background evidence indicates that insulin resistance results in poor sustained viral response (svr) in patients with chronic hepatitis c (chc). metformin is an oral hypoglycemic agent which improves insulin resistance. methods we sought to determine if the addition of metformin to the treatment regimen could improve svr in treatment-naive chc patients in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-con...

Brucella endocarditis is an uncommon but not rare manifestation of brucellosis in our country. We report six adult patients aged 20 to 45 years. Two of our patients were female, and this is the first time that Brucella endocarditis was reported in adult females. In five cases, aortic valve replacement was performed in addition to combined antibiotic therapy. One of them died due to immedia...

In this study, various percentage of DEE was added to the optimum selected ethanol-diesel blend (D-E10) and optimized its blending ratio to overcome the poor ignition quality of ethanol when utilized in a single cylinder DI diesel engine. Some physicochemical properties of test fuels such as heating value, viscosity, and density and distillation profile were determined in accordance to the A...

OBJECTIVE to determine whether depression is an important and independent predictor of falls in community-dwelling older people living in Taiwan. DESIGN longitudinal study. SETTING five randomly selected villages from Tainan city, Taiwan. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS in total, 280 community-dwelling people not taking anti-depressant medication aged 65-91 years (mean age 74.9). Participants co...

Despite possessing the adequate purchase potential for the fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs), the poor are not reckoned as a viable market by the FMCG marketers and as a result, the purchase preferences of poor are largely unexplored for the concerned products. The present paper bridges the gap subsisting in the pertinent literature by exploring the purchase behavior of poor consumers in the r...

Vacuum.-By creating a vacuum the process of decalcification can be characterized as follows: Insoluble calciurn-salts+acid o-soluble calciumsalts+CO2. The carbon dioxide, rapidly extracted, will disturb the balance of the chemical equilibrium, and, according to Le Chatelier, result in an acceleration of the reaction. Waerhaug (1949), however, points out that there will be a more intensive conta...

conclusions participants’ experience highlighted the necessity of awareness about adverse side effects of otc drug use; such awareness can be achieved through various methods such as information dissemination and proper culture of drug use promoted by healthcare professionals to resolve the mentioned issues and improve, consolidate, and promote society’s level of knowledge and health. methods t...

TheMinkowski sum of two setsA,B ∈ IR, denotedA⊕B, is defined as {a+ b | a ∈ A, b ∈ B}. We describe an efficient and robust implementation for the construction of Minkowski sums of polygons in IR using the convolution of the polygon boundaries. This method allows for faster computation of the sum of non-convex polygons in comparison to the widely-used methods for Minkowski-sum computation that d...