Effect of "no added salt diet" on blood pressure control and 24 hour urinary sodium excretion in mild to moderate hypertension

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The incidence of Hypertension as a major cardiovascular threat is increasing. The best known diet for hypertensives is 'no added salt diet'.</p> <p>In this study we evaluated the effect of 'no added salt diet' on a hypertensive population with high dietary sodium intake by measuring 24 hour urinary sodium excretion.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this single center randomized study 80 patients (60 cases and 20 controls) not on any drug therapy for hypertension with mild to moderate hypertension were enrolled. 24 hour holter monitoring of BP and 24 hour urinary sodium excretion were measured before and after 6 weeks of 'no added salt diet'.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There was no statistically significant difference between age, weight, sex, Hyperlipidemia, family history of hypertension, mean systolic and diastolic BP during the day and at night and mean urinary sodium excretion in 24 hour urine of case and control groups. Seventy eight percent of all patients had moderate to high salt intake.</p> <p>After 6 week of 'no added salt diet' systolic and diastolic BP significantly decreased during the day (mean decrease: 12.1/6.8 mmhg) and at night (mean decrease: 11.1/5.9 mmhg) which is statistically significant in comparison to control group (P 0.001 and 0.01).</p> <p>Urinary sodium excretion of 24 hour urine decreased by 37.1 meq/d ± 39,67 mg/dl in case group which is statistically significant in comparison to control group (p: 0.001).</p> <p>Only 36% of the patients, after no added salt diet, reached the pretreatment goal of 24 hour urinary sodium excretion of below 100 meq/dl (P:0.001).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Despite modest effect on dietary sodium restriction, no added salt diet significantly decreased systolic and diastolic BP and so it should be advised to every hypertensive patient.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>Clinicaltrial.govnumber NCT00491881</p

Holographic Conformal Window - A Bottom Up Approach

We propose a five-dimensional framework for modeling the background geometry associated to ordinary Yang-Mills (YM) as well as to nonsupersymmetric gauge theories possessing an infrared fixed point with fermions in various representations of the underlying gauge group. The model is based on the improved holographic approach, on the string theory side, and on the conjectured all-orders beta function for the gauge theory one. We first analyze the YM gauge theory. We then investigate the effects of adding flavors and show that, in the holographic description of the conformal window, the geometry becomes AdS when approaching the ultraviolet and the infrared regimes. As the number of flavors increases within the conformal window we observe that the geometry becomes more and more of AdS type over the entire energy range.Comment: 20 Pages, 3 Figures. v2: references adde

Phenotypic covariance of longevity, immunity and stress resistance in the Caenorhabditis nematodes

Background \ud Ageing, immunity and stresstolerance are inherent characteristics of all organisms. In animals, these traits are regulated, at least in part, by forkhead transcription factors in response to upstream signals from the Insulin/Insulin– like growth factor signalling (IIS) pathway. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, these phenotypes are molecularly linked such that activation of the forkhead transcription factor DAF-16 both extends lifespan and simultaneously increases immunity and stress resistance. It is known that lifespan varies significantly among the Caenorhabditis species but, although DAF-16 signalling is highly conserved, it is unclear whether this phenotypic linkage occurs in other species. Here we investigate this phenotypic covariance by comparing longevity, stress resistance and immunity in four \ud Caenorhabditis species. \ud \ud Methodology/Principal Findings \ud We show using phenotypic analysis of DAF-16 influenced phenotypes that among four closely related Caenorhabditis nematodes, the gonochoristic species (Caenorhabditis remanei and Caenorhabditis brenneri) have diverged \ud significantly with a longer lifespan, improved stress resistance and higher immunity than the hermaphroditic species (C. elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae). Interestingly, we also observe significant differences in expression levels between the daf-16 homologues in these species using Real-Time PCR, which positively correlate with the observed phenotypes. Finally, we provide additional evidence in support of a role for DAF-16 in regulating phenotypic coupling by using a combination of wildtype isolates, constitutively active daf-16 mutants and bioinformatic analysis. \ud \ud Conclusions \ud The gonochoristic species display a significantly longer lifespan (p < 0.0001)and more robust immune and stress response (p<0.0001, thermal stress; p<0.01, heavy metal stress; p<0.0001, pathogenic stress) than the hermaphroditic species. Our data suggests that divergence in DAF-16 mediated phenotypes may underlie many of the differences observed between these four species of Caenorhabditis nematodes. These findings are further supported by the correlative higher daf-16 expression levels among the gonochoristic species and significantly higher lifespan, immunity and stress tolerance in the constitutively active daf-16 hermaphroditic mutants

Nuclear matter to strange matter transition in holographic QCD

We construct a simple holographic QCD model to study nuclear matter to strange matter transition. The interaction of dense medium and hadrons is taken care of by imposing the force balancing condition for stable D4/D6/D6 configuration. By considering the intermediate and light flavor branes interacting with baryon vertex homogeneously distributed along R^3 space and requesting the energy minimization, we find that there is a well defined transition density as a function of current quark mass. We also find that as density goes up very high, intermediate (or heavy) and light quarks populate equally as expected from the Pauli principle. In this sense, the effect of the Pauli principle is realized as dynamics of D-branes.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure

Phenotypic covariance of Longevity, Immunity and Stress Resistance in the Caenorhabditis Nematodes

