Measuring and monitoring socioeconomic health inequalities are critical for understanding the impact of policy decisions. However, the measurement of health inequality is far from value neutral, and one can easily present the measure that best supports one's chosen conclusion or selectively exclude measures. Improving people's understanding of the often implicit value judgments is therefore import

Context/Objective: Locally aggressive pituitary tumors (LAPT) and pituitary carcinomas respond poorly to conventional therapy and cytotoxic drugs. Temozolomide (TMZ) is an oral alkylating drug with good tolerability, approved for treatment of malignant gliomas. The experience of its use in pituitary tumors is limited. Design/Setting: We report on 24 patients with aggressive pituitary tumors (16 LA

Codifications of human rights are widely understood as politically established instruments for evaluating human life. The call for such an apparatus emerges as a response to the age-old problem of social organization, constituting – in extension – a means by which to cope with the overall problem of survival. However, evaluating life is inherently problematic. It is problematic as it presupposes a

Objective. To investigate the associations of index finger-to-ring finger (2D:4D) length ratio with radiographic knee and hand osteoarthritis (OA), previous knee injury, and meniscal lesions in the general population. Methods. We measured the length of the right second and fourth phalangeal and metacarpal bones on hand radiographs from 1,020 randomly recruited subjects (ages 51-92 years). Knee rad

Introduction: Basal-like breast cancers (BL-BCa) have the worst prognosis of all subgroups of this disease. Hyaluronan (HA) and the HA receptor CD44 have a long-standing association with cell invasion and metastasis of breast cancer. The purpose of this study was to establish the relation of CD44 to BL-BCa and to characterize how HA/CD44 signaling promotes a protease-dependent invasion of breast c

The Nordic Myeloma Study Group conducted an open randomized trial to compare bortezomib as consolidation therapy given after high-dose therapy and autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) with no consolidation in bortezomib-naive patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma. Overall, 370 patients were centrally randomly assigned 3 months after ASCT to receive 20 doses of bortezomib given duri

Abstract Objective: This cross-sectional study aimed at investigating the relationship between the return to work potential, according to the Worker Role Interview (WRI) assessment, and clinical characteristics and level of empowerment and occupational engagement among persons with severe mental illness who express their own interest in working. Methods: 120 participants entered the study. The WRI

Isoprene is emitted from many terrestrial plants at high rates, accounting for an estimated 1/3 of annual global volatile organic compound emissions from all anthropogenic and biogenic sources combined. Through rapid photooxidation reactions in the atmosphere, isoprene is converted to a variety of oxidized hydrocarbons, providing higher order reactants for the production of organic nitrates and tr

In patients unsuitable for standard, infrarenal endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) due to an inadequate or inappropriate infrarenal neck, various options have been proposed to achieve a suitable endovascular repair. The primary objective in this setting is to move the endograft sealing zone to a healthier, more cranial segment of the aorta. The need for a solution for problematic proximal neck an

Several philosophers have maintained in recent years that the endurance/perdurance debate is merely verbal: these prima facie distinct theories of objects’ persistence are in fact metaphysically equivalent, they claim. The present paper challenges this view. Three proposed translation schemes (those set forth by Miller 2005; McCall and Lowe 2006; Hirsch 2009) are examined; all are shown to be faul

While children of parents with criminal behavior (CB) are at increased risk for CB, we have limited knowledge about the causes of this cross-generational transmission.

The aim of this study was to determine the clinical conditions of patients with haemophilia within Europe as recommended by the European Commission. In this multicentre, cross-sectional, ambispective study, conducted within 21 European countries patients' clinical data were collected, amongst others haemophilia type, severity, treatment pattern, use of factor products, bleeding, orthopaedic joint

We report on a new form of III-IV compound semiconductor nanostructures growing epitaxially as vertical V-shaped nanomembranes on Si(001) and study their light-scattering properties. Precise position control of the InAs nanostructures in regular arrays is demonstrated by bottom-up synthesis using molecular beam epitaxy in nanoscale apertures on a SiO2 mask. The InAs V-shaped nanomembranes are foun

Incorporation of nanoscale catalysts into porous structures of SOFC has been proven highly successful in increasing active sites and catalyst utilization. In addition, electrochemical reactions as well as heat transfer process in porous anode are strongly affected by complex porous structures. It is believed that study of anode thermal properties are critical for SOFC design and operation. In this

Programmable shading provides artistic control over materials and geometry, but the black box nature of shaders makes some rendering optimizations difficult to apply. In many cases, it is desirable to compute bounds of shaders in order to speed up rendering. A bounding shader can be automatically derived from the original shader by a compiler using interval analysis, but creating optimized interva

We report a Rashba spin splitting of a two-dimensional electron gas in the topological insulator Bi2Se3 from angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. We further demonstrate its electrostatic control, and show that spin splittings can be achieved which are at least an order-of-magnitude larger than in other semiconductors. Together these results show promise for the miniaturization of spintronic