond orders exhibit the bonding nature of these states and the existence of antibonding states above EF

Electronic structure multiconfiguration calculation of a small cluster embedded in an LDA host

The present paper proposes a method for electronic-structure calculations on a type of system that cannot be handled by present methods. It considers a system where a multideterminant wave function is essential for an atom or a small cluster of atoms embedded in a large system, normally a solid, which can be treated by density-functional methods such as with the local-density approximation (LDA). A suitable example is a transition-metal atom in a semiconductor or MgO host. In this method the embedding potential for the cluster is generated from a LDA calculation but applied in a multiconfiguration calculation. The method and the concept of the embedding potential are validated by application to a simple system of a cluster Li2Mg2 of four pseudoatoms