{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02065826330532213, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009453781512605041, 'mean_word_length': 5.077659574468085, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
What's new in Shock, April 2006?

Once again, our esteemed Editor of Shock has drawn together an interesting lineup of articles including two excellent review articles. The first by Dubick et al. (1) discusses potential issues with the use of hypertonic/hyperoncotic resuscitation after hemorrhagic shock in humans. This review identifies potential issues that may arise and reviews the literature stretching back to the year 1918. Publication of this article is particularly timely since largescale clinical trials are just beginning. The second article by Markel et al. (2) reviews the literature concerning cytokines in necrotizing enterocolitis. This article is also very well done and includes 107 references going back to 1972. When evaluating review articles, there is always a concern that the authors have not looked at the more recent literature, but this review cites 18 articles from the last 2 years, including six from 2005. Both of these reviews are well written and informative. There are five articles addressing different cardiovascular issues, including one clinical article and five basic science papers. Cardiac function was evaluated in normal human volunteers after infusion of endotoxin in the paper by Mathru et al. (3) The infusion of endotoxin induced a hyperdynamic state with a substantial increase in the cardiac index within the first 5 hours. In one of the basic science articles, Maass et al. (4) used echocardiography in awake mice to demonstrate significant depression in myocardial contractile function after burn injury. This article helps to show that some of the tools used for humans such as echocardiography are now available for smaller animals. The article by Aghajani et al. (5) used three different types of load interventions to evaluate their impact on cardiac function in swine. The studies showed that the elastance is extremely load-dependent such that it reflects the load interventions more accurately than the inotropic state of the cardiac muscle. Pigs were also used in the article by Brander et al. (6) to study the hepatic arterial buffer response to both dobutamine and low abdominal blood flow. Low-dose dobutamine was able to increase gut and celiac trunk blood flow without altering either the hepatic artery blood flow or renal blood flow. The last article by Gonzales et al. (7) examined different aspects of cardiovascular function and evaluated the pattern of acetylation of cardiac histones. Valproic acid was used to treat rats that had been subjected to lethal hemorrhage. The data show that valproic acid significantly improved survival and that this was associated with hyperacetylation of cardiac histones. There are three articles which evaluate different aspects of endotoxin infusion into experimental animals as well as humans. In the first of these by Godet et al. (8), rats were made tolerant by infusion of endotoxin 2 days before renal ischemia. Endotoxin tolerance results in less renal injury which was associated with increased IL-10 production. In the second article, Schmidhammer et al. (9) infused increasing doses of endotoxin which induced acute lung injury. Interestingly, although there was an increase in lung injury, the acute pulmonary hypertension frequently observed after bolus infusion of endotoxin did not occur. The third article by van Eijk et al. (10) examined the plasma obtained from normal human volunteers infused with endotoxin. This plasma induced increased vascular permeability in an in vitro setting, and the levels of IL-10 and VEGF within the plasma correlated with this increased permeability. Indicators for the presence and severity of the systemic inflammatory response syndrome and sepsis were studied in two clinical articles. In the first of these by Kuwata et al. (11), the presence of peripheral hemophagocytosis in the systemic inflammatory response syndrome was studied. Hemophagocytosis refers to the observation of mononuclear cells phagocytosing red blood cells and is one of the diagnostic criteria for the hemophagocytic syndrome. Peripheral hemophagocytosis was observed more frequently in those patients with advanced systemic inflammatory response syndrome and was also associated with an increased risk of death. The second article by Brunialti et al. (12) also evaluated peripheral blood and specifically looked at monocyte expression of several markers in the correlation with sepsis. Their data, based on 41 patients and 17 healthy volunteers, showed that the inflammatory response was associated with a continuum of clinical manifestations. A proposed new therapy for the treatment of peritonitis was examined in the article by Bernardshaw et al. (13) In this article, prophylactic administration of a mushroom extract decreased the number of colony-forming units of bacteria in the blood and improved survival. The last two articles addressed whether specific components of the immune response were critical for determining outcome. In the first of these, gut barrier function was examined in the article by Mazzon et al. (14) using an experimental animal model of colitis and knockout mice. Their studies showed that 5-lipoxygenase was responsible for a significant portion of the permeability in the ileum as well as colonic inflammation. In the next article by Wieland et al. (15), the role of leptin in the host defense against bacterial pneumonia was examined. Mice genetically deficient in leptin were used in this article. At higher doses of bacteria, there was no difference between the wild-type mice and those lacking leptin, although at lower doses, the leptin-deficient mice had decreased pulmonary expression of cytokines and chemokines. Enjoy this month’s issue!