Alzheimer's disease is a common and devastating disease for which there is no readily available biomarker to aid diagnosis or to monitor disease progression. Biomarkers have been sought in CSF but no previous study has used two-dimensional gel electrophoresis coupled with mass spectrometry to seek biomarkers in peripheral tissue. We performed a case-control study of plasma using this proteomics approach to identify proteins that differ in the disease state relative to aged controls. For discovery-phase proteomics analysis, 50 people with Alzheimer's dementia were recruited through secondary services and 50 normal elderly controls through primary care. For validation purposes a total of 511 subjects with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases and normal elderly controls were examined. Image analysis of the protein distribution of the gels alone identifies disease cases with 56% sensitivity and 80% specificity. Mass spectrometric analysis of the changes observed in two-dimensional electrophoresis identified a number of proteins previously implicated in the disease pathology, including complement factor H (CFH) precursor and alpha-2-macroglobulin (alpha-2M). Using semi-quantitative immunoblotting, the elevation of CFH and alpha-2M was shown to be specific for Alzheimer's disease and to correlate with disease severity although alternative assays would be necessary to improve sensitivity and specificity. These findings suggest that blood may be a rich source for biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease and that CFH, together with other proteins such as alpha-2M may be a specific markers of this illness.

INTRODUCTION Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is relatively new tool in treatment of chronic heart failure (HF), especially in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) with the left bundle branch block (LBBB). OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to assess the success of CRT in treatment of severe HF and the role of echocardiography in the evaluation of results of such therapy. METHOD The group consisted of 19 patients, 13 males and 6 females, mean age 58.0 +/- 8.22 years (47-65 years) with CRT applied for DCM, severe HF (NYHA III-IV), LBBB and ejection fraction (EF) <35%. The mean follow up was 17 months (6.5-30). Standard color Doppler echocardiography examination was performed in all patients before and after CRT. The parameters of systolic and diastolic left ventricular function, mitral insufficiency and the right ventricular pressure were evaluated. RESULTS Following the CRT, statistically significant improvement of the end-systolic LV dimension, cardiac output, cardiac index, myocardial performance index (p < 0.01) and stroke index (p < 0.05) was recorded. The mean value of EFLV was increased by 10% and LV fractional shortening improved by 6% in 10/16 (62%) patients. CRT resulted in decreased MR (p < 0.01), prolonged LV diastolic filling time (p < 0.02) and reduced RV pressure (p < 0.05). Interventricular mechanical delay was shortened by 28% (18 msec) CONCLUSION CRT has an important role in improvement of LV function and correction of ventricular asynchrony. The echocardiography is a useful tool for evaluation of HF treatment with CRT.

This book investigates the phenomenon that has become a landmark of the past century, the phenomenon of collective evil, in an attempt to construct an explanatory conceptual framework that would acknowledge the heterogeneity of this occurrence and not reduce it to a singular cause. The underlying philosophical assumption of this inquiry is acknowledgement to evil, individual as well as collective, of positive ontological status, in contrast to the mainly theologically-grounded denial of ontological substance to evil, the understanding of evil as an absence or lack of good rather than a presence itself (p. 59). The main argument thus relates evil to the existential, arguably ontological, vulnerability of human beings and the subject’s dependence upon others, which can, however, be encouraged, exploited, manipulated and instrumentalized in specific socio-historical circumstances for the purposes of collective evildoing. The book is divided into three main parts or levels. The first level, composed of the first three chapters, is Vetlesen’s conceptual inquiry into three different theories of evil: sociological (Zygmunt Bauman), philosophical (Hannah Arendt) and psychological (Fred Alford). In the second level, Vetlesen brings into this conceptual discussion a recent example of collective evildoing – atrocities committed in Bosnia in the first half of the 1990s. Through the conceptual investigation and historical analysis, Vetlesen finally arrives at the normative theory of human agency in the third level of the book. In Chapter 1, Vetlesen engages in a critical reading of Bauman’s theory of collective evildoing as an offspring of the dehumanizing project of modernity. He finds Bauman’s main argument on evil, as a consequence of distantiation of one group from the other, through which the victim-group is deprived of humanness and hence rendered unworthy of humane treatment, problematic when confronted with historical evidence from the Holocaust on which it is based but also through the more recent cases of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, when proximity never did generate ethical impulse in the perpetrators but was in fact what aggravated the atrocities. The distantiation argument is grounded in Bauman’s thesis that collective evil is a product of modernity – sterile, inhuman, highly organized as these crimes were, they are seen by Bauman as flowing directly out of modern bureaucratic structures and dominant instrumental rationality. Vetlesen finds this debatable on historical account, as the evidence suggests that ‘the Nazi regime parasitically and progressively transformed and (even) revolutionized the institutional apparatus it had inherited from the democratic Weimar era’ (p. 44). Pursuing it further, however, Vetlesen demonstrates that the analysis is problematic also conceptually since Bauman presumes the equation of totalitarian regimes and modern society, neglecting the important pluralistic tendencies in modernity. The outcome is, Vetlesen concludes, a highly depsychologized sociological account of collective evil as a product of ideologized institutional structures which ignores the fact European Journal of Social Theory 9(4): 559–563