| 1. |
- Danesh, John, et al.
(författare)
-
Plasma fibrinogen level and the risk of major cardiovascular diseases and nonvascular mortality: an individual participant meta-analysis
- 2005
-
Ingår i: JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. - : American Medical Association (AMA). - 1538-3598 .- 0098-7484. ; 294:14, s. 1799-1809
-
Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- CONTEXT: Plasma fibrinogen levels may be associated with the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke. OBJECTIVE: To assess the relationships of fibrinogen levels with risk of major vascular and with risk of nonvascular outcomes based on individual participant data. DATA SOURCES: Relevant studies were identified by computer-assisted searches, hand searches of reference lists, and personal communication with relevant investigators. STUDY SELECTION: All identified prospective studies were included with information available on baseline fibrinogen levels and details of subsequent major vascular morbidity and/or cause-specific mortality during at least 1 year of follow-up. Studies were excluded if they recruited participants on the basis of having had a previous history of cardiovascular disease; participants with known preexisting CHD or stroke were excluded. DATA EXTRACTION: Individual records were provided on each of 154,211 participants in 31 prospective studies. During 1.38 million person-years of follow-up, there were 6944 first nonfatal myocardial infarctions or stroke events and 13,210 deaths. Cause-specific mortality was generally available. Analyses involved proportional hazards modeling with adjustment for confounding by known cardiovascular risk factors and for regression dilution bias. DATA SYNTHESIS: Within each age group considered (40-59, 60-69, and > or =70 years), there was an approximately log-linear association with usual fibrinogen level for the risk of any CHD, any stroke, other vascular (eg, non-CHD, nonstroke) mortality, and nonvascular mortality. There was no evidence of a threshold within the range of usual fibrinogen level studied at any age. The age- and sex- adjusted hazard ratio per 1-g/L increase in usual fibrinogen level for CHD was 2.42 (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.24-2.60); stroke, 2.06 (95% CI, 1.83-2.33); other vascular mortality, 2.76 (95% CI, 2.28-3.35); and nonvascular mortality, 2.03 (95% CI, 1.90-2.18). The hazard ratios for CHD and stroke were reduced to about 1.8 after further adjustment for measured values of several established vascular risk factors. In a subset of 7011 participants with available C-reactive protein values, the findings for CHD were essentially unchanged following additional adjustment for C-reactive protein. The associations of fibrinogen level with CHD or stroke did not differ substantially according to sex, smoking, blood pressure, blood lipid levels, or several features of study design. CONCLUSIONS: In this large individual participant meta-analysis, moderately strong associations were found between usual plasma fibrinogen level and the risks of CHD, stroke, other vascular mortality, and nonvascular mortality in a wide range of circumstances in healthy middle-aged adults. Assessment of any causal relevance of elevated fibrinogen levels to disease requires additional research.
|
|
| 2. |
- Ning, Zhijun, et al.
(författare)
-
Starburst triarylamine based dyes for efficient dye-sensitized solar cells
- 2008
-
Ingår i: Journal of Organic Chemistry. - : American Chemical Society (ACS). - 0022-3263 .- 1520-6904. ; 73:10, s. 3791-3797
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We report here on the synthesis and photophysical/electrochemical properties of a series of novel starburst triarylamine-based organic dyes (S1, S2, S3, and S4) as well as their application in dye-sensitized nanocrystalline TiO2 solar cells (DSSCs). For the four designed dyes, the starburst triarylamine group and the cyanoacetic acid take the role of electron donor and electron acceptor, respectively. It was found that the introduction of starburst triarylamine group to form the D-D-pi-A configuration brought about superior performance over the simple D-pi-A configuration, in terms of bathochromically extended absorption spectra, enhanced molar extinction coefficients and better thermo-stability. Moreover, the HOMO and LUMO energy levels tuning can be conveniently accomplished by alternating the donor moiety, which was confirmed by electrochemical measurements and theoretical calculations. The DSSCs based on the dye S4 showed the best photovoltaic performance: a maximum monochromatic incident photon-to-current conversion efficiency (IPCE) of 85%, a short-circuit photocurrent density (J(sc)) of 13.8 mA cm(-2), an open-circuit photovoltage (V-oc) of 0.63 V, and a fill factor (ff) of 0.69, corresponding to an overall conversion efficiency of 6.02% under 100 mW cm(-)2 irradiation. This work suggests that the dyes based on starburst triphenylamine donor are promising candidates for improvement of the performance of the DSSCs.
