OBJECTIVES We sought to investigate the association between visceral adipose tissue (VAT) with the presence, extent, and characteristics of noncalcified coronary plaques (NCPs) using 64-slice computed tomography angiography (CTA). BACKGROUND Although visceral adiposity is associated with cardiovascular events, its association with NCP burden and vulnerability is not well known. METHODS The ...

For a broad class of multi-level models, there exist two well-known competing parameterizations, the centered parametrization (CP) and the non-centered parametrization (NCP), for effective MCMC implementation. Much literature has been devoted to the questions of when to use which and how to compromise between them via partial CP/NCP. This paper introduces an alternative strategy for boosting MC...

Climate change impacts social-ecological systems in mountainous areas by increasing certain natural disasters and changing nature’s contributions to people (NCP). Nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly implemented help local communities adapt climatic hazards. However, the relevance of their location relation those hazards NCP has hardly been addressed. In PORTAL (Pathways Transformation...

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Cancer is a significant public health problem in every country. The World Health Organiza...

Annals of Chemical Science Research Progressive Indoor Air Quality Management Using Nanocomposites Derived Filtration Media Ayesha Kausar1,2,3*, Ishaq Ahmad1,2,3, Zhu Tianle4 and Eisa MH5 1NPU-NCP joint international research center on Advanced Nanomaterials Defects engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China 2UNESCO-UNISA Africa Chair in Nano-sciences/Nanotechnology, iThemba LABS...

BACKGROUND Because the effects of cricoid pressure (CP) on BIS values have not been evaluated, this prospective study was designed to assess the BIS values after application of CP in adult patients during the routine induction of general anesthesia. METHODS We randomly allocated 70 patients (ASA-I) aged 18-64 years, listed for elective surgery into two groups of cricoid (CP) and non-cricoid (...

The Mediterranean Sea is a vulnerable region for climate change, warming at higher rates compare to the global ocean. Warming leads to increased stratification of the water column and enhanced the oligotrophic nature of the Mediterranean Sea. The oligotrophic waters are already highly transparent, however, exposure of Mediterranean plankton to ultraviolet radiation (UV-B and UV-A) may increase ...

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate some kinds of nonlinear complementarity problems (NCP). For the structured tensors, such as, symmetric positive definite tensors and copositive tensors, we derive the existence theorems on a solution of these kinds of nonlinear complementarity problems. We prove that a unique solution of the NCP exists under the condition of diagonalizable tensors.

Naja atra subsp. atra cardiotoxin 1 (CTX-1), produced by Chinese cobra snakes, belonging to Elapidae family, is included in the three-finger toxin family and exerts high cytotoxicity and antimicrobial activity too. Using as template mainly the tip and the subsequent β-strand of the first "finger" of this toxin, different sequences of 20 amino acids linear peptides have been designed in order to...