Many people do not know their body as they would know a friend, that is, as someone they listen to and understand. This is a book that provides you with tools, by giving you an understanding of how the different parts of your body and mind work together to form your experience of life. It combines scientific facts, knowledge and wisdom from a wide variety of fields to help you orientate yourself in the maze of lifestyle and health advices that are given in conversations or shows up in trad...

This groundbreaking volume of original essays presents fresh avenues of inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry. Contributors draw from a variety of fields, including evolutionary psychiatry, phenomenology, biopsychosocial models, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, neuroethics, behavioral economics, and virtue theory. Philosophy and Psychiatry’s unique structure consists of two parts: in the first, philosophers write five lead essays with replies from psychiatrists. In...

All pathology residents must have a good command of clinical chemistry, toxicology, immunology, and laboratory statistics to be successful pathologists, as well as to pass the American Board of Pathology examination. Clinical chemistry, however, is a topic in which many senior medical students and pathology residents face challenges. Clinical Chemistry, Immunology and Laboratory Quality Control meets this challenge head on with a clear and easy-to-read presentation of core topics and detai...

This book addresses various aspects of testicular autoimmunity. It has long been suspected that testicular autoimmunity could be one of the causes of idiopathic male infertility. However, it is very difficult to estimate the incidence of testicular autoimmunity in men, as most male patients first realize they are infertile when they start trying to conceive a child, and there is a possibility that their testes may already exhibit the end stage of testicular autoimmunity, in which lymphocyt...

In the summer of 1988, my developmental biology professor announced to the class that hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) had finally been purified. Somehow, I never forgot the professor’s words. When I started working in Dr. Irv Weissman’s labo- tory at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow, I realized that the findings mentioned by the professor were from Weissman’s laboratory and had been published in a 1988 edition of the journal Science. It has been over 20 years since the publication of that...

The vertebrate immune system is distinctive among defense systems of multicellular organisms. In addition to nonspecific immunity, it generates a randomized array of millions of antigen receptors (immunoglobulins and T-cell receptors). A subset of these receptors are critical for binding to invading microbes or biochemicals from them to tag the microbes for elimination. Three site-directed DNA modification processes are critical to this process in vertebrates. V(D)J recombination generates...

The collection of chapters in this proceedings volume brings together research from academic and industry scientists and clinical development experts who are focused on contemporary and emerging aspects of improving treatments employing biosurfaces. Interactions between biomaterial implants, devices, cell therapies, and whole organ transplants frequently trigger activation of body defense systems and responses that negatively affect the clinical outcome. Optimal tissue integration and modu...

The third edition of this important, gold-standard title outlines a range of significant advances in the study and understanding of myasthenia gravis. The overarching goal of this new edition is identical to the first and second -- to provide the clinician and the scientist with a common resource for understanding the profound achievements in the clinical, translational, and basic sciences of neuromuscular transmission disorders. In addition to several new authors and an extensive update o...

The various cell types have traditionally been recognized and classified according to their appearance in the light microscope following the process of fixing, processing, sectioning, and staining tissues that is known as histology. Classical histology has been augmented by immunohistochemistry (the use of specific antibodies to stain particular molecular species in situ). Immunohistochemistry has allowed the identification of many more cell types than could be visualized by classical hist...

The field of dermatology has very much changed during the last decades. An ever-increasing knowledge about the pathogenesis of diseases of the skin has made it possible to not only better classify but also to make dermatoses better explainable and understandable. The present book exemplifies this with a very common disease, the dyshidrotic eczema of the hands. Most current textbooks still describe "dyshidrosis" as a disease of the eccrine sweat glands, as was first postulated in 1873 by T....

In 2013, 200 million people were infected with malaria, resulting in over 584,000 deaths, with the potential to affect over half the world's population. Such is the widespread nature of malaria that it is increasingly believed only a vaccine will lead to its eradication.Although the first attempt at a vaccine was made a century ago, it is only in the last 30 years that real progress in testing has been made, in the hope of discovering a molecule that can provide long-lasting protection aga...

This book covers the broad area related to Notch-mediated regulation of the immune system and tumorigenesis. Notch signaling was originally identified as a crucial pathway to regulate cell fate choice. Subsequent studies, however, have revealed that Notch regulates many steps of immune cell differentiation or development as well as tumorigenesis of cells. Although there are still many controversial issues regarding the functions or regulatory mechanism of Notch, it is important to summariz...