The effect of immobilization stress on the pharmacokinetics of omeprazole in rats.

The effects of immobilization stress on the pharmacokinetics of omeprazole were studied in rats. The immobilization stress for 30 or 60 min immediately after oral administration of the drug caused an increase in the time to reach the maximum concentration. However, such stress did not alter the area under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC). When administered intravenously, the half-life during the elimination phase was significantly prolonged by 30 min of immobilization stress, but the AUC value remained unchanged. The intestinal propulsive activity was significantly decreased by immobilization stress. These findings suggest that immobilization stress reduces gastrointestinal motility. A resulting delay during the absorption phase of omeprazole occurs, although the degree of influence on overall pharmacokinetics is relatively insignificant.</p

The effects of exposure to cigarette smoke on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of zonisamide in rats.

The effects of exposure to cigarette smoke on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of zonisamide, an antiepileptic drug, were investigated in rats. Absorption of oral zonisamide was significantly inhibited by exposure to cigarette smoke. The Cmax, T1/2 and the area under the plasma concentration-time curve 0-24 values in the cigarette smoke exposure group were significantly lower than those in the control group. Although tonic extension (TE) induced by maximal electroshock was completely blocked by the administration of zonisamide in the control group, 50% of rats showed TE in the cigarette smoke exposure group. Exposure to cigarette smoke influences both the pharmacokinetics and antiepileptic effects of zonisamide. The effects of smoking on epileptic patients using zonisamide warrants further attention.</p

Discrete Flavor Symmetry, Dynamical Mass Textures, and Grand Unification

Discrete flavor symmetry is explored for an intrinsic property of mass matrix forms of quarks and leptons. In this paper we investigate the S3 permutation symmetry and derive the general forms of mass matrices in various types of S3 theories. We also exhibit particular realizations of previous ansatze of mass matrices, which have often been applied in the literature to the standard model Yukawa sector. Discrete flavor symmetry is also advantageous for vanishing matrix elements being dynamically generated in the vacuum of scalar potential. This is due to the fact that group operations are discrete. While zero elements themselves do not explain mass hierarchies, we introduce an abelian flavor symmetry. A non-trivial issue is whether successful quantum numbers can be assigned so that they are compatible with other (non-abelian) flavor symmetries. We show typical examples of charge assignments which not only produce hierarchical orders of mass eigenvalues but also prohibit non-renormalizable operators which disturb the hierarchies in first-order estimation. As an explicit application, a flavor model is constructed in grand unification scheme with S3 and U(1) (or Z_N) flavor symmetries.Comment: 40 pages, references adde