Mennesker eksponeres for en rekke miljøgifter gjennom diett og ved bruk av produkter som er ment til å forbedre hverdagen. Kartlegging av eksponering er viktig for å kunne iverksette tiltak som reduserer denne. Vi har undersøkt mengden perfluoroalkyl forbindelser i blodet til fødende kvinner bosatt i Sør Afrika, by beliggende i arktisk del av Russland og landsbygda i Usbekistan. Konklusjonen er at ...

Antibodies against human platelet antigen (HPA)-1a are the most common cause of fetal and neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia (FNAIT) in Caucasians, and is a break of the tolerance normally seen for the fetus in pregnant women. The initiation of immunization is suggested to be feto-maternal transfer of platelets during pregnancy and at delivery, and one of the consequences of anti-HPA-1a antibodies ...

Cluster headache has been claimed to be a chronobiological disorder because of its striking periodic occurrence. This suggests that the biological clock is involved in the pathophysiology of the disease, but few researchers have studied this in depth. In this thesis, we have studied several aspects of chronobiology in cluster headache patients. First, we assessed the periodicity of headache attacks, ...

Lungekreft er uten sammenligning den kreftsykdommen som tar flest liv i Norge og 6 personer dør i gjennomsnitt hver dag av sykdommen. De som blir oppdaget i et tidlig stadium kan opereres med mål om å bli kurert. Likevel dør nesten halvparten av de som blir operert av lungekreft og behovet for nye behandlingsalternativer er stort. Andersens funn viser at markører for lave surstoff nivåer og ...

The main goal of this work was to describe the prevalence of adventitious lung sounds (wheezes and crackles) in a general population. We obtained lung sound recordings from 4033 participants in the 7th survey of the Tromsø. We observed a crude prevalence of adventitious lung sounds in 28% of the participants; 18 % had wheezes, 13% had crackles. Age, female sex, self-reported asthma, and current ...

The atypical MAP kinases ERK3 and ERK4 are the main characters in this study. ERK3 and ERK4 were for long considered as orphan proteins without known upstream activators. However, in 2011 two studies had detected that group I p-21 protein activated kinase (PAKs) can constitutively phosphorylate ERK3 and ERK4 in their activation loop. The only well-characterized substrate for ERK3 and ERK4 at that ...

Patient harms, or adverse events which is the term used in this PhD thesis, is a global health problem. The Global Trigger Tool (GTT) is a widely used method to identify and measure adverse events (AEs). The method involves reviewers searching for triggers (situations) in randomly selected medical records and subsequently identifying AEs. However, the method is criticized due to the time used by ...

This thesis is based on four papers that have imaging techniques used in breast reconstruction as the common denominator. Each paper describes the results of a study. The purpose of the first three studies was to evaluate the use of dynamic infrared thermography (DIRT) as an imaging technique for perforator mapping in breast reconstruction with a deep inferior epigastric perforator (DIEP) flap. The ...

Oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSSCs) are aggressive tumors often associated with a low survival rate. The immune system influences the development of OSCCs, and the immune infiltrate surrounding the cancer cells is an indicator of the host’s anti-tumor response. The main aim of this thesis was to describe how the tumor microenvironment in OSCC is organized, and to determine whether different subsets ...

<p><i>Background:</i> Prostate cancer is a very common, but particularly heterogenic cancer form. Whilst some patients have a very aggressive course with a fatal outcome, the majority of patients have slow-growing disease with low risk of death or significant symptoms. Unfortunately, doctors do not possess sufficient prognostic tools, and there is a high risk of overtreatment with unnecessary ...