OBJECTIVE: To assess the frequency of comorbidities and metabolic risk factors at and prior to giant cell arteritis (GCA) diagnosis. METHODS: This is a retrospective case control study of patients with incident GCA between January 1, 2000, and December 31, 2019, in Olmsted County, Minnesota. Two age- and sex-matched controls were identified, and each assigned an index date corresponding to an inci

The idea that sex differences in selection drive the evolution of suppressed recombination between sex chromosomes is well developed in population genetics. Yet, despite a now classic body of theory, empirical evidence that sexually antagonistic selection drives the evolution of recombination arrest remains equivocal and alternative hypotheses underdeveloped. Here, we investigate whether the lengt

Gambling disorder is a major public health issue in many countries. It has been defined as a persistent, recurrent pattern of gambling and is associated with substantial distress or impairment, lower quality of life, and living with a plurality of psychiatric problems. Many people suffering from gambling disorder seek help in ways other than formal treatment seeking, including self-management stra

Vid Örebro universitet anordnades våren 2021 för andra gången konferensen Forskning om högre utbildning. Ett tema för konferensen var utveckling av högskolepedagogisk forskning. Högre utbildning publicerar nu tre texter på detta tema som en fördjupad diskussion. De kan läsas var för sig eller tillsammans. Den första utgörs av Sverre Wides inledningsanförande från konferensen. Efter inbjudan från rIn spring 2021, Örebro University arranged the second Swedish conference for Research in Higher Education. One of the themes for the conference was the development of higher education studies as a specific branch of this research. Our journal, Högre utbildning, now publishes three contributions linked to this theme as in-depths essays. These may be read separately or together. The first consists o

The Arctic temperature changes are closely linked to midlatitude weather variability and extreme events, which has attracted much attention in recent decades. Syntheses of proxy data from poleward of 60g gN indicate that there was asymmetric cooling of-1.54 and-0.61gg C for the Atlantic Arctic and the Pacific Arctic during the Holocene, respectively. We also present a similar consistent cooling pa

Reading out the parity degree of freedom of Majorana bound states is key to demonstrating their non-Abelian exchange properties. Here, we present a low-energy model describing localized edge states in a two-arm device. We study parity-to-charge conversion based on coupling the superconductor bound states to a quantum dot whose charge is read out by a sensor. The dynamics of the system, including t

Ultrafast (UF) dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE)-MRI offers the potential for a faster and, therefore, less expensive examination of breast lesions; however, there are no reports that have evaluated whether UF DCE-MRI can be used the same as conventional DCE-MRI in the reading of morphological information. This study evaluated the agreement in morphological information obtained from malignant breast

A recoil-beta-tagging experiment has been performed to study the excited T= 0 and T= 1 states in the odd–odd N= Z nucleus 94Ag, populated via the 40Ca(58Ni,1p3n)94Ag reaction. The experiment was conducted using the MARA recoil separator and JUROGAM3 array at the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyväskylä. Through correlating fast, high-energy beta decays at the MARA focal plane with pro

BackgroundDuring recent years FLASH radiotherapy (FLASH-RT) has shown promising results in radiation oncology, with the potential to spare normal tissue while maintaining the antitumor effects. The high speed of the FLASH-RT delivery increases the need for fast and precise motion monitoring to avoid underdosing the target. Surface guided radiotherapy (SGRT) uses surface imaging (SI) to render a 3D

Robust skin lesion segmentation of dermoscopic images is still very difficult. Recent methods often take the combinations of CNN and Transformer for feature abstraction and multi-scale features for further classification. Both types of combination in general rely on some forms of feature fusion. This paper considers these fusions from two novel points of view. For abstraction, Transformer is viewe

Introduction: The striped ambrosia beetle Trypodendron lineatum (Coleoptera, Curculionidae, Scolytinae) is a major forest pest in the Holarctic region. It uses an aggregation pheromone and host and non-host volatiles to locate suitable host trees, primarily stressed or dying conifer trees. The beetles bore into the xylem and inoculate spores of their obligate fungal mutualist Phialophoropsis ferru

Hexagonal YMnO3 is a prototype antiferromagnet which exhibits multiferroic behavior with the ferroelectric and magnetic transitions occurring at different temperatures. We observe an out-of-plane canting of the Mn3+ magnetic moments using resonant x-ray diffraction (RXD) in a single crystal of this material. These canted moments result in the symmetry-forbidden (0,0,1) magnetic Bragg reflection, w

Purpose: Tau pathology is associated with concurrent atrophy and decreased cerebral blood flow (CBF) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but less is known about their temporal relationships. Our aim was therefore to investigate the association of concurrent and longitudinal tau PET with longitudinal changes in atrophy and relative CBF. Methods: We included 61 individuals from the Amsterdam Dementia Cohor

The evolution of separate sexes from hermaphroditism is thought to have occurred independently many times, and may be linked to the evolution of sex chromosomes. Even though we have a good understanding of the theoretical steps in the evolution of sex chromosomes from a hermaphrodite ancestor, the initial stages are still hard to study in animals because many well-studied animal sex chromosome sys

Background: Advances in sports medicine, rehabilitation applications and diagnostics of neuromuscular disorders are based on the analysis of skeletal muscle contractions. Recently, medical imaging techniques have transformed the study of muscle contractions, by allowing identification of individual motor units’ activity, within the whole studied muscle. However, appropriate image-based simulation

The phosphoinositide 3-kinases (PI3Ks) are a family of lipid kinases central to regulating a wide range of important intracellular processes. Despite the vast knowledge around class I PI3Ks, the class II PI3Ks have been neglected, seemingly only due to the chronology of their discovery. Here we focus on the cellular functions of the three class II PI3K isoforms, PI3KC2α, PI3KC2β, and PI3KC2γ, in d

We consider general prepare-and-measure scenarios in which Alice can transmit qubit states to Bob, who can perform general measurements in the form of positive operator-valued measures (POVMs). We show that the statistics obtained in any such quantum protocol can be simulated by the purely classical means of shared randomness and two bits of communication. Furthermore, we prove that two bits of co

The electrochemical growth of Au nanowires in a template of nanoporous anodic aluminum oxide was investigated in situ by means of grazing-incidence transmission small- and wide-angle x-ray scattering (GTSAXS and GTWAXS), x-ray fluorescence (XRF), and two-dimensional surface optical reflectance. The XRF and the overall intensity of the GTWAXS patterns as a function of time were used to monitor the