Despite recent advancements in reproductive medicine, recurrent implantation failure and habitual abortion remain ongoing issues. One of the most important aspects of successful implantation is the intricate immune response and regulation necessary for the acceptance of the hemiallogenic embryo. The most numerous immune cells in the decidua are uterine natural killer cells (uNK). Studies suggest that changes in the uNK count and physiology may be responsible for the aforementioned pathological conditions. Thus, testing for uNK may provide valuable insights into their pathogenesis. The study compared Pipelle endometrial sampling with conventional curettage to find out whether the less invasive Pipelle method is a viable alternative of tissue collection. Tissue samples from 14 patients obtained by both methods were examined. The average size of tissue samples obtained with Pipelle was 17 mm2 , samples obtained with curettage had on average 34 mm2 . Using immunohistochemical visualization of CD56 (NK cells) and granzyme B antigens (serine protease-expressing activation state of NK cells), it was found that the average total count of CD56 / mm2 was 115 for Pipelle and 120 for curettage, respectively. The study also proved a correlation between granzyme B positivity and identification of NK cells clusters. The results indicated that Pipelle endometrial sampling seems a suitable method of tissue harvesting for the purpose of uNK cells examination. Pipelle endometrial sampling is safe, cost-effective and can be performed on an outpatient basis without the need of anesthesia or analgesia. Several issues remain yet to be solved: how to standardize the subsequent uNK testing, how to interpret the results and finally yet importantly, how to use this knowledge in personalized treatment protocols.
Let X be a completely regular Hausdorff space and, as usual, let C(X) denote the ring of real-valued continuous functions on X. The lattice of z-ideals of C(X) has been shown by Martínez and Zenk (2005) to be a frame. We show that the spectrum of this lattice is (homeomorphic to) βX precisely when X is a P-space. This we actually show to be true not only in spaces, but in locales as well. Recall that an ideal of a commutative ring is called a d-ideal if whenever two elements have the same annihilator and one of the elements belongs to the ideal, then so does the other. We characterize when the spectrum of the lattice of d-ideals of C(X) is the Stone-Čech compactification of the largest dense sublocale of the locale determined by X. It is precisely when the closure of every open set of X is the closure of some cozero-set of X.
The study stems from the author’s long-time interest in the history of the Czechoslovak foreign resistance during the Great War, particularly in Russia. As to its sources, it draws from a collection of published recollections of Czechoslovak legionnaires and their autobiographic novels and other texts of prose. The author attempts to reconstruct the picture of the return of Czechoslovak legions from Russia to their home country; due to the nature of his sources, however, his intention is not to convey an authentic experience of the return in the fi rst days and weeks, but rather to examine the construct created by the legionnaires’ memories and novels. In this respect, he makes use of, in particular, Anglo-Saxon historical literature dealing with similar topics. The key issues include how individuals or whole social groups were coping with the reality of the newborn republic, which was rather different from the visions of the home country they had been dreaming about while away. An important factor affecting their refl ections was also the required political nonaffi liation of organizations of legionnaires, as well as the criticism of the situation not just among the veterans, but in the entire society. The extent of the idealization of Russia, which was a fairly frequent phenomenon among them, was directly proportional to the disillusionment after their return, and was a mirror image of their previous idealization of home while they had been in Russia. In the author’s opinion, the topic of the return of Czechoslovak legions home and their life in their home country is far from exhausted; this is why the present study should be just a springboard to further broadly conceived research. and Přeložil Jiří Mareš
Suppose F ⊂ [0, 1] is closed. Is it true that the typical (in the sense of Baire category) function in C 1 [0, 1] is one-to-one on F? If dimBF < 1/2 we show that the answer to this question is yes, though we construct an F with dimB F = 1/2 for which the answer is no. If Cα is the middle-α Cantor set we prove that the answer is yes if and only if dim(Cα) ≤ 1/2. There are F’s with Hausdorff dimension one for which the answer is still yes. Some other related results are also presented.