Mercury (Hg) levels in hair are directly related to eating habits, especially fish consumption by coastal populations with a large contingent of traditional fishing families. This study assessed total Hg levels in children's hair. The study group was selected from three public elementary schools in Cananéia, São Paulo State, Brazil (ages 4 to 12 years). The results (median and range) for total ...

For pension-savers, a low payoff is a financial disaster. Such investors will most likely prefer left-skewed payoff distributions over right-skewed payoff distributions. We explore how such distributions can be delivered. Cautious-relaxed utility measures are cautious in ensuring that payoffs don’t fall much below a reference value, but relaxed about exceeding it. We find that the payoff distri...

Measurement of human growth hormone (hGH; somatotropin) concentrations in serum after provocative tests is crucial for diagnosing deficiencies in production of this hormone. Serum hGH can be measured by various immunoassays, isotopic and nonisotopic, with monoclonal or polyclonal antibodies: a cutoff value of 10 micrograms/L after provocative testing is usually used to distinguish normal from h...

0.0001 by Wilcoxon signed-rank test) and based on the 99th percentile values for each assay, 9 discordances were found between assays for values within the reference interval vs increased values. The ADVIA TnI-Ultra method showed no interference from dilutions with plasma samples that contained high concentration of triglycerides (6.6 g/L, final dilution 1:128; y 0.044 0.14x, n 8, R 0.99) or he...

Increased cell proliferation is a central key event in the mode of action for many non-genotoxic carcinogens, and quantitative cell proliferation data play an important role in the cancer risk assessment of many pharmaceutical and environmental compounds. Currently, there is limited unified information on assay standards, reference values, targeted applications, study design issues, and quality...

OBJECTIVE Transparent evidence-based decision making has been promoted worldwide to engender trust in science and policy making. Yet, little attention has been given to transparency implementation. The degree of transparency (focused on how uncertain evidence was handled) during the development of folate and vitamin D Dietary Reference Values was explored in three a priori defined areas: (i) va...

This study investigates the ability of speakers to imitate features from another dialect of their native language. Speakers from two different Norwegian dialects spoken in Stavanger and Trondheim produced speech material using their own and each other’s dialect. Acoustic analysis involved the realization of lenited fortis stop consonants compared with lenis stops. In general, imitations by both...

Multiscale design for dealing with 2-scale material and product system is implemented by employing the probabilistic analytical target cascading (PATC) and polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) approaches in this paper. PATC allows design autonomy at each scale subsystem by formulating the multiscale design problem as a hierarchical structure. PCE ensures uncertainties to be propagated within and ac...

When asked to bisect mentally numerical intervals, neglect patients show a displacement of the numerical midpoint similar to the one observed in physical line bisection. This spatial-numerical bias has been taken as evidence of the spatial nature of numerical magnitude representations. However, to date, neuropsychological studies in neglect patients have only used symbolic numerical material. H...

BACKGROUND The measurement of handgrip strength (HGS) has prognostic value with respect to all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality and cardiovascular disease, and is an important part of the evaluation of frailty. Published reference ranges for HGS are mostly derived from Caucasian populations in high-income countries. There is a paucity of information on normative HGS values in non-Cauca...