|
|
| 3. |
- Wu, Di, 1979-
(författare)
-
Scalable Multi-Standard Radio Baseband for Modern Wireless Communications
- 2009
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Today, owing to the rapid advancement of technologies, people can cross the geographic gap and communicate without waiting for a week to receive a mail. Meanwhile, more and more wireless communications standards are emerging, as all claimed to make our life easier. This really brings us into a dilemma: we need new technologies, not because we are fond of technical complication, on the contrary, because we are constantly pursuing convenience and simplicity. Being tangled by so many standards for connectivity is not fun for anyone (even for people who invented these technologies). The demand is rather simple: why not put everything into one unit which can automatically attach itself to the most suitable radio access available in the circumstances? The whole purpose of this thesis is to find out an economic way of meeting such a demand. From semiconductor industry’s point-of-view, traditional ASIC design flow is facing the challenges brought by the ever rapidly changing specification and immense tape-out cost at nanoscale. Let alone the ever increased system complexity requires painstaking and costly integration and verification. This thesis investigates multi-tasking radio which is a concept to allow multiple radio access technologies to be supported by the same hardware platform and switched under different scenarios. By simultaneously looking at different layers of abstraction such as system modeling and simulation, architecture design, and silicon implementation, the design tradeoff for multi-tasking radio baseband is discussed. In this dissertation, taking the emerging mobile broadband standard 3GPP LTE as the focus and other standards (e.g IEEE 802.11n and DVB) as complements, the system architecture of a multi-tasking radio platform is studied. A general multi-tasking radio baseband chain is partitioned into several functional blocks according to the processing flow and investigated separately. These blocks include synchronization, channel estimation, demodulation and channel coding. Different algorithms are evaluated for each functional block. A new multiple-input multipleoutput symbol detection algorithm “modified fixed-complexity soft-output”, in short MFCSO, is proposed and implemented in silicon. A unified synchronization unit is presented to support several standards. The architecture of channel estimator is also addressed. Finally a highspeed radix-2 Turbo decoder implementation is presented leading towards radix-4 scenario. It is worth mentioning that in this dissertation, the performance evaluation takes the complete system into consideration rather than independently analyzing an individual block. Based on this, algorithm/hardware co-optimization is carried out. Using the “Single Instruction Multiple Tasks” architecture presented earlier, by exploring the commonality of signal processing functions and choosing the proper level of hardware multiplexing, it is concluded in this dissertation that system thinking allows a harmony to be achieved for multi-tasking radio baseband design.
|
|
| 4. |
- Wu, Jun, et al.
(författare)
-
Acid sphingomyelinase is induced by butyrate but does not initiate the anticancer effect of butyrate in HT29 and HepG2 cells
- 2005
-
Ingår i: Journal of Lipid Research. - 1539-7262. ; 46:9, s. 1944-1952
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Butyric acid and sphingomyelin (SM) affect colonic tumorigenesis. We examined the potential link between butyrate stimulation and SM metabolism in colonic and hepatic cancer cell lines. After incubating HT29 and HepG2 cells with butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids, we found that butyrate increased acid but not neutral or alkaline sphingomyelinase (SMase) activity by 10- to 20-fold. The effects occurred after 16 h of incubation and were associated with reduced SM and phosphatidylcholine contents and increased ceramide levels. Northern blotting showed increased acid SMase mRNA levels in these cells after butyrate stimulation. Propionate was less potent, and acetate had no effect. No similar changes of acid phosphatase could be identified. At concentrations that increased acid SMase expression, butyrate inhibited cell proliferation, activated caspase 3, and induced apoptosis. However, the antiproliferative and apoptotic effects of butyrate preceded the changes of acid SMase and were not affected by knocking down acid SMase expression by small, interfering RNA. In addition, butyrate-induced acid SMase expression was not affected by blocking the caspase pathway. In conclusion, butyrate regulates SM metabolism by stimulating acid SMase expression in colon and liver cancer cells, but the increased acid SMase is not a critical mechanism for initiating the anticancer effects of butyrate.
|
|
| 5. |
- Wu, Jun, et al.
(författare)
-
Intestinal alkaline sphingomyelinase hydrolyses and inactivates platelet-activating factor by a phospholipase C activity.
- 2006
-
Ingår i: The Biochemical journal. - 1470-8728. ; 394, s. 299-308
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Alkaline sphingomyelinase (alk-SMase) is a new member of the NPP (nucleotide pyrophosphatase/phosphodiesterase) family that hydrolyses SM (sphingomyelin) to generate ceramide in the intestinal tract. The enzyme may protect the intestinal mucosa from inflammation and tumorigenesis. PAF (platelet-activating factor) is a pro-inflammatory phospholipid involved in pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel diseases. We examined whether alk-SMase can hydrolyse and inactivate PAF. [3H]Octadecyl-labelled PAF was incubated with purified rat intestinal alk-SMase or recombinant human alk-SMase expressed in COS-7 cells. The hydrolytic products were assayed with TLC and MS. We found that alkSMase cleaved the phosphocholine head group from PAF and generated 1-O-alkyl-2-acetyl-sn-glycerol. Differing from the activity against SM, the activity against PAF was optimal at pH 7.5, inhibited by EDTA and stimulated by 0.1-0.25 mM Zn2+. The activity was abolished by site mutation of the predicted metal-binding sites that are conserved in all NPP members. Similar to the activity against SM, the activity against PAF was dependent on bile salt, particularly taurocholate and taurochenodeoxycholate. The V(max) for PAF hydrolysis was 374 mumol x h(-1) x (mg of protein)(-1). The hydrolysis of PAF and SM could be inhibited by the presence of SM and PAF respectively, the inhibition of PAF hydrolysis by SM being stronger. The PAF-induced MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase) activation and IL-8 (interleukin 8) release in HT-29 cells, and chemotaxis in leucocytes were abolished by alk-SMase treatment. In conclusion, alk-SMase hydrolyses and inactivates PAF by a phospholipase C activity. The finding reveals a novel function, by which alk-SMase may counteract the development of intestinal inflammation and colon cancer.
|
|
