background: thalassemia is probably the most common single gene disorder causing a major public health problem in the world. currently, allogenic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (hsct) is the only curative therapy for thalassemia. one major limitation of hsct is the lack of hla-identical sibling donors, so attention has turned to finding phenotypically matched unrelated donors. patients...

It is not fully understood whether masticatory performance is compromised in individuals with the more common forms of malocclusion (i.e. Class I and Class II). The aim of this prospective investigation was to establish the relationships between masticatory performance, malocclusion (type and severity), age, body size and gender, in children and adolescents. A total of 335 individuals were exam...

In this work we analyze a class of diminishing 2 × 2 Pólya-Eggenberger urn models with ball replacement matrix M given by M = ` −a 0 c −d´, a, d ∈ N and c ∈ N0. We obtain limit laws for this class of 2 × 2 urns by giving estimates for the moments of the considered random variables. As a special instance we obtain limit laws for the pills problem, proposed by Knuth and McCarthy, which correspond...

We consider the problem of estimating the scale parameter &beta of a rescaled F-distribution when &beta has a lower bounded constraint of the form &beta&gea, under the entropy loss function. An admissible minimax estimator of the scale parameter &beta, which is the pointwise limit of a sequence of Bayes estimators, is given. Also in the class of truncated linear estimators, the admissible estim...

BACKGROUND Celiac disease (CD) has emerged as a common, but largely undiagnosed health problem. Numerous studies examined the influence of infant nutrition on the development of diagnosed CD. However, results are still inconsistent. In addition, the effect of infant feeding practices on the development of potential forms of CD might be different. OBJECTIVE The objective was to examine whether...