Late diabetic complications are often related to vascular changes and formation of thrombi in the altered vasculature. Contributing factors to thrombosis susceptibility of diabetic patients include changes in clotting factors, platelets, and inhibition of fibrinolysis. We have measured various fibrinolytic inhibitors in the blood of diabetic children, diabetic pregnant women and their offspring, and healthy controls. Inhibitors studied included 1) fast (immediate) antiplasmin, 2) slow (progressive) antiplasmin, 3) alpha-2-macroglobulin, and 4) alpha-1-antitrypsin. It appears from our study that high fast-antiplasmin levels, and low or missing slow-antiplasmin levels are characteristic of diabetic patients and of newborn of diabetic mothers. The reason for high fast-antiplasmin levels is not clear: Levels are not connected with the age of the patient or duration of diabetes, and are not elevated in response to a fibrinolytic process (fibrin decomposition products could not be shown to be present in the serum of diabetic children). Alpha-2-macroglobulin was significantly higher and alpha-1-antitrypsin significantly lower in diabetic women than in controls. In the other groups of patients studied differences in these inhibitors from the appropriate control groups were not statistically significant.
The current study was conducted to investigate the effects of dietary chitosan-alginate-Fe(II) complex (CAFC) supplementation on carcass and meat qualities of pig m. longissimus during chiller ageing. One hundred and twenty-two LYD (Landrace×Yorkshire×Duroc) pigs were sampled from an industrial population. Seventy-four pigs (32 gilts and 42 barrows) were administered 3 ml of dietary supplementation of CAFC per day from 25 to 70 days of age, while the remaining 48 pigs (20 gilts and 28 barrows) were fed the same commercial feeding regime without the supplementation. For assessing the dietary effects on pH, objective meat color, cooking loss, water-holding capacity (WHC), thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), volatile basic nitrogen (VBN) and fatty acid composition during ageing, 20 barrows (10 of each treatment) were randomly sampled, and aged for 3, 7, 12, 16, 20 and 25 days in a 1°C chiller. The results showed that CAFC-fed pigs required approximately 10 fewer feeding days than the control group. Furthermore, the treatment resulted in greatly higher carcass grade whereby the grade A was increased by approximately 35% and 7% for gilts and barrows, respectively. The treatment had no significant effect (p>0.05) on pH, meat color and WHC during ageing. On the other hand, the CAFC-fed pigs showed significantly (p<0.05) lower TBARS values from 20 days of storage. In addition, the sum of unsaturated fatty acids for the treated group was significantly (p<0.05) higher than that for the control group after the storage time. This implied that CAFC supplementation could reduce the formation of free radicals in fatty acids (i.e., lipid oxidation). The treatment also significantly (p<0.05) retarded VBN formation during ageing, indicating a significant reduction in protein degradation. However, as there was no difference in pH between the two groups, the result raised a possibility that antibacterial activity of the CAFC alone could cause reduction in the formation of TBARS and VBN. In this regard, although the treatment effectively slowed down the formation of TBARS and TBA during chiller ageing, it was not resolved whether that was associated with the direct effect of the antioxidant function of chitosan and/or alginate, or a consequence of their antibacterial functions.
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