Clinical, microbiological, and salivary biomarker profiles of dental implant patients with type 2 diabetes

Objective Regulators of peri‐implant bone loss in patients with diabetes appear to involve multiple risk factors that have not been clearly elucidated. This study was conducted to explore putative local etiologic factors on implant bone loss in relation to type 2 diabetes mellitus, including clinical, microbial, salivary biomarker, and psychosocial factors. Materials and methods Thirty‐two subjects (divided into type 2 diabetes mellitus and non‐diabetic controls), having at least one functional implant and six teeth, were enrolled in a 1‐year longitudinal investigation. Analyses of clinical measurements and standardized intra‐oral radiographs, saliva and serum biomarkers (via protein arrays for 20 selected markers), and plaque biofilm (via q PCR for eight periodontal pathogens) were performed at baseline and 1 year. In addition, the subjects were asked to respond to questionnaires to assess behavioral and psychosocial variables. Results There was a significant increase from baseline to 1 year in the probing depth of implants in the diabetes group (1.95 mm to 2.35 mm, P  = 0.015). The average radiographic bone loss during the study period marginally increased at dental implants compared to natural teeth over the study period (0.08 mm vs. 0.05 mm; P  = 0.043). The control group harbored higher levels of T reponema denticola at their teeth at baseline ( P  = 0.046), and the levels of the pathogen increased significantly over time around the implants of the same group ( P  = 0.003). Salivary osteoprotegerin ( OPG ) levels were higher in the diabetes group than the control group at baseline only; in addition, the salivary levels of IL ‐4, IL ‐10, and OPG associated with host defense were significantly reduced in the diabetes group ( P  = 0.010, P  = 0.019, and P  = 0.024), while controls showed an increase in the salivary OPG levels ( P  = 0.005). For psychosocial factors, there were not many significant changes over the observation period, except for some findings related to coping behaviors at baseline. Conclusions The study suggests that the clinical, microbiological, salivary biomarker, and psychosocial profiles of dental implant patients with type 2 diabetes who are under good metabolic control and regular maintenance care are very similar to those of non‐diabetic individuals. Future studies are warranted to validate the findings in longer‐term and larger clinical trials ( ClinicalTrials.gov # NCT00933491).Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107497/1/clr12139.pd

Off-shell M5 Brane, Perturbed Seiberg-Witten Theory, and Metastable Vacua

We demonstrate that, in an appropriate limit, the off-shell M5-brane worldvolume action effectively captures the scalar potential of Seiberg-Witten theory perturbed by a small superpotential and, consequently, any nonsupersymmetric vacua that it describes. This happens in a similar manner to the emergence from M5's of the scalar potential describing certain type IIB flux configurations [arXiv:0705.0983]. We then construct exact nonholomorphic M5 configurations in the special case of SU(2) Seiberg-Witten theory deformed by a degree six superpotential which correspond to the recently discovered metastable vacua of Ooguri, Ookouchi, Park [arXiv:0704.3613], and Pastras [arXiv:0705.0505]. These solutions take the approximate form of a holomorphic Seiberg-Witten geometry with harmonic embedding along a transverse direction and allow us to obtain geometric intuition for local stability of the gauge theory vacua. As usual, dynamical processes in the gauge theory, such as the decay of nonsupersymmetric vacua, take on a different character in the M5 description which, due to issues of boundary conditions, typically involves runaway behavior in MQCD.Comment: 62 pages (46 pages + 5 appendices), 10 figure

What We Don't Know about BTZ Black Hole Entropy

With the recent discovery that many aspects of black hole thermodynamics can be effectively reduced to problems in three spacetime dimensions, it has become increasingly important to understand the ``statistical mechanics'' of the (2+1)-dimensional black hole of Banados, Teitelboim, and Zanelli (BTZ). Several conformal field theoretic derivations of the BTZ entropy exist, but none is completely satisfactory, and many questions remain open: there is no consensus as to what fields provide the relevant degrees of freedom or where these excitations live. In this paper, I review some of the unresolved problems and suggest avenues for their solution.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX, no figures; references added, brief discussion of relation to string theory added; to appear in Class. Quant. Gra

A prospective, controlled clinical trial evaluating the clinical and radiological outcome after 3 years of immediately placed implants in sockets exhibiting periapical pathology

