Motion and twisting of magnetic particles ingested by alveolar macrophages in the human lung: effect of smoking and disease

Table 2 Results of the measurement of relaxation and of randomization energy, E_r

	Healthy	SAR	FIB	COB
N	17	15	12	19
A_{r_s}	0.76 +/- 0.04	0.79 +/- 0.03 (**)	0.79 +/- 0.07 (ns)	0.75 +/- 0.06 (ns)
T_{r_f}, s	20.6 +/- 7.0	14.5 +/- 3.8 (**)	14.2 +/- 5.6 (**)	16.9 +/- 5.4 (ns)
T_{r_s}	259 +/- 61	257 +/- 39 (ns)	221 +/- 47 (ns)	239 +/- 57 (ns)
T_{r_a}, s	66.1 +/- 16.3	57.5 +/- 9.1 (ns)	50.2 +/- 12.5 (**)	55.7 +/- 14.5 (*)
b1	0.61 +/- 0.05	0.63 +/- 0.02 (ns)	0.60 +/- 0.04 (ns)	0.59 +/- 0.07 (ns)
b5	0.23 +/- 0.07	0.24 +/- 0.04 (ns)	0.20 +/- 0.06 (ns)	0.21 +/- 0.07 (ns)
E_r, 10^-18 J	6.0 +/- 2.1	4.6 +/- 1.5 (*)	5.2 +/- 2.6 (ns)	5.4 +/- 3.1 (ns)

Data are presented as mean +/- SD; SAR: patients with sarcoidosis, IPF: patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, COB: patients with chronic obstructive bronchitis, N: number of subjects, parameters of the two-term exponential relaxation model: A_{r_s}: fraction of slow decay, T_{r_f}: time constant of fast decay, T_{r_s}: time constant of slow decay, T_{r_a}: time constant of initial decay; b1: normalized decay after 1 min.; b5: normalized decay after 5 min.; E_r: cell energy; ns: not significant; *: p < 0.05, **: p < 0.01).