Muscle loss in aging population NIKOLIĆ, MARINA; BAJEK, SNJEŽANA; GLIBOTIĆ KRESINA, HELENA ...
Periodicum biologorum,
12/2013, Letnik:
115, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
Sarcopenia is a generic term for the loss of skeletal muscle mass, quality and performance associated with normal aging that can lead to frailty in the elderly. It cannot be considered a disease or a ...condition that has a clear diagnostic marker. However, the clearly is a decline in the average muscle mass and performance associated with senescence. Because of the great increase in the proportion of the population living long enough that frailty becomes a significant problem, there is much interest in achieving a better scientific understanding of sarcopenia. The ageing of the European population is a major public health problem for most of the industrialized western countries, and represents both a social and an economic burden for the European population.
In a developing embryo, information about the position of cells is encoded in the concentrations of "morphogen" molecules. In the fruit fly, the local concentrations of just a handful of proteins ...encoded by the gap genes are sufficient to specify position with a precision comparable to the spacing between cells along the anterior--posterior axis. This matches the precision of downstream events such as the striped patterns of expression in the pair-rule genes, but is not quite sufficient to define unique identities for individual cells. We demonstrate theoretically that this information gap can be bridged if positional errors are spatially correlated, with relatively long correlation lengths. We then show experimentally that these correlations are present, with the required strength, in the fluctuating positions of the pair-rule stripes, and this can be traced back to the gap genes. Taking account of these correlations, the available information matches the information needed for unique cellular specification, within error bars of ~2%. These observation support a precisionist view of information flow through the underlying genetic networks, in which accurate signals are available from the start and preserved as they are transformed into the final spatial patterns.
To determine whether a transient hypercoagulable state is induced by the uterine artery embolization (UAE) procedure.
Serial periprocedure blood samples were obtained from 27 patients undergoing the ...UAE procedure. Five blood samples were obtained from each patient at set time intervals: before the procedure (for baseline determination), immediately before and after embolization of the uterine arteries, 90 minutes after conclusion of the procedure, and between 18 and 24 hours later. Each blood sample was analyzed for the peripheral levels of the following parameters: thrombin-antithrombin complex (TAT), prothrombin fragment 1.2 (F1.2), platelet factor 4 (PF4), D-dimer, and plasmin-alpha(2)-antiplasmin complex (PAP). For each parameter, the baseline values were statistically compared with the pre- and postembolization values for each individual to detect change over time. Overall and global occasion effects for continuous variables were assessed with the Friedman statistic and individual comparisons between occasions with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.
No evidence was found for a difference in coagulability among the five occasions for D-dimer (P =.7645) or PF4 (P =.09). All three of the remaining measures were found to have statistically significant differences (P <.0001 for F1.2, P =.0026 for PAP, and P =.0006 for TAT). No evidence was found for a difference between preprocedure and preembolization levels for these three latter parameters (P =.595 for F1.2, P =.128 for PAP, P =.9705 for TAT). Hypercoagulability potential as measured by prothrombinase and F1.2 generation increased between preembolization samples and each of the successive postprocedure samples (P <.0001, P <.0001, P =.0082), whereas PAP increased at 90 minutes (P =.0023) and TAT increased immediately after embolization (P <.0001). No clinically apparent thrombotic complications occurred among any of the patients studied.
Surrogate markers of hypercoagulability increase as a result of UAE, suggesting that a prothrombotic state may result after the procedure.
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