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the abstract of medical paper

752 views. 2010-4-19 23:44 |

An abstract should be a brief, comprehensive summary of the contents of a document; it allows the reader to survey the contents of the document quickly and decide whether to continue reading.

The frequently used abstracts can be divided into “traditional” and “structured”. The former are short blocks of text which sum up the most important information from an article following the natural sequence of the different parts of the article.

The information of Traditional abstracts is not divided up into separate sections.eg:

Abstract Previous studies in our lab have identified pre-B-cell colony enhancing factor (PBEF) as a novel biomarker in acute lung injury. This study continues to elucidate the underlying molecular mechanism of PBEF in the pathogenesis of acute lung injury in pulmonary cell culture models. Our results revealed that IL-1βinduced PBEF expression in pulmonary vascular endothelial cells at the transcriptional level and a -1535 Tvariant in the human PBEF gene promoter significantly attenuated its binding to an IL-1β-induced unknown transcription factor. This may underlie the reduced expression of PBEF and thus the lower susceptibility to acute lung injury in-1535T carriers. Furthermore, overexpression of PBEF significantly augmented IL-8 secretion and mRNA expression by more than 6-fold and 2-fold in A549 cells and HPAEC, respectively. It also significantly augmented IL-1β-mediated cell permeability by 44% in A549 cells and 65% in endothelial cells. The knockdown of PBEF

expression significantly inhibited IL-1β-stimulated IL-8 secretion and mRNA level by 60% and 70%, respectively, and the knockdown of PBEF expression also significantly attenuated IL-1β-induced cell permeability by 29% in epithelial cells and 24% in endothelial cells. PBEF expression also affected the expression of two other inflammatory cytokines (IL-16 and CCR3 genes). These results suggest that PBEF is critically involved in pulmonary vascular and epithelial inflammation and permeability, which are hallmark features in the pathogenesis of acute lung injury. This study lends further support to our finding that PBEF is a potential new target in acute lung injury.

The structured abstracts are practically the same as traditional ones but with the difference that the text is divided into separate sections.eg:

Objective: Epicardial and abdominal adipose tissues have recently been demonstrated to play inflammatory roles in coronary atherosclerosis. We sought to compare tissue adipocytokine levels of these two anatomically distinct adipose stores in patients with and without coronary artery diseases (CAD).

Design: Samples of abdominal and epicardial fat tissues were harvested to detect the levels of adipocytokines and proinflammatory mediators.

Subjects: Forty-six patients with CAD who underwent coronary artery bypass surgery and 12 non-CAD control subjects who underwent other types of open-heart surgery.

Measurements: Tissue levels of adipocytokines (adiponectin, leptin and visfatin) and proinflammatory mediators (tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a) and interleukin-6 (IL-6)) were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.

Results: Tissue levels of TNF-a, IL-6, leptin and visfatin were significantly higher in CAD patients relative to control subjects. In addition, significantly higher tissue levels of these four cytokines from abdominal fat depots were found compared to those from epicardial fat in CAD patients. Conversely, in comparison with control subjects, tissue levels of adiponectin were significantly reduced in CAD patients with a significantly lower tissue levels of abdominal than epicardial fat depots demonstrated.

Conclusion: Abdominal adiposity may play more significant role than epicardial fat in the pathogenesis of coronary atherosclerosis.