Although we deliberately excluded those with overt chronic infections, we must underline that we did not undertake exhaustive screening for chronic viral infections, a factor that can

have a substantial impact upon the immune profile of the elderly. Further study is also needed to examine how far the associations with psychobiological variables are causal, how easily psychological health can be enhanced, and whether this will indeed have a favourable impact upon immune function. Although elderly women show some univariate correlations between fitness markers and such characteristics of an aging immune system as alterations in T cell activation markers, memory cell counts, and CD56+ cell counts, stronger learn more correlations

are seen relative to psychobiologic variables (depression, fatigue and quality of life). Longitudinal studies are recommended to examine how far the adverse psychological concomitants of aging can be reversed, and whether this may offer a helpful approach to the treatment of immuno-senescence. This study was supported by a Grant from Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) (2001/14976-2). “
“Cervical spondylosis is a common degenerative disease that buy SP600125 causes several types of motor and sensory dysfunction. Routine clinical magnetic resonance (MR) imaging (for example, T2-weighted imaging) to evaluate pathological changes in this disease is of limited use because the correlation between the MR findings and clinical symptoms is weak [1]. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has been added to conventional MR imaging in many investigations of the spinal cord to evaluate microstructural changes [2]. Changes in DTI signals depend on the diffusivity of water molecules in a particular environment. DTI-derived quantitative metrics such as the fractional anisotropy

(FA) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) show promise as biomarkers in evaluating the microstructural pathology of the cervical spinal cord. For example, reduced FA and increased ADC have been reported at damaged spinal cord regions regardless of whether abnormal signal intensity in the spinal cord was observed on conventional MR images [3], [4] and [5]. Tolmetin Moreover, a recently introduced extension of the DTI technique called diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI) [6] and [7] has shown greater promise than DTI in evaluating the microstructure and pathologic condition of neuronal tissue [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13] and [14], especially gray matter [15] and [16]. For evaluation of the spinal cord, DKI can provide a more comprehensive characterization of lesions and changes of white or gray matter in patients with multiple sclerosis [17]. Furthermore, as noted in a recent study [18], the mean diffusional kurtosis (MK) can provide additional information on the spinal cord in patients with cervical spondylosis.