High postprandial blood glucose levels are associated with increased mortality, cardiovascular events and development of diabetes in the general population. Interventions targeting postprandial glucose have been shown to prevent both cardiovascular events and diabetes. This study evaluates the efficacy and safety of a novel nutritional supplement targeting postprandial glucose excursions in non-di

Purpose: To investigate the global burden of sepsis in hospitalized adults by updating and expanding a systematic review and meta-analysis and to compare findings with recent Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) sepsis estimates. Methods: Thirteen electronic databases were searched for studies on population-level sepsis incidence defined according to clinical criteria (Sepsis-1, -2:

Hypothesis: The stability of colloidal dispersions in the presence of multivalent ions depends strongly on the electrostatic interactions between the suspended particles. Of particular interest are colloidal particles having dimensions in the nanometric range and with an anisotropic shape due to its high surface area per unit mass, for example clay, which has the key characteristic of a negatively

BACKGROUND: The four-kallikrein (4K) panel has been demonstrated to improve prediction of aggressive prostate cancer compared with prostate-specific antigen (PSA) among men with moderately elevated PSA levels. However, the development and testing of the 4K panel has been conducted primarily in White men, with limited data in African Americans and no studies in other racial and ethnic groups. METHO

BACKGROUND: Recent global changes have led to an increase in distribution of ticks towards higher elevation and latitude in Europe and livestock are at increasing risk of contracting tick-borne diseases, but psychological aspects of how this affects human well-being are rarely assessed. Departing from the theory on emotional appraisal coming from psychology, this study investigates which factors t

With the aim of supporting ecological analyses in butterflies, the third most species-rich superfamily of Lepidoptera, this paper presents the first time-calibrated phylogeny of all 496 extant butterfly species in Europe, including 18 very localised endemics for which no public DNA sequences had been available pre-viously. It is based on a concatenated alignment of the mitochondrial gene COI and u

We write with great concern in response to the recent systematic review and meta-analysis of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) by Uhre et al.1 Although the authors’ results consistently support the clinical efficacy of CBT for pediatric OCD, we expect that, much like ourselves, readers will be confused by the discordant and inappropriate conclusion

This paper investigates potential factors that control the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Spring Persistence Barrier (SPB) strength in two different ENSO regimes and apply it to explain the ENSO SPB strength modulation after the 21st century. In a damped, noise-driven model, the theoretical solution of SPB strength illustrates that a weaker ENSO growth rate strengthens SPB. In the self-sustai

In this study, two digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) systems were evaluated: Siemens Mammomat Inspiration TOMO (Siemens Healthineers, Erlangen, Germany) and GE Senographe Pristina (GE, Buc, France). Along with differences such as angular range and detectors type, the systems use different reconstruction algorithms. One was available for the GE system, based on iterative reconstruction (IR). Two a

Pituitary adenohypophyseal tumors are considered as benign and termed “adenomas”. However, many tumors are invasive and a proportion of these exhibit an “aggressive behavior” with premature death due to progressive growth. Only very rare (0.2%) tumors with metastases are considered malignant and termed “carcinomas”. Taking into account this variability in behavior and the oncological definition, p

We examine the favorable propagation (FP) behavior of a massive multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system equipped with a uniform linear array (ULA), horizontal uniform rectangular array (HURA) or uniform circular array (UCA) using a ray-based channel model with user cluster sharing. We demonstrate FP for these systems and provide analytical expressions for the mean-squared distan

Increasing landscape complexity can mitigate negative effects of agricultural intensification on biodiversity by offering resources complementary to those provided in arable fields. In particular, grazed semi-natural grasslands and woody elements support farmland birds, but little is known about their relative effects on bird diversity and community composition. In addition, the relative importanc

The standard approach to the evaluation of tremor in medical practice is subjective scoring. The objective of this study was to show that signal processing of physiological data, that are known to be altered by tremor in Parkinson's disease (PD), can quantify the postural dynamics and the effects of DBS. We measured postural control and its capacity to adapt to balance perturbations with a force p

The world has been afflicted heavily by the burden of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that overwhelmed health care systems and caused severe economic and educational deficits, in addition to anxiety among the public. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the mutual effects of belief that the pandemic was the result of a conspiracy on knowledge and anxiety levels among students at the Univ

Currently, in the era of big data and 5G communication technology, electromigration has become a serious reliability issue for the miniaturized solder joints used in microelectronic devices. Since the effective charge number (Z*) is considered as the driving force for electromigration, the lack of accurate experimental values for Z* poses severe challenges for the simulation-aided design of electr

BACKGROUND: A substantial proportion of cancer driver genes (CDG) are also cancer predisposition genes. However, the associations between genetic variants in lung CDGs and the susceptibility to lung cancer have rarely been investigated. METHODS: We selected expression-related single-nucleotide polymorphisms (eSNP) and nonsynonymous variants of lung CDGs, and tested their associations with lung can

Measures of risk concentration and their asymptotic behavior for portfolios with heavy-tailed risk factors is of interest in risk management. Second order regular variation is a structural assumption often imposed on such risk factors to study their convergence rates. In this paper, we provide the asymptotic rate of convergence of the measure of risk concentration for a portfolio of heavy-tailed r

A projectile Coulomb-excitation experiment was performed at the radioactive ion beam facility HIE-ISOLDE at CERN. The radioactive 140Nd and 142Sm ions were post accelerated to the energy of 4.62 MeV/A and impinged on a 1.45 mg/cm2-thin 208Pb target. The γ rays depopulating the Coulomb-excited states were recorded by the HPGe-array MINIBALL. The scattered charged particles were detected by a double