1,721,012 research outputs found

    Multimodality imaging for pre-clinical assessment of Fabry's cardiomyopathy

    No full text
    Anderson Fabry's disease (AFD) is a rare but underdiagnosed intracellular lipid disorder which can cause left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH). Pre-clinical diagnosis of Fabry's disease is important as it permits early stratification for enzyme replacement therapy, improving the patient's long-term prognosis, avoiding progression to irreversible fibrosis, and preventing cardiovascular complications.Combinations of imagingmodalities that integrate the strengths of each modality and at the same time eliminate weaknesses of an individual modality can offer improved diagnostics, therapeutic monitoring, and pre-clinical assessment of Fabry's disease. This reviewdiscusses the advantages and challenges in developingmultimodality imaging systems of Fabry's cardiomyopathy, highlights somesuccessful combinations that are nowroutinely used in the clinic and in research, and discusses recent advances in multimodality instrumentation that may offer new opportunities for pre-clinical assessment of this disease

    Electrical plasticity and cardioprotection in myocardial ischemia - Role of selective sodium channel blockers

    No full text
    The concept of electrical protection of the ischemic myocardium is in constant evolution and has recently been supported by experimental and clinical studies. Historically, antiplatelet agents, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, β-blockers, and statins have been all proposed as drugs conferring anti-ischemic cardioprotection. This was supported by the evidence consistently indicating that all these drugs were capable of reducing mortality and the risk of repeat myocardial infarction. The electrical plasticity paradigm is, however, a novel concept that depicts the benefits of improved sodium channel blockade with drugs such as ranolazine and cariporide. Although it has been hypothesized that the protective role of ranolazine depends on decreased fatty acid β-oxidation affecting preconditioning, we speculate against such a hypothesis, because inhibition of β-oxidation requires higher concentrations of the drug, above the therapeutic range. Rather, we discuss the key role of calcium overload reduction through inhibition of the late sodium current (INa). Mechanisms driving cardioprotection involve the block of a cascade of complex ionic exchanges that can result in intracellular acidosis, excess cytosolic calcium, myocardial cellular dysfunction, and eventually cell injury and death. In this review we discuss the studies that demonstrate how electrical plasticity through sodium channel blockers can promote cardioprotection against ischemia in coronary heart disease. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

    Full text link
    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

    Full text link
    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

    Full text link
    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

    Full text link
    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

    No full text
    Nao informado
    corecore