“
“Carbon monoxide (CO) is associated

with central nervous system toxicity. However, evidence also indicates that PLX4032 CO can be protective, depending on its concentration. To determine if CO can be neuroprotective after ischemic brain injury, we subjected mice to transient middle cerebral artery occlusion and exposed them to different concentrations of CO. We found that in mice, low CO levels protected the brain from injury following 90-min transient focal ischemia and 48 h of reperfusion. When inhalation of 125 or 250 ppm CO began immediately at the onset of reperfusion, total hemispheric infarct volume was reduced by 32.1 +/- A 8.9% and 62.2 +/- A 14.4%, respectively; with an extended therapeutic window of 1-3 h after ischemia, CO inhalation also attenuated infarct volume significantly. Furthermore, early CO exposure limited brain edema formation by 3.2 +/- A 0.8% (125 ppm) and 2.6 +/- A 0.3% (250 ppm). Finally, CO inhalation significantly improved neurological deficit scores at 48 h of survival time after ischemia. Transient elevation

of carboxyhemoglobin levels selleckchem returned rapidly to baseline when CO exposure was stopped. These findings suggest a potential application of CO to treat brain ischemic stroke.”
“The radio-frequency (rf) power absorption due to a small hemispherical protrusion on a resonant cavity’s surface is computed analytically. This protrusion may assume arbitrary values of permittivity, permeability, and conductivity so that it may represent a foreign object. Under the

assumption that the protrusion radius, a, is small compared with the rf wavelength, the power dissipated in the protrusion by the rf electric field and by the rf magnetic field are calculated explicitly. It is found that, in general, the heating by the rf magnetic field is dominant when delta/a < 1, even for nonmagnetic materials, where delta is the skin depth associated JQ1 mw with the protrusion material. The field enhancement factors for both the rf electric field and the rf magnetic field on the protrusion are also calculated analytically. They are found to decrease as delta/a increases. They are spot checked against the MAXWELL 3D code. These field enhancement factors are also consistent with the published results in the delta=0 limit, in which case the protrusion may represent a small local bump on the surface of a superconducting cavity. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [DOI: 10.1063/1.3131844]“
“Quality assurance and improvement (QA/QI) is a critical activity in medicine. The use of large-scale collaborative databases is increasingly essential to obtain enough reports with which to establish standards of practice and define the incidence of complications and risk/benefit ratios for rare events. Such projects can enhance local QA/QI endeavors by enabling institutions to obtain benchmark data against which to compare their performance and can be used for prospective analyses of inter-institutional differences to determine best practice.