BACKGROUND The article by Feachem et al, published in the BMJ in 2002, claimed to show that, compared with the United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS), the Kaiser Permanente healthcare system in the United States (US) has similar healthcare costs per capita, and performance that is considerably better in certain respects. AIM To assess the accuracy of Feachem et al's comparison and ...

The social intelligence hypothesis posits that complex cognition and enlarged "executive brains" evolved in response to challenges that are associated with social complexity. This hypothesis has been well supported, but some recent data are inconsistent with its predictions. It is becoming increasingly clear that multiple selective agents, and non-selective constraints, must have acted to shape...

Dear Editor, The recent paper by Chintoh and colleagues (2008) reporting olanzapine-induced dysfunction in glucose metabolism, enhanced visceral fat and reduced locomotor activity in female rats was highly interesting as it illustrated olanzapine’s ability to replicate aspects of metabolic dysfunction in the rodent model in a similar manner to the human scenario. However, contrary to previous r...

Gene duplication provides much of the raw material from which functional diversity evolves. Two evolutionary mechanisms have been proposed that generate functional diversity: neofunctionalization, the de novo acquisition of function by one duplicate, and subfunctionalization, the partitioning of ancestral functions between gene duplicates. With protein interactions as a surrogate for protein fu...

a 10-year period attempts to answer several questions currently in dispute: the correlation of the patient's condition on admission with the mortality rate, the relation of the patient's age to prognosis, and the value of routine anticoagulant therapy. It presents the major statistical objections to the study by the Committee for the Evaluation of Anticoagulants of the American Heart Associatio...