STUDY DESIGN Randomized trial and concurrent observational cohort study. OBJECTIVE To compare 4 year outcomes of surgery to nonoperative care for spinal stenosis. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Surgery for spinal stenosis has been shown to be more effective compared to nonoperative treatment over 2 years, but longer-term data have not been analyzed. METHODS Surgical candidates from 13 centers...

BACKGROUNDS/AIMS For patients with acute cholecystitis, conversion from laparoscopic cholecystectomy to open surgery is not uncommon due to possibilities of serious hemorrhage at the liver bed and bile duct injury. Recent studies reported successful laparoscopic subtotal cholecystectomy for acute cholecystitis. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy and feasibility of such an o...

The aim of this study was to identify clinical signs and symptoms of ovarian torsion (OT) in children and to develop a simple predictive score.A chart review of patients with acute adnexal pathologies treated at the University Children's Hospital Basel, Switzerland, between March 2006 and June 2015 was performed. Medical records were screened for demographic and clinical data. These included cl...

The effect of constant temperature on the germination rate and percentage of two cotton seed lots was determined using a thermogradient plate. A gradient of 10 oC to 40 oC was established across the plate so that temperatures changed 2 oC for each 5 cm increment in length, resulting in sixteen different temperature treatments. The optimal temperature zone for germination was 28 oC to 30 oC. As ...

Administration of oral contraceptive (OC) has been associated with body fluid retention and in high doses over a long period, promotes hypertension. This present investigation tests the hypothesis that the dietary calcium supplementation increases salt and water excretion in OC (norgestre/ethinylestradiol) treated 32 female albino rats randomly distributed into four (1-4) groups of 8 rats each:...

BACKGROUND Osteocalcin (OC) is produced by osteoblasts during bone formation, and circulating OC has been used in clinical investigations as a marker of bone metabolism. OC is excreted into urine by glomerular filtration and can be found in urine as midmolecule fragments. METHODS We developed and evaluated three immunoassays (U-MidOC, U-LongOC, and U-TotalOC) for the detection of various mole...

Conceptual models suggest that stability of organic carbon (OC) in soil depends on the source of plant litter, occlusion within aggregates, incorporation in organomineral complexes, and location within the soil profile. Density fractionation is a useful tool to study the relevance of OC stabilization in aggregates and in association with minerals, but it has rarely been applied to full soil pro...

The recent enthusiastic reception of the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project has significantly improved the general awareness of Open Courseware (OC). However, many other lesser known projects and resources can also be classified as OC. The OC movement can potentially provide a vast pool of resources to satisfy diverse needs of Computer Science (CS) educators. However, there are only limited discu...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Literature suggests a small increased risk of ischemic stroke with oral contraception (OC) use. We evaluated the association of stroke and OC use in women on the basis of whether they recalled being advised by a physician not to use OC or to discontinue OC use because of the presence of stroke risk modifiers, and whether such advice resulted in behavioral change. METHOD...

Apparent comorbidity between bipolar disorder (BD) and anxiety disorders is a common condition in psychiatry with higher prevalence rates for generalised anxiety disorder, social phobia, panic disorder. 1 Overlapping clinical criteria for many diagnoses, especially mood and anxiety disorders, produced by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) might lay behind these high...