Co-administration of N-Acetylcysteine and Acetaminophen Efficiently Blocks Acetaminophen Toxicity.

Preclinical Research Although acetaminophen (APAP) is an effective analgesic and anti-pyretic, APAP overdose is the most frequent cause of serious, often lethal, drug-induced hepatotoxicity. Administration of N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) within 8 hours of APAP overdose effectively mitigates APAP-induced hepatotoxicity. Thus, preventing APAP toxicity before it occurs by formulating APAP with NAC is logical and, as we show here in a mouse model, is effective in preventing APAP toxicity. Thus, toxic oral APAP doses sufficient to cause severe widespread liver damage do not cause significant damage when administered concurrently with equal amounts of NAC, that is, in the NAC-APAP treated animals, hepatic transaminases increase only marginally and liver architecture remains fully intact. Thus, we conclude that concomitant oral dosing with APAP and NAC can provide a convenient and effective way of preventing toxicity associated with large dosage of APAP. From a public health perspective, these findings support the concept that a co-formulation of APAP plus NAC is a viable over-the-counter (OTC) alternative to the current practice of providing APAP OTC and treating APAP toxicity if/when it occurs. In essence, our findings indicate that replacing the current OTC APAP with a safe and functional APAP/NAC formulation could prevent the accidental and intentional APAP toxicity that occurs today.

Ontogeny of gamma delta T cells in humans.

T cell receptors consist either of an alpha-chain combined with a beta-chain or a gamma-chain combined with a delta-chain. alphabeta T cells constitute the majority of T cells in human blood throughout life. Flow cytometric analyses presented in this study, which focus on the representation of the developmental (naive and memory) subsets of gammadelta T cells, show by function and phenotype that this lineage contains both naive and memory cells. In addition, we show that the representation of naive T cells is higher among alphabeta than gammadelta T cells in adults and that the low frequency of naive gammadelta T cells in adults reflects ontological differences between the two major gammadelta subsets, which are distinguished by expression of Vdelta1 vs Vdelta2 delta-chains. Vdelta1 cells, which mirror alphabeta cells with respect to naive representation, predominate during fetal and early life, but represent the minority of gammadelta cells in healthy adults. In contrast, Vdelta2 cells, which constitute the majority of adult gammadelta cells, show lower frequencies of naive cells than Vdelta1 early in life and show vanishingly small naive frequencies in adults. In essence, nearly all naive Vdelta2 cells disappear from blood by 1 year of life. Importantly, even in children less than 1 year old, most of the nonnaive Vdelta2 cells stain for perforin and produce IFN-gamma after short-term in vitro stimulation. This represents the earliest immunological maturation of any lymphocyte compartment in humans and most likely indicates the importance of these cells in controlling pathology due to common environmental challenges.