PREFACE Health Services Research & Development Service's (HSR&D) Evidence-based Synthesis Program (ESP) was established to provide timely and accurate syntheses of targeted healthcare topics of particular importance to Veterans Affairs (VA) managers and policymakers, as they work to improve the health and healthcare of Veterans. The ESP disseminates these reports throughout the VA. HSR&D provid...

BACKGROUND The human endometrium undergoes cyclical regeneration throughout a woman's reproductive life. Ectopic implantation of endometrial cells through retrograde menstruation gives rise to endometriotic lesions which affect approximately 10% of reproductive-aged women. The high regenerative capacity of the human endometrium at eutopic and ectopic sites suggests the existence of stem/progeni...

As cancer incidence varies according to age, it is important to rule out differences in age structures in any comparison. A common way of adjusting for these differences is using direct age standardization, which applies age-specific weights from a standard population. Eurostat has recently introduced a revised European standard population (RESP). The effect of using the new standard, in compar...

International tourism and its related businesses have considerably increased recently. Due to this expansion, tourism employees must be able to communicate appropriately, and effective ESP programs need to be administered accordingly. Many studies have been conducted on current ESP courses for tourism; however, major problems still remain in designing ESP courses to satisfy L2 learners’ needs, ...

BACKGROUND Eggs deposited in the liver of the mammalian host by the blood fluke parasite, Schistosoma mansoni, normally drive a T-helper-2 (Th2)-mediated granulomatous response in immune-competent mice. By contrast, in mice deprived of T-cells and incapable of producing granulomata, egg-secreted proteins (ESP) induce acute hepatic injury and death. Previous work has shown that one such ESP, the...

We have used differential RNA-seq (dRNA-seq) to characterise the transcriptomic architecture of S. Typhimurium SL1344, and its dependence on the bacterial alarmone, guanosine tetraphosphate (ppGpp) during late stationary phase, (LSP). Under LSP conditions we were able to identify the transcriptional start sites (TSSs) for 53% of the S. Typhimurium open reading frames (ORFs) and discovered 282 c...

The reliability of the ESP Culture System II (herein referred to as ESP II) for testing susceptibilities of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates to isoniazid, rifampin, ethambutol, and streptomycin was evaluated by comparing results to those of the method of proportion (MOP), which was considered the reference method, for 20 clinical isolates and 30 challenge strains provided by the Centers for ...

In the USA, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VREF) is endemic in hospitals, despite lack of carriage among healthy individuals. In Europe, however, hospital outbreaks are rare, but VREF carriage among healthy individuals and livestock is common. We used amplified fragment-length polymorphism analysis to genotype 120 VREF isolates associated with hospital outbreaks and 45 non-epidemic ...

In the ESP tradition, genre is often defined as “structured communicative events engaged in by specific discourse communities whose members share broad communicative purposes.” ESP genre research has generated numerous descriptions and explanations of discipline-specific genre exemplars and has produced various pedagogical proposals. However, what learners learn from these genre descriptions an...

The relationship between the structure and cytotoxic activity of azulenequinones and trihaloacetylazulenes was investigated based on theoretical calculations. Four different dipole moments (mu(G), mu(ESP-G), mu(W) and mu(ESP-W)) and heats of formation (DeltaH(f)) of the azulenequinones [1-27] and trihaloacetylazulenes [28a,b-40a,b] were separately calculated in gas phase and aqueous solution us...