Figure 1.

Effect of shock severity on liver apoptosis. Rats were subjected to sham protocol (S) or to trauma/HS protocol with increasing duration of shock as indicated followed by resuscitation. The livers were harvested 60 minutes after the start of resuscitation. Nucleosome levels were measured in protein extracts of frozen sections of each liver and the results plotted after correction for total protein, as a function of the duration of the hypotensive period for each animal. Curve fitting was performed and the best-fitting curve shown; nucleosome levels increased exponentially with duration of hypotension (Pearson correlation coefficient=0.879, p<0.001).