Growth, History, or Institutions? What Explains State Fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa We explore the determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for a wide range of economic, demographic, geographic and istitutional regressors, we find that institutions, and in particular the civil liberties index and the number of revolutions, are the main determinants of fragility, even...

BACKGROUND The Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS) Index is associated with all-cause mortality in individuals infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It is also associated with markers of inflammation and may thus reflect physiologic frailty. This analysis explores the association between physiologic frailty, as assessed by the VACS Index, and fragility fracture. METHODS HIV-infecte...

Specialized topoisomerases solve the topological constraints arising when replication forks encounter transcription. We have investigated the contribution of Top2 in S phase transcription. Specifically in S phase, Top2 binds intergenic regions close to transcribed genes. The Top2-bound loci exhibit low nucleosome density and accumulate gammaH2A when Top2 is defective. These intergenic loci asso...

Background: People occasionally undergo medical diagnostic X-ray examinations and expose their red blood cells to radiation. Radiation that is generated from medical diagnostic X-ray machines is widely used in medical diagnoses. One of the important parameters is kilo-voltage (kV) that is applied across the X-ray tube in medical diagnostic X-ray machines. Kilo-voltage influences the radiation d...

Using data for more than 160 countries in the period 1997–2010, we explore the impact of large-scale natural disasters on the distance-to-default of commercial banks. The financial consequences of natural catastrophes may stress and threaten the existence of a bank by adversely affecting their solvency. After extensive testing for the sensitivity of the results, our main findings suggest that n...

The consolidated way of diagnosing and treating osteoporosis in order to prevent fragility fractures has recently been questioned by some papers, which complained of overdiagnosis and consequent overtreatment of this pathology with underestimating other causes of the fragility fractures, like falls. A new clinical approach is proposed for identifying the subgroup of patients prone to fragility ...