Background: Ageing, immunity and stresstolerance are inherent characteristics of all organisms. In animals, these traits are regulated, at least in part, by forkhead transcription factors in response to upstream signals from the Insulin/Insulin–like growth factor signalling (IIS) pathway. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, these phenotypes are molecularly linked such that activation of the forkhead transcription factor DAF-16 both extends lifespan and simultaneously increases immunity and stress resistance. It is known that lifespan varies significantly among the Caenorhabditis species but, although DAF-16 signalling is highly conserved, it is unclear whether this phenotypic linkage occurs in other species. Here we investigate this phenotypic covariance by comparing longevity, stress resistance and immunity in four Caenorhabditis species. \ud \ud Methodology/Principal Findings: We show using phenotypic analysis of DAF-16 influenced phenotypes that among four closely related Caenorhabditis nematodes, the gonochoristic species (Caenorhabditis remanei and Caenorhabditis brenneri) have diverged significantly with a longer lifespan, improved stress resistance and higher immunity than the hermaphroditic species (C. elegans and Caenorhabditis briggsae). Interestingly, we also observe significant differences in expression levels between the daf-16 homologues in these species using Real-Time PCR, which positively correlate with the observed phenotypes. Finally, we provide additional evidence in support of a role for DAF-16 in regulating phenotypic coupling by using a combination of wildtype isolates, constitutively active daf-16 mutants and bioinformatic analysis. \ud \ud Conclusions: The gonochoristic species display a significantly longer lifespan (p<0.0001) and more robust immune and stress response (p<0.0001, thermal stress; p<0.01, heavy metal stress; p<0.0001, pathogenic stress) than the hermaphroditic species. Our data suggests that divergence in DAF-16 mediated phenotypes may underlie many of the differences observed between these four species of Caenorhabditis nematodes. These findings are further supported by the correlative higher daf-16 expression levels among the gonochoristic species and significantly higher lifespan, immunity and stress tolerance in the constitutively active daf-16 hermaphroditic mutants

Behavior and Impact of Zirconium in the Soil–Plant System: Plant Uptake and Phytotoxicity

Because of the large number of sites they pollute, toxic metals that contaminate terrestrial ecosystems are increasingly of environmental and sanitary concern (Uzu et al. 2010, 2011; Shahid et al. 2011a, b, 2012a). Among such metals is zirconium (Zr), which has the atomic number 40 and is a transition metal that resembles titanium in physical and chemical properties (Zaccone et al. 2008). Zr is widely used in many chemical industry processes and in nuclear reactors (Sandoval et al. 2011; Kamal et al. 2011), owing to its useful properties like hardness, corrosion-resistance and permeable to neutrons (Mushtaq 2012). Hence, the recent increased use of Zr by industry, and the occurrence of the Chernobyl and Fukashima catastrophe have enhanced environmental levels in soil and waters (Yirchenko and Agapkina 1993; Mosulishvili et al. 1994 ; Kruglov et al. 1996)

Functional kinds: a skeptical look

The functionalist approach to kinds has suffered recently due to its association with law-based approaches to induction and explanation. Philosophers of science increasingly view nomological approaches as inappropriate for the special sciences like psychology and biology, which has led to a surge of interest in approaches to natural kinds that are more obviously compatible with mechanistic and model-based methods, especially homeostatic property cluster theory. But can the functionalist approach to kinds be weaned off its dependency on laws? Dan Weiskopf has recently offered a reboot of the functionalist program by replacing its nomological commitments with a model-based approach more closely derived from practice in psychology. Roughly, Weiskopf holds that the natural kinds of psychology will be the functional properties that feature in many empirically successful cognitive models, and that those properties need not be localized to parts of an underlying mechanism. I here skeptically examine the three modeling practices that Weiskopf thinks introduce such non-localizable properties: fictionalization, reification, and functional abstraction. In each case, I argue that recognizing functional properties introduced by these practices as autonomous kinds comes at clear cost to those explanations’ counterfactual explanatory power. At each step, a tempting functionalist response is parochialism: to hold that the false or omitted counterfactuals fall outside the modeler’s explanatory aims, and so should not be counted against functional kinds. I conclude by noting the dangers this attitude poses to scientific disagreement, inviting functionalists to better articulate how the individuation conditions for functional kinds might outstrip the perspective of a single modeler

Integration of Evolutionary Features for the Identification of Functionally Important Residues in Major Facilitator Superfamily Transporters

The identification of functionally important residues is an important challenge for understanding the molecular mechanisms of proteins. Membrane protein transporters operate two-state allosteric conformational changes using functionally important cooperative residues that mediate long-range communication from the substrate binding site to the translocation pathway. In this study, we identified functionally important cooperative residues of membrane protein transporters by integrating sequence conservation and co-evolutionary information. A newly derived evolutionary feature, the co-evolutionary coupling number, was introduced to measure the connectivity of co-evolving residue pairs and was integrated with the sequence conservation score. We tested this method on three Major Facilitator Superfamily (MFS) transporters, LacY, GlpT, and EmrD. MFS transporters are an important family of membrane protein transporters, which utilize diverse substrates, catalyze different modes of transport using unique combinations of functional residues, and have enough characterized functional residues to validate the performance of our method. We found that the conserved cores of evolutionarily coupled residues are involved in specific substrate recognition and translocation of MFS transporters. Furthermore, a subset of the residues forms an interaction network connecting functional sites in the protein structure. We also confirmed that our method is effective on other membrane protein transporters. Our results provide insight into the location of functional residues important for the molecular mechanisms of membrane protein transporters