Abstract Objectives: The aim of the present study was to compare the clinical and radiological outcome of immediately placed implants in sockets with or without periapical pathology 3 years after implant placement. Materials and methods: Twenty-nine patients with immediate implant placement were clinically and radiologically followed 3 years after implant placement (test group: 16 patients without periapical pathology, control group: 13 patients with periapical pathologies). Clinical (full-mouth bleeding score, full-mouth plaque score, clinical attachment level measurements and width of keratinized mucosa buccaly of the implant) and radiological parameters (vertical distance from the implant shoulder to the first bone-to-implant contact [IS-BIC]) were assessed. Both 95% confidence intervals, as well as results of statistical tests (one-sample, two-sample and paired t-test) were provided. Results: The implant survival rate was 100% for all 29 implants after 3 years. The clinical and radiological parameters showed no statistically significant difference between the test and the control group at 3 years (two-sample t-test). The IS-BIC was between 1.54 +/- 0.88 mm (mesial, test) and 1.69 +/- 0.92 mm (distal, test). Between the 1- and 3-year visit the IS-BIC increased in both groups significantly on one side of the implant: 0.30 +/- 0.37 mm (mesial, test) and 0.33 +/- 0.43 mm (distal, control) (one-sample t-test). None of the 13 examined radiographs of implants immediately placed in sockets with periapical pathologies revealed retrograde peri-implantitis after 3 years. Conclusion: It is concluded within the limitations of this study, that after careful debridement of the extraction socket, immediate placement of implants into sites with periapical pathologies can be a successful treatment modality for at least 3 years with no disadvantages in clinical and radiological parameters to immediately placed implants into healthy sockets. To cite this article: Truninger TC, Philipp AOH, Siegenthaler DW, Roos M, Hämmerle CHF, Jung RE. A prospective, controlled clinical trial evaluating the clinical and radiological outcome after 3 years of immediately placed implants in sockets exhibiting periapical pathology. Clin. Oral Impl. Res. xx, 2010; 000-000

AVNP2 protects against cognitive impairments induced by C6 glioma by suppressing tumour associated inflammation in rats

© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/).Glioblastoma is a kind of malignant tumour and originates from the central nervous system. In the last century, some researchers and clinician have noticed that the psychosocial and neurocognitive functioning of patients with malignant gliomas can be impaired. Many clinical studies have demonstrated that part of patients, adults or children, diagnosed with glioblastoma will suffer from cognitive deficiency during their clinical course, especially in long-term survivors. Many nanoparticles (NPs) can inhibit the biological functions of tumours by modulating tumour-associated inflammation, which provokes angiogenesis and tumour growth. As one of the best antiviral nanoparticles (AVNPs), AVNP2 is the 2nd generation of AVNP2 that have been conjugated to graphite-graphene for improving physiochemical performance and reducing toxicity. AVNP2 inactivates viruses, such as the H1N1 and H5N1influenza viruses and even the SARS coronavirus, while it inhibits bacteria, such as MRSA and E. coli. As antimicrobials, nanoparticles are considered to be one of the vectors for the administration of therapeutic compounds. Yet, little is known about their potential functionalities and toxicities to the neurotoxic effects of cancer. Herein, we explored the functionality of AVNP2 on inhibiting C6 in glioma-bearing rats. The novel object-recognition test and open-field test showed that AVNP2 significantly improved the neuro-behaviour affected by C6 glioma. AVNP2 also alleviated the decline of long-term potentiation (LTP) and the decreased density of dendritic spines in the CA1 region induced by C6. Western blot assay and immunofluorescence staining showed that the expressions of synaptic-related proteins (PSD-95 and SYP) were increased, and these findings were in accordance with the results mentioned above. It revealed that the sizes of tumours in C6 glioma-bearing rats were smaller after treatment with AVNP2. The decreased expression of inflammatory factors (IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α) by Western blotting assay and ELISA, angiogenesis protein (VEGF) by Western blotting assay and other related proteins (BDNF, NF-ĸB, iNOS and COX-2) by Western blotting assay in peri-tumour tissue indicated that AVNP2 could control tumour-associated inflammation, thus efficiently ameliorating the local inflammatory condition and, to some extent, inhibiting angiogenesis in C6-bearing rats. In conclusion, our results suggested that AVNP2 could have an effect on the peri-tumor environment, obviously restraining the growth progress of gliomas, and eventually improving cognitive levels in C6-bearing rats.Peer reviewedProo

Cosmology at Low Frequencies: The 21 cm Transition and the High-Redshift Universe

Observations of the high-redshift Universe with the 21 cm hyperfine line of neutral hydrogen promise to open an entirely new window onto the early phases of cosmic structure formation. Here we review the physics of the 21 cm transition, focusing on processes relevant at high redshifts, and describe the insights to be gained from such observations. These include measuring the matter power spectrum at z~50, observing the formation of the cosmic web and the first luminous sources, and mapping the reionization of the intergalactic medium. The epoch of reionization is of particular interest, because large HII regions will seed substantial fluctuations in the 21 cm background. We also discuss the experimental challenges involved in detecting this signal, with an emphasis on the Galactic and extragalactic foregrounds. These increase rapidly toward low frequencies and are especially severe for the highest redshift applications. Assuming that these difficulties can be overcome, the redshifted 21 cm line will offer unique insight into the high-redshift Universe, complementing other probes but providing the only direct, three-dimensional view of structure formation from z~200 to z~6.Comment: extended review accepted by Physics Reports, 207 pages, 44 figures (some low resolution); version with high resolution figures available at http://pantheon.yale.edu/~srf28/21cm/index.htm; minor changes to match published versio

Water stress is a component of cold acclimation process essential for inducing full freezing tolerance in strawberry

