Background: Adequate resource allocation is an important factor to ensure equity in health care. Previous reimbursement models have been based on age, gender and socioeconomic factors. An explanatory model based on individual need of primary health care (PHC) has not yet been used in Sweden to allocate resources. The aim of this study was to examine to what extent the ACG case-mix system could exp

Abstract is not available

Background/Objectives: Given the importance of nutrition therapy in diabetes management, we hypothesized that food intake differs between individuals with and without diabetes. We investigated this hypothesis in two large prospective studies including different countries and ethnic groups. Subjects/Methods: Study populations were the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Stu

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women living in Sweden and the second most common cancer in the rest of the world. The risk of developing breast cancer is modified by environment, lifestyle, genetics and a combination of these factors. In this thesis work the combination of lifestyle and genetic polymorphisms on tumor characteristics and early recurrence have been studied. Absence of th

Background and purpose - Postoperative muscle strength and component alignment are important factors affecting functional results after total knee arthroplasty (TKA). We are not aware of any studies that have investigated the relationship between them. We therefore investigated whether coronal malalignment of the mechanical axis and/or of individual implant components would affect knee muscle stre

Invasive species can displace natives, and thus identifying the traits that make aliens successful is crucial for predicting and preventing biodiversity loss. Pathogens may play an important role in the invasive process, facilitating colonization of their hosts in new continents and islands. According to the Novel Weapon Hypothesis, colonizers may out-compete local native species by bringing with

We examine how the generation and propagation of high-order harmonics in a partly ionized gas medium affect their strength and synchronization. The temporal properties of the resulting attosecond pulses generated in long gas targets can be significantly influenced by macroscopic effects, in particular by the intensity in the medium and the degree of ionization which control the dispersion. Under s

We add the Wess-Zumino-Witten term to the N = 3 massive nonlinear sigma model and study the leading logarithms in the anomalous sector. We obtain the leading logarithms to six loops for pi(0) -> gamma*gamma* and to five loops for y*pi pi pi. In addition we extend the earlier work on the mass and decay constant to six loops and the vector form factor to five loops. We present numerical results for

The soil salinity distribution and solute transport properties of three different soil types were investigated and compared within a project area in northeastern Egypt. For this purpose, dye tracer experiments and salinity sampling were carried out. The resulting salinity maps showed that the soil salinity in the cultivated western site of the project area is 8-10 times higher than that in the cul

Popular Abstract in Swedish Allergiska besvär från luftvägarna utgör ett stort och växande folkhälsoproblem. Det finns idag ingen bot mot dessa sjukdomar och de kan, om de inte behandlas, utgöra ett betydande hinder i vardagen. Även om dagens mediciner i de allra flesta fall kuperar symtomen väl, vet man, att många patienter är odiagnostiserade eller saknar behandling trots diagnos. Målet med behAllergic diseases, which constitute a global health problem, have been defined as one of the epidemics of the twenty-first century. Since there are no cures for allergic diseases today, the goal of treatment is to get the disease under control so that the patient can live a normal life with optimal chances of development. Patient-reported outcomes for control assessment have been a focus of attent

Monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) was identified in 3.2% of 21 463 residents of Olmsted County, Minnesota, 50 years of age or older. The risk of progression to multiple myeloma, Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, AL amyloidosis or a lymphoproliferative disorder is approximately 1% per year. Low-risk MGUS is characterized by having an M protein < 15 g/l, IgG type and a normal

In this paper, optimization problems arising in model predictive control (MPC) and in distributed MPC aresolved by applying a fast gradient method to the dual of the MPC optimization problem. Although the development of fast gradient methods has improved the convergence rate of gradient-based methods considerably, they are still sensitive to ill-conditioning of the problem data. Since similar opti

The Anselmian claim that God is that than which a greater cannot be thought in virtue of being ‘whatever it is better to be than not to be’ may be accused of incoherence or even unintelligibility. By proposing a non-relative but apparently meaningful analysis thereof, I attempt to defend it against such criticism. In particular, I argue that ‘whatever it is better to be than not to be’ can be plau

Background: We have previously demonstrated that elevated concentrations of tumour-associated trypsin inhibitor (TATI) in both tumour tissue (t-TATI) and in serum (s-TATI) are associated with a poor prognosis in colorectal cancer patients. It was also found that s-TATI concentrations were lower in patients with rectal cancer compared to patients with colon cancer. In this study, we investigated th

Popular Abstract in English A central requirement in the design of bridge, or any structure, is that they are safe and do not fail unexpectedly. To ensure that such occurrences are acceptably rare involves predicting the various ways in which the bridge can fail and ensuring that provisions are made to prevent or control these potential failure. In other words, the risks associated with failure shEngineering design, in concise terms, is what engineers do using what they know. It is the underlying decision making activity that determines what is to be built and how it should be built. An ever present requirement in engineering design is that the structure should be safe. While historical approaches to safety in design relied on experience and engineering judgment, modern approaches have rat

Childhood cancer five-year survival now exceeds 70-80%. Childhood exposure to radiation is a known thyroid carcinogen; however, data are limited for the evaluation of radiation dose-response at high doses, modifiers of the dose-response relationship and joint effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. To address these issues, we pooled two cohort and two nested case-control studies of childhood can

Effects of helix destabilization on lipid membrane interaction, liposome rupture, and bacterial killing was investigated for variants of the antimicrobial peptide GKE21 (GKEFKRIVQRIKDFLRNLVPR), an internal sequence of human cathelicidin LL-37, by ellipsometry, circular dichroism, fluorescence spectroscopy, and bacterial radial diffusion assay. GKE21 displayed moderate helix induction in buffer, wh

Background: The n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid, which are present in fish, are protective against myocardial infarction. However, fish also contains methylmercury, which influences the risk of myocardial infarction, possibly by generating oxidative stress. Methylmercury is metabolized by conjugation to glutathione, which facilitates elimination. Glut