Because of the limited clinical consequences of the “diagnosis” of GS, the clinicians may not always add this term to their patients’ case records, leading to underdiagnosis. We need to consider the likely impact of this phenomenon on the study results. A nonselective failure to diagnosis GS

would merely reduce the power of the study, making it harder to detect a difference between “cases” and “controls”; this is not a consideration in the current study since the authors did find a difference between the two groups. Of greater concern is a possibility of selective assignment of diagnosis of “GS” in persons who were healthier. A physician VX-809 clinical trial encountering a patient in whom no other diagnosis

has been reached may be more likely to add the diagnosis of GS to the electronic records than for a patient in whom another diagnosis has been made. The resultant selection bias would be expected to result in unmatched groups, with the GS cases being healthier and with a lower all-cause death rate. Given the structure of the database used, it is difficult to exclude this possibility. If the association between GS and overall death rate were indeed true, what could be the underlying mechanisms? Given our current understanding about bilirubin, it may be reasonable to suspect the involvement of pathways related to free radicals and oxidative stress. A free radical is an atom, ion, or molecule with unpaired valence electrons. These particles are Selleckchem LY2109761 inherently unstable, and try to attain stability by reacting with other molecules. Biological systems contain several molecules such as superoxide ions, hydroxyl and hydroperoxyl radicals, hydrogen peroxide, pernitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, peroxynitrite, and

ozone, which contain oxygen molecules and act as free radicals, and are collectively referred to as reactive oxygen species. The reactive oxygen species can induce oxidative injury in body tissues by interaction with various intracellular biomolecules. The body cells are able to counteract these oxidative radicals with an array of natural antioxidant systems, such as glutathione, superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase, catalase, vitamins C and E, and medchemexpress beta-carotene. An imbalance between the pro-oxidant and antioxidant activities, known as oxidative stress, is widely implicated in the pathogenesis of ageing, diabetes mellitus, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, reperfusion injury, oncogenesis, and age-related neurodegeneration. Bilirubin is the breakdown product of heme. Heme is oxidized by heme oxygenase enzyme into biliverdin, a nontoxic substance, which is in turn reduced by biliverdin reductase into bilirubin. Though both bilirubin and biliverdin possess antioxidant properties, bilirubin is at least three times more potent in this regard.