Objective. To determine whether systemic elimination of macrophages by means of clodronate‐containing liposomes counteracts inflammation and joint destruction in rats with established adjuvant arthritis (AA). Methods. Rats with AA received a total of 2.7 mg of clodronate encapsulated in liposomes in 3 intravenous doses on days 10, 11, and 12 of arthritis. Phosphate buffered saline (PBS), PBS‐laden liposomes, or free clodronate were used as negative controls. Clinical, hematologic, and histopathologic signs of AA were monitored, and depletion of macrophages by clodronate‐liposomes was evaluated both in the synovial membrane (SM) and in organs of the mononuclear phagocyte system (MPS). Results. Clodronate‐laden liposomes led to significant, long‐term amelioration of the clinical signs of AA, a reduction in the erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and counteraction of joint destruction, not only immediately after treatment, but also for 2 weeks thereafter. Free clodronate induced moderate clinical improvement and a significant decrease in the ESR, but only during the late phase of AA. Drug‐free vesicles even aggravated the joint destruction. Clodronate‐laden liposomes did not induce significant depletion of resident macrophages in the SM, but rather, in the paracortical region of popliteal lymph nodes, in the liver, and in the marginal zone and periarteriolar lymphatic sheaths of the spleen. Conclusion. Clodronate‐laden liposomes induce long‐term amelioration of AA, even if administered for a brief period during the florid phase of the disease. The amelioration is paralleled by the elimination of macrophages in immunocompetent areas of the spleen and draining lymph nodes, but not locally in the SM. This suggests an influence of the treatment on the immunoregulatory rather than effector, functions of macrophages.

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Heart-Protecting Musk Pill (HMP) is a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that has been used for the prevention and treatment of coronary heart disease in clinic. The current study investigated the effect of HMP on the concentrations of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) and observed the relationship between level changes of inflammatory cytokines and ventricular remodeling in rats with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Animal models of AMI were made by coronary artery ligation in Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats. AMI rats showed increased levels of IL-6 and TNF-α. Treatment with HMP decreases IL-6 and TNF-α concentrations in rats with AMI. Histopathological and transmission electron microscopic findings were also essentially in agreement with biochemical findings. The results of our study revealed that inflammatory cytokines IL-6 and TNF-α induce cardiac remodeling in rats after AMI; HMP improves cardiac function and ameliorates ventricular remodeling by downregulating the expression of IL-6 and TNF-α and further suppressing the ultrastructural changes of myocardial cells.

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In this paper, we proposed a method to numerically determinate 3-dimensional thermal response due to electromagnetic exposure quickly and accurately. Due to the stability criterion the explicit finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method works fast only if the spatial step is not set very small. In this paper, the semi-implicit Crank-Nicholson method for time domain discretization with unconditional time stability is proposed, where the idea of fractional steps method was utilized in 3-dimension so that an efficient numerical implementation is obtained. Compared with the explicit FDTD, with similar numerical precision, the proposed method takes less than 1/200 of the execution time.