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INTRODUCTION: Whether low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with worse rheumatoid arthritis (RA) outcomes in countries with general tax-financed healthcare systems (such as Sweden) remains to be elucidated. Our aim was to investigate the influence of educational background (achieving university/college degree (high) or not (low)) on the outcomes of early RA, in terms of disease activity (DA
Reduced fibrinolytic capacity due to increased plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) activity in plasma is a common finding in patients with coronary heart disease or venous thromboembolism, although its clinical significance is debated. Recently, a dimorphism in the PAI-1 promoter (4G-5G) has been reported and homozygosity for the 4G allele is associated with increased transcription and highe
Air pollution causes premature mortality and morbidity globally, but these adverse health effects occur over proportionately in low-and middle-income countries. Lack of both air pollution data and knowledge of its spatial distribution in African countries have been suggested to lead to an underestimation of health effects from air pollution. This study aims to measure nitrogen oxides (NOx), as wel
Bayesian decision analysis is a useful method for risk management decisions, but is limited in its ability to consider severe uncertainty in knowledge, and value ambiguity in management objectives. We study the use of robust Bayesian decision analysis to handle problems where one or both of these issues arise. The robust Bayesian approach models severe uncertainty through bounds on probability dis
Two inherent challenges in the mechanistic interpretation of protease-deficient phenotypes are defining the specific substrate cleavages whose reduction generates the phenotypes and determining whether the phenotypes result from loss of substrate function, substrate accumulation, or loss of a function(s) embodied in the substrate fragments. Hence, recapitulation of a protease-deficient phenotype b
PICT (Pollution Induced Community Tolerance) to Cu is a useful and sensitive tool to assess the effects of Cu pollution in soils under laboratory conditions. However, in field situations, the absence of reference values, i.e. bacterial community tolerance to Cu baseline from non-polluted soils, make the method uncertain when we want to know if a soil is or is not polluted from a microbiological po
A search is presented for the production of the Standard Model Higgs boson in association with a high-energy photon. With a focus on the vector-boson fusion process and the dominant Higgs boson decay into b-quark pairs, the search benefits from a large reduction of multijet background compared to more inclusive searches. Results are reported from the analysis of 132 fb−1 of pp collision data at s
Mafic dykes and dyke swarms in continental settings provide information on the evolution of the subcontinental mantle and can be key elements in the reconstruction of paleo-geographic settings of now separated crustal terranes. This study focuses on the petrogenesis and geochronology of mafic dykes of the WNW (~125°) trending Bhanupratappur swarm in the central Bastar Craton, central India. Dykes
Diel vertical migration (DVM) is the most common behavioral phenomenon in zooplankton, and numerous studies have evaluated DVM under strong seasonality at higher latitudes. Yet, our understanding of the environmental drivers of DVM at low latitudes, where seasonal variation is less pronounced, remains limited. Therefore, we here examined patterns of vertical distribution in copepods in six subtrop
Background: Diseases of the bowel are not always displayed on conventional abdominal computed tomography (CT). The studied oral contrast agent aims to improve this. Purpose: To investigate whether the use of a novel oral contrast for abdominal CT enables the same diagnostic advantages as seen in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Material and Methods: Twenty-five consented volunteers drank up to 14
This contribution analyses the first decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the qualification and regulation of stand-alone software as medical devices. Referring to the facts of the case and the applicable EU regulatory framework, the Court specifically found that prescription support software may constitute a medical device. This would even be the case where the softwar
A search for the supersymmetric partners of quarks and gluons (squarks and gluinos) in final states containing jets and missing transverse momentum, but no electrons or muons, is presented. The data used in this search were recorded by the ATLAS experiment in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of s = 13 TeV during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated
We provide a natural resource explanation for the divergence of the Portuguese economy relative to other European countries before the Second World War. First, we demonstrate that a lack of domestic resources meant that Portugal experienced limited and unbalanced growth during the age of steam. Imports of coal were prohibitively expensive for inland areas. Coastal areas industrialized through stea
Purpose: To evaluate the association between a previously published 313 variant–based breast cancer (BC) polygenic risk score (PRS313) and contralateral breast cancer (CBC) risk, in BRCA1 and BRCA2 pathogenic variant heterozygotes. Methods: We included women of European ancestry with a prevalent first primary invasive BC (BRCA1 = 6,591 with 1,402 prevalent CBC cases; BRCA2 = 4,208 with 647 prevale
