BACKGROUND Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) causes a wide range of clinical symptoms and potentially serious complications, but epidemiological data about GERD in China are limited. The aim of this pilot study was to develop and validate a methodology for the epidemiological study of GERD in China. METHODS Regionally stratified, randomized samples of Shanghai residents (n = 919) complet...

Formins are a large family of actin assembly-promoting proteins with many important biological roles. However, it has remained unclear how formins nucleate actin polymerization. All other nucleators are known to recruit actin monomers as a central part of their mechanisms. However, the actin-nucleating FH2 domain of formins lacks appreciable affinity for monomeric actin. Here, we found that yea...

INTRODUCTION Adults with intellectual disabilities have higher rates of mental ill-health and problem behaviors than the general population. METHOD In this study, we present data on trends in challenging behavior in residential care centers in Israel from 1998 to 2008 and further data on trends in employment of psychiatrists from 1998 to 2009 and psychotropic medication use from 1998 to 2008....

Women with intellectual disability have historically not been provided the opportunity to become mothers. Attitudes held by future professionals will determine the level and quality of support these women are provided. This study was designed to evaluate and compare the attitudes of students from Education, Disability and Midwifery towards the sexuality and parenting of people with an intellect...

BACKGROUND Percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) for patients with chronic painful osteoporotic compression fractures has not been extensively studied. OBJECTIVE To prospectively evaluate the efficacy of PVP for patients with chronic painful osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures (VCFs). METHODS Sixty-two consecutive patients with chronic painful osteoporotic VCFs for ≥3 months underwent ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine whether low power laser therapy (Gallium-Arsenide) is useful or not for the therapy of chronic low back pain (LBP). STUDY DESIGN/MATERIALS AND METHODS This study included 75 patients (laser + exercise-25, laser alone-25, and exercise alone-25) with LBP. Visual analogue scale (VAS), Schober test, flexion and lateral flexion measu...

OBJECTIVES To assess the construct validity of the HIV Disability Questionnaire (HDQ), a self-administered questionnaire that describes the presence, severity and episodic nature of disability experienced by people living with HIV. DESIGN We conducted a confirmatory factor analysis. We hypothesised that domains in the HDQ characterised six dimensions of disability, each represented by HDQ ite...

In Mobile IPv6 especially in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), Mobile Node’s handoff performance is greatly impaired by the Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) procedure for the newly formed Care-of Address. Based on the data gathered from our HMIPv6 test bed, this paper analyzed the origin of such performance degradation. To alleviate the impact of DAD on handoff performance, Greg Daley et al p...

BACKGROUND Limitations in physical activity are considered as a key problem in patients with multiple sclerosis (PwMS). Contemporary methods to assess the level of physical activity in PwMS are regular clinical observation. However, these methods either rely on high recall and accurate reporting from the patients (e.g. self-report questionnaires), or they are conducted during a particular clini...