Over the last 30 years, rounds of therapeutic treatments with cost consciousness and cost containment have been administered to the healthcare industry, with generally disappointing clinical response. The last treatment cycle came in the 1990s, with the combination therapy of prospective payment and managed care, treatments that produced a transient remission in cost inflation but that left the...

Of course, neighboring plants in natural communities interact: we usually think of plants competing for sunlight and soil nutrients. Few topics in plant ecology have inspired so much excitement and controversy, however, as communication between plants. The idea, simply put, is that rooted and immobile plants might act to increase their levels of defense by responding to cues from neighbors that...

In the last decades, molecular biology has moved from gene-by-gene analysis to more complex studies using a genome-wide scale. Thanks to high-throughput genomic technologies, such as microarrays and next-generation sequencing, a huge amount of information has been generated, expanding our knowledge on the genetic basis of various diseases. Although some of this information could be transferred ...

We studied the effect of nearest pattern interaction on a global pattern formation in a two-dimensional space, where patterns are to grow initially from a noise in the presence of a periodic supply of energy. Although our approach is general, we found that this study is relevant in particular to the pattern formation on a periodically vibrated granular layer, as it gives a unified perspective o...

Although adenocarcinoma of the prostate persists in being the most common form of cancer in men, its clinical behavior does not maintain this type of consistency, wavering from extremely aggressive fatal cancers to clinically insignificant, incidental entities. The prevalence of prostate cancer at autopsy is remarkably high, increasing from 20% in men in their 50s to up to 80% in men 70 to 80 y...

The ability of Gaussian noise to induce ordered states in dynamical systems is here presented in an overview of the main stochastic mechanisms able to generate spatial patterns. These mechanisms involve: (i) a deterministic local dynamics term, accounting for the local rate of variation of the field variable, (ii) a noise component (additive or multiplicative) accounting for the unavoidable env...

The common phenomena of white-coat and masked hypertension have established the need for assessing blood pressure (BP) out of the office, particularly using 24-hour ambulatory monitoring (ABPM). In the last 2 decades, evidence on the usefulness of the alternative method for out-of-office BP assessment, namely home BP monitoring (HBPM), has accumulated, and guidelines on using this method have r...