BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The available data on low-dose oral contraceptive pill (OCP) use and stroke risk in US women are limited by small numbers. We sought more precise estimates by conducting a pooled analysis of data from 2 US population-based case-control studies. METHODS We analyzed interview data from 175 ischemic stroke cases, 198 hemorrhagic stroke cases, and 1191 control subjects 18 t...

Consumers are increasingly navigating across sales channels to maximize the value of their purchase. The existing retail practices of pricing channels independently at the one end, and matching channel and competitor prices at the other, are unable to achieve the desired profitable coordination required between channels. As part of a joint partnership agreement with IBM Commerce, we engaged wit...

Vitamins B(6), B(12) and folate play crucial metabolic roles especially during the reproductive years for women. There is limited reporting of within-subject variability of these vitamins. This study aimed to determine the within and between subject variability in serum vitamins B(6), B(12), folate and erythrocyte folate concentrations in young women; identify factors that contribute to variabi...

OBJECTIVE To estimate whether daily educational text messages affect oral contraceptive pill (OCP) continuation at 6 months. METHODS We randomized young women electing OCPs at an urban family planning health center to either routine care or routine care plus 180 days of daily educational text messages. Investigators masked to treatment allocation randomized participants who were not masked to...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to explore whether a nonhuman primate model could be developed to test drugs for the prevention of ovarian cancer. METHODS Nineteen adult female Rhesus macaques were given fenretinide (4HPR), oral contraceptives (OCP), the combination (4HPR + OCP), or no medication for 3 months. Exploratory laparotomy was done pre- and postdrug to assess intermediary ...

BACKGROUND The oral contraceptive pill (OCP) remains the most popular form of prescription contraception in many countries, despite adherence difficulties for many. Uptake of long acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), which are less reliant on user adherence, remains low. The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of, and attitudes towards, prescription contraception amongst sampl...

Bioavailable water concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) and organochlorine pesticides (OCP) were measured in the water column from Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) collected in May 2008 using semipermeable membrane devices (SPMDs). The sampling sites spanned the whole reservoir from the upstream Chongqing to the great dam covering more than 600 k...

The driving force and nucleation rate of calcium phosphate (Ca-P) precipitation in simulated body fluid (SBF) were analyzed based on the classical crystallization theory. SBF supersaturation with respect to hydroxyapatite (HA), octacalcium phosphate (OCP) and dicalcium phosphate (DCPD) was carefully calculated, considering all the association/dissociation reactions of related ion groups in SBF....

A method is proposed to systematically transform a constrained optimal control problem (OCP) into an unconstrained OCP, which can be treated in the standard calculus of variations. The considered class of constraints comprises up to m input constraints and m state constraints with well-defined relative degree, where m denotes the number of inputs of the given nonlinear system. Starting from an ...