The factors involved in cold acclimation process and their role in inducing freezing tolerance were studied in strawberry (Fragaria X ananassa) plants. The results show that low temperature and water stress are two key components of cold acclimation, in that low temperature typically induced water stress in the plants. After a 2-week exposure of plants to 3/1°C (day/night temperature), the leaf water potential decreased markedly to below -1.6 MPa. While both of these components contribute significantly to the induction of freezing tolerance, water stress is a dominant factor in inducing freezing tolerance, contributing roughly to 56% of freezing tolerance acquired by natural cold acclimation. Typical cold acclimation treatment of plants for 2 weeks increased their freezing tolerance by about 14°C to -20.7°C while the same treatment, in the absence of the accompanying water stress, increased their freezing tolerance only by 5°C, which indicates the importance of water stress during cold acclimation. Furthermore, both low temperature and water stress independently induced the orthologs of cold-responsive genes, COR47 and COR78, however, stronger expression of these genes was observed in response to cold acclimating conditions. Thus, these results show that both of these factors are essential elements of cold acclimation process and play an important role in inducing freezing tolerance in strawberry plants

Colossal magnetocapacitance and scale-invariant dielectric response in phase-separated manganites

Thin films of strongly-correlated electron materials (SCEM) are often grown epitaxially on planar substrates and typically have anisotropic properties that are usually not captured by edge-mounted four-terminal electrical measurements, which are primarily sensitive to in-plane conduction paths. Accordingly, the correlated interactions in the out-of-plane (perpendicular) direction cannot be measured but only inferred. We address this shortcoming and show here an experimental technique in which the SCEM under study, in our case a 600 Angstrom-thick (La1-yPry)0.67Ca0.33MnO3 (LPCMO) film, serves as the base electrode in a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) trilayer capacitor structure. This unconventional arrangement allows for simultaneous determination of colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) associated with dc transport parallel to the film substrate and colossal magnetocapacitance (CMC) associated with ac transport in the perpendicular direction. We distinguish two distinct strain-related direction-dependent insulator-metal (IM) transitions and use Cole-Cole plots to establish a heretofore unobserved collapse of the dielectric response onto a universal scale-invariant power-law dependence over a large range of frequency, temperature and magnetic field.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figures, Supplementary section included, Submitted to Nature Physic

De-contamination of cosmological 21-cm maps

We present a method for extracting the expected cosmological 21-cm signal from the epoch of reionization, taking into account contaminating radiations and random instrumental noise. The method is based on the maximum a-posteriori probability (MAP) formalism and employs the coherence of the contaminating radiation along the line-of-sight and the three-dimensional correlations of the cosmological signal. We test the method using a detailed and comprehensive modeling of the cosmological 21-cm signal and the contaminating radiation. The signal is obtained using a high resolution N-body simulation where the gas is assumed to trace the dark matter and is reionized by stellar radiation computed from semi-analytic galaxy formation recipes. We model contaminations to the cosmological signal from synchrotron and free-free galactic foregrounds and extragalactic sources including active galactic nuclei, radio haloes and relics, synchrotron and free-free emission from star forming galaxies, and free-free emission from dark matter haloes and the intergalactic medium. We provide tests of the reconstruction method for several rms values of instrumental noise from $\sigma_{N}=1$ to 250 mK. For low instrumental noise, the recovered signal, along individual lines-of-sight, fits the true cosmological signal with a mean rms difference of $d_{rms}\approx 1.7\pm 0.6$ for $\sigma_{N}=1$ mK, and $d_{rms}\approx 4.2\pm 0.4$ for $\sigma_{N}=5$ mK. The one-dimensional power spectrum is nicely reconstructed for all values of $\sigma_{N}$ considered here, while the reconstruction of the two-dimensional power spectrum and the Minkowski functionals is good only for noise levels of the order of few mK.Comment: 19 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

The demographics of galactic bulges in the SDSS database

We present a new database of our two-dimensional bulge–disk decompositions for 14,233 galaxies drawn from Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR12 in order to examine the properties of bulges residing in the local universe (0.005 < z < 0.05). We performed decompositions in the g and r bands by utilizing the galfit software. The bulge colors and bulge-to-total ratios are found to be sensitive to the details in the decomposition technique, and hence we hereby provide full details of our method. The g − r colors of bulges derived are almost constantly red regardless of bulge size, except for the bulges in the low bulge-to-total ratio galaxies (B/T r lesssim 0.3). Bulges exhibit similar scaling relations to those followed by elliptical galaxies, but the bulges in galaxies with lower bulge-to-total ratios clearly show a gradually larger departure in slope from the elliptical galaxy sequence. The scatters around the scaling relations are also larger for the bulges in galaxies with lower bulge-to-total ratios. Both the departure in slopes and larger scatters likely originate from the presence of young stars. The bulges in galaxies with low bulge-to-total ratios show signs of a frosting of young stars so substantial that their luminosity-weighted Balmer-line ages are as small as 1 Gyr in some cases. While bulges seem largely similar in optical properties to elliptical galaxies, they do show clear and systematic departures as a function of bulge-to-total ratio. The stellar properties and perhaps associated formation processes of bulges seem much more diverse than those of elliptical galaxies