Ecological indicators are needed to evaluate natural biodiversity and to estimate environmental change. I used bird community composition as an environmental indicator to evaluate forest disturbance (at the community level) in areas of Western Mexico. Surveyed bird and vegetation composition data at 79 sites within regions of the Sierra Madre del Sur and Transvolcanic Belt Provinces of Central ...

The objective of this article is to assess the contribution of disease activity, pain, and psychological factors to self-reported sleep disturbance in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and to evaluate whether depression mediates the effects of pain on sleep disturbance. The sample included 106 patients with confirmed RA who participated in an assessment of their disease activity, pain, p...

Patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) often hypoventilate during sleep with marked falls in oxygen saturation (SaO2%). This occurs most commonly during REM sleep, when there is a reduction in rib cage excursion and a fall in end-expiratory lung volume (EELV). The aim of this study was to examine the effect of nocturnal nasal continuous positive airway pressure (nCPAP) on SaO2 and the respiratory d...

background: the aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of arterial blood gases (abgs) in determining the type of intoxication. methods: medical charts of all patients who had referred to the toxicology ward of baharloo hospital between january 2009 and december 2009 were evaluated. after excluding the patients with multi-drug toxicity, data, including age, sex, type of intoxication (the...

Noninvasive ventilation is effective in acute respiratory failure, in which drug therapy and administration of supplemental oxygen do not suffice and attempts are made to prevent the patient from ending up in invasive respirator therapy. The treatment is suited for acute respiratory failure for instance in cases of exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, in which a disturbance of...

This paper presents a novel technique to visualize and detect various power quality disturbance events. It is based on the image processing methods known as grayscale images and binary images. Gray image created from recorded disturbance voltage waveform is first represented as a transverse wave having compressions and rarefactions. Then using image enhancement techniques, the unique features o...

The aim of this study was to investigate sources of stress and psychological disturbance in dental students across the five years of undergraduate study at a dental school in Trinidad. Eighty-three percent of students completed a modified version of the Dental Environment Stress questionnaire (DES) and the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI). On a scale ranging from 0 (not stressful) to 5 (highly str...

In this work our intention was to further analyze by epidemiological methods the association between low Apgar scores and the total spectrum of respiratory diseases in an unselected population. The influence of varying gestational ages and different modes of delivery on the risk factor associated with the Apgar score was studied. Furthermore, we investigated the impact of the various components...