Search

We report a case of Peutz-Jeghers syndrome with gallolyticus endocarditis which has not yet been reported. Colon cancer was observed and implicated in Peutz-Jeghers syndrome. A 44-year-old female with fever and heart murmur was diagnosed as infective endocarditis caused by streptococcus gallolyticus. After treatment with antibiotics and mitral valbuloplasty, we performed gastrointestinal endoscopic studies and found polyps in stomach and colon. Histological findings of a large pedunculated colon polyp revealed hamartomatous polyp with a lesion of adenocarcinoma with adenoma. She had pigmentation of digits. Her father had also digits pigmentation and died of pancreas cancer. Peutz-Jeghers syndrome with colon cancer was incidentally diagnosed by infective endocarditis and subsequent colonoscopy.

The use of steel-encased precast concrete (SC) piles has risen rapidly for the construction of earthquake-resilient foundation systems for buildings in Japan and Southeast Asia. SC piles are used near the pile-pile cap connection owing to their increased ductility, and resistance against large bending moments and axial forces, compared to the other precast concrete piles. However, there are no official guidelines available for the design of SC piles in severe earthquakes, except for a proposed draft by the AIJ committee for the determination of bending capacities. In this work, a database of 79 tests on SC piles, all tested under axial-flexural loads, was created. The bending capacities obtained from these tests were used to verify the provisions of the proposed draft and the provisions for composite member design in AIJ, Eurocode 4 and, AISC. Furthermore, a distributed plasticity formulation was adopted to develop a non-linear static model, that takes into account the concrete confinement and local buckling of steel casing, for prediction of moment and drift capacities. The accuracy of the model was verified against various experiments, and the capability to reproduce the moment-drift relations was confirmed.

Kawasaki disease (KD) is an acute, self-limited vasculitis of unknown etiology that occurs predominantly in young children (≤5 years of age). We herein report the case of an 18-year-old Japanese man with a history of incomplete KD during infancy; later, despite an initial diagnosis of retropharyngeal abscess, he was ultimately diagnosed with retropharyngeal edema associated with recurrent KD. Adult-onset or recurrent KD is an uncommon event, and retropharyngeal edema is a rare manifestation of this disease. Internists should be aware of the possibility of KD that mimics a retropharyngeal abscess, even in adult patients.

Changes occurring in membrane saccharides during the in vivo aging of normal human erythrocytes have been evaluated after the fractionation of the red cells into five age groups by density gradient centrifugation. The glycoconjugate fractions studied included sialoglycoproteins, macroglycolipids, low-molecular-weight glycolipids, and Band 3 glycoproteins. All of the carbohydrate constituents of the membrane were found to decrease relative to the total ghost protein as a function of cell age, with the most substantial losses occurring in the macroglycolipids (50%) and Band 3 glycoprotein (30%); the smallest changes were observed in the sialoglycoproteins (13%). No preferential loss of sialic acid or other peripheral sugars was found, making unlikely the importance of glycosidase action in the removal of sugars from the membrane. It is suggested that the changes observed in the composition of the ghosts during aging are best explained by a loss of membrane segments enriched in glycoproteins and glycolipids and deficient in internally located molecules such as spectrin. Analyses were also performed on the glycoconjugate fractions from diabetic erythrocytes separated according to cell age. These erythrocytes, which had glycosylated hemoglobin values twice those of normals, had somewhat smaller amounts of membrane-bound carbohydrate. The difference between diabetic and normal erythrocytes was greatest when young cells were examined (diabetic to normal = 0.93), suggesting that the known increased turnover of red cells in diabetes leads to an early loss of membrane constituents.

A series of research so far carried out, has clarified that among various kinds of multiple notches existing in steel structures, the collinear notch has the largest influence upon brittle fracture initiations. In this research, therefore, the collinear notch is taken up as the subject of study, and examination is made on deformation behaviors ahead of notch tip and on fracture characteristics by elastic-plastic analysis based on the finite element method (FEM) and by experiments.The results are summarized as follows : (1) A crack opening displacement (COD) obtained by FEM is approximately equal to the theoretical value by E. Smith and a measured value by Moire method, which enables the coefficient of interaction effects of notches to be estimated by FEM.(2) When notches are contiguous very closely to each other, fracture stress is decreased and at the same time the critical COD is decreased. Therefore the concept of COD is not simply applicable to that case. The reason for the occurrence of such phenomenon is clarified through examination of the relation between the plastic strain in notch tip zone and the COD which are respectively calculated by FEM.

Selective dimolar benzoylation of methyl 6-deoxy-α- and β-D-glucopyranosides yielded the 2,3-di-O-benzoate of the respective glucopyranoside as the major product in 61 and 29% yields. The orders of the reactivity of the secondary hydroxyl groups in α- and β-anomers were different, i.e., the order was 2-OH > 3-OH > 4-OH for the former and 3-OH > 2-OH > 4-OH for the latter.