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To avoid over-treatment of prostate cancer patients following screening for elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels, keeping patients on active surveillance has been suggested as an alternative to radical treatment. This means reoccurring visits for patients with low-grade cancer to monitor progression. The Prostate Cancer Research International Active Surveillance (PRIAS) study was initia

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to investigate neurological disorder as a risk factor for dislocation following arthroplasty for acute hip fractures. We also analysed medical and surgical adverse events (AE), readmission, reoperation, revision, and mortality as secondary outcomes. Methods: A longitudinal cohort study using prospectively collected and aggregated data from the Swedish Hi

The first great ruler to encourage the adoption of Western culture and technology throughout Siam was King Narai, who also had a passion for astronomy. He showed this by encouraging French and other Jesuit missionaries, some with astronomical interests and training, to settle in Siam from the early 1660s. One of these was Father Antoine Thomas, and he was the first European known to have carried o

This chapter will focus on the diagnostic work around sexual dysfunction in Parkinson's disease, especially laboratory tests and biomarkers. A number of methods to analyze if sexual dysfunction is caused by neural pathology, vascular dysfunction or other mechanisms are now available. Other methods can be used to differentiate between psychogenic/functional reasons behind sexual dysfunction and org

Scope: This European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases guideline provides evidence-based recommendations to support a selection of appropriate antibiotic use practices for patients seen in the emergency department (ED) and guidance for their implementation. The topics addressed in this guideline are (a) Do biomarkers or rapid pathogen tests improve antibiotic prescribing and

BACKGROUND: Public health policies and healthcare quality play a pivotal role on the health outcome level and disparities across sociodemographic groups. However, there is little evidence on their role on disparities in life expectancy (LE) and life disparity (LD) in low and middle income countries. The present study aimed to assess the contributions of avoidable mortality, as a measure of inter-s

The practice of using quantitative risk assessments (QRAs) for managing risks in land-use planning varies between countries. Some regulatory regimes are highly prescriptive in terms of explicit requirements on methodology, assumptions, modelling tools, input data, risk criteria, etc. Others require risk analyses to support decision-making without regulating the details. The present study seeks to

Rationale: Symptom relief is a key treatment goal in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, there are limited data available on the response to bronchodilator therapy in patients at low risk of exacerbations with different levels of symptom severity. This study compared treatment responses in patients with a range of symptom severities as indicated by baseline COPD as

Introduction: Developing a national assistive products list is an important part of an assistive technology policy and requires knowledge of total population need, and product costs and benefits; information is not always readily available in low-income countries. Our experience in Tajikistan of developing a national assistive products list provides guidance for others. Methods: Two hundred people

In the last decade, organoid technology has filled the gap generated by the poor accessibility and unique features of the human brain. Organoids present several advantages in comparison with two-dimensional culturing, since they recapitulate cytoarchitecture in space and functionality of the tissue. Therefore, they mimic the unique features of human brain better than animal models. Although signif

Background: Since long travel times to reach health facilities are associated with worse outcomes, geographic accessibility is one of the six core global surgery indicators; this corresponds to the second of the “Three Delays Framework,” namely “delay in reaching a health facility.” Most attempts to estimate this indicator have been based on geographical information systems (GIS) algorithms. The a

The central challenge tackled in this thesis is the development of an optical imaging approach capable of multidimensional image capture of dynamic samples. Many conventional optical imaging approaches, which can obtain dimensional information such as spectral, polarisation, or volumetric, to name a few, about samples either employ sequential image capture or parallelised detector arrangements. Du

The cholinergic hypothesis of geriatric memory dysfunction suggests that the learning and memory deficits representing the cardinal symptoms of dementia in the aged and in patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease may be attributable to a decline in the function of the cholinergic projection systems of the basal forebrain. Although many studies have addressed the issue of a causal relationship b

Skin is attractive for drug therapy because it offers an easily accessible route without first-pass metabolism. Transdermal drug delivery is also associated with high patient compliance and through the site of application, the drug delivery can be locally directed. However, to succeed with transdermal drug delivery it is often required to overcome the low permeability of the upper layer of the ski

Background and aims: Plant diversity – ecosystem processes relationships are essential to our understanding of ecosystem functioning. We aimed at disentangling the nature of such relationships in a mesotrophic grassland that was highly heterogeneous with regards to nutrient availability. Methods: Rather than targeting primary productivity, like most existing reports do, we focused our study on bel

In this article, model predictive control is used to dynamically optimize an investment portfolio and control drawdowns. The control is based on multi-period forecasts of the mean and covariance of financial returns from a multivariate hidden Markov model with time-varying parameters. There are computational advantages to using model predictive control when estimates of future returns are updated

We evaluated clinical significance of serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP)-IgM immune complexes, in comparison with free AFP, on the diagnosis of primary hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Serum levels of AFP-IgM immune complexes and free AFP were determined by the ELISA method and electrochemiluminescence, respectively, in 103 healthy controls, 74 patients suffering from primary HCC, 27 patients suffering