Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0085437 (bacterial meningitis)
 4,038 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) concentration and urinary excretion of cyclic adenosine-3',5'-monophosphate(cAMP) were measured in children aged from 3 days to 15 years by the protein-binding method of Gilman (1970). The mean CSF cAMP concentration (22.4 plus or minus 0.6 (S.E.) nmol/l) of 24 "healthy" children tended to be lower (P less then 0.2) than that of adult patients who revealed no pathological findings on clinical examination. No difference in the results was foung between the sexes. High cAMP concentrations were found in CSF of children suffering from cerebellar glioma, hypothalamic precocious puberty, bacterial meningitis, or Cushing's disease. The urinary excretion of cAMP varied from 0.2 to 5.3 in "healthy" and from 1.3 to 7.6 mumol/24 hrs in diseased children. Two children with pheochromocytoma showed a striking decrease in the rate of urinary excretion of the nucleotide after surgical treatment.
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PMID:Cerebrospinal fluid concentration and urinary excretion of cyclic adenosine-3', 5'-monophosphate in various diseases of children. 16 45

Recent studies using a rat model of pneumococcal meningitis have shown that nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitors greatly attenuated microvascular changes and brain edema formation. The site of NO production during bacterial meningitis is unknown. In this study we tested whether primary astrocyte cultures from neonatal rat cortex can be induced to release NO upon stimulation with pneumococci. NO production was assessed by measuring nitrite in the cell culture supernatant using the Griess reaction. Stimulation with heat-killed unencapsulated pneumococci (HKP) increased nitrite concentrations in astrocyte culture supernatants in a dose-dependent fashion. Administration of N-nitro-L-arginine (L-NA), aminoguanidine, L-canavanine, cycloheximide, and dexamethasone prevented the increase in nitrite concentrations. Addition of L-arginine, but not of D-arginine, partially reversed the inhibitory effect of L-NA. Administration of SOD increased nitrite accumulation. Moreover, at 72 h after stimulation with heat-killed pneumococci (10(7) cfu/ml) astrocytes showed an inducible NOS-like immunoreactivity. Accumulation of nitrite was also observed when rat cerebellar neurons and microglia were stimulated with HKP, whereas there was only a slight increase of nitrite in media of rat C6 glioma cells, but no increase of nitrite when the human glioblastoma cell line LN-229 was stimulated with HKP. There was a stronger increase in nitrite levels when astrocytes from Lewis rats were used compared to that from Wistar rats. In conclusion, our study indicates that astrocytes, neurons and microglia are inducible for NO production upon stimulation with pneumococci.
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PMID:Production of nitrite by primary rat astrocytes in response to pneumococci. 764 48

Targeting of T cells or natural killer (NK) cells to tumours by using bispecific antibodies has attracted increasing interest in the past few years. We treated 31 patients with malignant glioma using adoptive transfer of lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) cells coupled to a bispecific antibody (anti-CD3+anti-glioma) as post-operative adjuvant therapy. Although this study excluded patients with deeply-seated tumours or a poor performance status, approximately 50% of the patients remained alive after 3 years, and 40% were free of recurrence. Serial CT scans revealed disappearance of remnant tumours in some patients. In addition, CT-guided stereotactic biopsy of the tumour in 3 patients showed extensive necrosis and degeneration after specific targeting therapy (STT). Five patients developed acute infection, and one of them died of bacterial meningitis. Our results suggest that antibody-targeted LAK therapy can achieve a higher response rate in patients with standard LAK therapy or any type of conventional treatment.
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PMID:Targeting therapy for glioma by LAK cells coupled with bispecific antibodies. 1863 71

We would like to report a rare case of pontine glioma with unusual neuroimaging features. The patient was a 3-year-old girl who suffered from chronic nausea and gait disturbance for several months. Computed tomography (CT) demonstrated ventricular dilatation, and ventricular peritoneal (VP) shunt was performed for idiopathic hydrocephalus at another hospital. Fever of unknown origin continued for a month after the VP shunt. At our hospital, cerebrospinal fluid examination showed bacterial meningitis, and it was assumed that shunt infection lead to shunt failure. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed hydrocephalus and pontine swelling, and serial MRI suggested brainstem tumor extending to the bilateral thalamus. The patient underwent stereotactic biopsy of the left thalamic tumor, under general anesthesia, and the histological diagnosis was anaplastic astrocytoma. Diffuse pontine glioma rarely increases without cranial nerve deficits. In the present case, pontine glioma extended to the bilateral thalamus symmetrically. It was difficult to diagnose the presented lesion as pontine glioma in the early period because of its unusual neuroimaging.
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PMID:[A case of pontine astrocytoma with unusual neuroimaging features]. 1988 61