INTRODUCTION Considering a lack of efficacy data in patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (eRA) presenting without classical markers of poor prognosis, we compared methotrexate (MTX) with or without step-down glucocorticoids in the CareRA trial. METHODS Disease-modifying antirheumatic drug-naïve patients with eRA were stratified into a low-risk group based on prognostic markers that includ...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare ventilation parameters during mechanical ventilation using Laryngeal Mask Airway (LMA), Laryngeal Tube (LT), and Peri-Laryngeal Airway Cobra (PLA). METHODS In a prospective, randomised controlled trial, 90 patients undergoing general anaesthesia for elective surgery were divided into three subgroups. The settings of controlled ventilation were: ...

Mucuna pruriens Linn. (velvet bean) has been used by native Nigerians as a prophylactic for snakebite. Rats pretreated with M. pruriens seed extract (MPE) have been shown to protect against the lethal and cardiovascular depressant effects of Naja sputatrix (Javan spitting cobra) venoms, and the protective effect involved immunological neutralization of the venom toxins. To investigate further t...

In FSE 2014, an authenticated encryption mode COBRA [4], based on pseudorandom permutation (PRP) blockcipher, and POET [3], based on Almost XOR-Universal (AXU) hash and strong pseudorandom permutation (SPRP), were proposed. Few weeks later, COBRA mode and a simple variant of the original proposal of POET (due to a forging attack [13] on the original proposal) with AES as an underlying blockciph...

Blogs and RSS feeds are becoming increasingly popular. The blogging site LiveJournal has over 11 million user accounts, and according to one report, over 1.6 million postings are made to blogs every day. The “Blogosphere” is a new hotbed of Internet-based media that represents a shift from mostly static content to dynamic, continuously-updated discussions. The problem is that finding and tracki...