Recent Articles

Statistics across industrialised societies show that occupational stress results in social and financial costs for individuals, organisations, and economies. Occupational stress is prevalent in many different forms, for example, work intensification, dissatisfaction with current work schedules, feelings of job insecurity, more work being done at odd hours, the spread of new information and communication technologies, and long hours becoming more common.

Within traumatic-injury populations, adjustment following the suffering of a permanent impairment such as a traumatic Spinal Cord Injury (tSCI) follows quite a different path (and has quite different longer term participation outcomes) when the individual involved is a child or adolescent, and not an adult.

Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Case Reports and Studies. Within the field of medicine a number of systems have been established to stratify the quality of research designs which have been collectively termed "levels of evidence" or a "hierarchy of evidence" approach. These approaches rank study designs with respect to their impact on internal and external validity

Post-mortem imaging in the form of plain X-ray films has been in use for many years as an adjunct or occasionally as a substitute for autopsy. However, in the last two decades there has been increasing interest and investigation into the use of advanced techniques such as Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in death investigation.

Forensic investigation and clinical treatment of infanticide mother is an occasion to reflect about the social stigma associated with this crime. The forensic-psychiatric assessment must be anchored on an authentic and meaningful clinical relationship to criminal mother, without misinterpretation and countertransferal dynamics, such as emotional reactions of mistrust and stigmatization of the offender.

In recent years, an increasing number of new designer-drugs have increased the demands for general toxicological screening [1]. Limited screening based on immunoassays is commonly used in clinical toxicology, whereas more comprehensive approaches are common in forensic toxicology such as screening based on Gas or Liquid Chromatography (GC or LC) approaches.

An Ultra-High Pressure Liquid Chromatography Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (UHPLC-TOF-MS) method for quantitative analysis of 30 drugs in whole blood was developed and validated. The method was used for screening and quantification of common drugs and drugs of abuse in whole blood received from autopsy cases and living persons.

They are cytokines secreted by adipose tissue considered to be immunomodulating agents, however they can be more accurately put into the larger, growing list of adipose-derived hormones.

Atopic dermatitis, also known as eczema, affects about 10-20% of children in the UK and about 1-3% of adults [1]. The incidence of atopic dermatitis has increased as much as 3 fold in the past 40 years

In recent years many progress has been achieved in the biomedical and biopharmaceutical fields particularly in drug delivery and regenerative medicine. This has been possible thanks to the increased expertise in polymers chemistry as well as the advent of innovative techniques of materials manipulation that have lead to the production of new “smart” polymeric devices with peculiar propertiesable to selectively reach almost all areas of the human body, in the case of drug delivery systems, or to reduce the chemical-physical gap between human tissues and synthetic devices, in the case of tissue engineering.

A reliable, fast, sensitive and selective Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) method has been developed and validated for the determination of fenofibrate in marketed product (Lipanthyl) and human plasma. The chromatographic separation was performed on a reversed-phase Acquity®BEH C18 column (1.7 μm particle size, 50 mm x 2.1 mm ID) with an isocratic elution profile and mobile phase consisting of methanol and water (80:20, %, v/v). To achieve optimum chromatographic condition the influence of mobile phase composition and flow rate was investigated. The total chromatographic analysis time was as short as 2 min.

The field of nanoscience has experienced a staggering number of advances in recent years with regards to a wide range of disciplines including physics, chemistry, materials science, biology and medicine.

Thermodynamics provides the primary information regarding the feasibility of synthesis and stability of materials, principally through the quantities: heat capacity, Cp; entropy, S; enthalpy of formation, ΔfH; the Gibbs energy of formation, ΔfG, andamplified by lattice energy, ΔLU.

Polymeric nano-fiber based materials and their application is one of the research areas in materials science and nanotechnology. Nano-fibrous materials are receiving extensive research interest for applications in diverse fields as biosensors, optical and chemical sensors, stimuli-responsive or "smart" materials, bioreactors, drug delivery carriers, etc.

Naturally, all materials are able to response to some particular stimuli via changing their one or more chemical/physical properties accordingly. Among these properties, the ability for shape change can be harnessed for motion and/or force generation.

We have synthesized Au/CuO and Au/ZnO nanocomposites using the laser soldering technique. The process was carried out by irradiating a solution containing Au-CuO and Au-ZnO nanoparticles using 532 nm laser pulses of 0.1 J/cm2 continuously for 20 minutes.

I feel much honored to have been appointed as the new editorial board member of Journal of Materials Science and Nanotechnology. This is the 1st year of Journal of Materials Science and Nanotechnology. I am pleased to see that the new innovative advances have seen materials science and nanotechnology gaining further recognition within the international materials science and nanotechnology community.

Why one more journal on materials and/or nanotechnology? Well, we all live in a nano-materials world. Trivially enough, each and every object, tool or device is made up of structured matter. At the same time, matter is intrinsically structured at the nanoscale level, via ions, atoms and molecules, and related assemblies.

Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) pathway is a signal transduction pathway that functions in a wide range of physiological and pathophysiological cellular events including cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, migration, inflammation, metabolic disorders and diseases.

The discovery of a substance with antibacterial properties was expected to permanently diminish the occurrence of bacterial infections posing a threat to health and life. Since the discovery of penicillin many new groups of antibiotics have been introduced into treatment of disease in people and animals, but their excessive and frequently unjustified use, and most importantly, incorrect dosage, have led to numerous unanticipated problems in contemporary human and veterinary medicine.