IMPORTANCE Self-monitoring of blood glucose is a costly component of care for diabetes mellitus, with unclear benefits for patients not taking insulin. Veterans with dual Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Medicare benefits have access to test strips through both systems, raising the potential for overuse. OBJECTIVES To examine the patterns of test strip receipt among older veterans with...

Boll weevil, Anthonomus grandis grandis Boheman (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), eradication programs typically equip pheromone traps with an insecticide-impregnated kill strip. These strips are intended to kill captured insects, thereby simplifying trap servicing and reducing the loss of weevils from predation and escape. However, the effectiveness of kill strips has not been extensively evaluated...

Loratadine is a second-generation histamine H1 receptor antagonist used in the treatment of allergic rhinitis and urticaria. The present work was aimed to develop of Loratadine using HPMC E15 LV PREMIUM as film forming polymer, glycerin as a plasticizer and tween 80 as a surfactant. The strips were evaluated for thickness, tensile strength, % elongation, disintegration time and in vitro drug re...

We report our experience with three patients who received NPWT over complex incisions following combined fleur-de-lis panniculectomy with ventral hernia repair. All patients received perioperative antibiotics. Panniculectomy was performed prior to components separation and underlay of biologic graft. Closure followed with drain placement to all undermined areas, with 3 French fry portals left o...

Ion irradiation induced modifications of a periodic Pt/C multilayer system containing Fe impurity have been analyzed by X-ray techniques suitable for exploring nanometer depth scales with sub-nanometer depth resolution. The multilayer stack with 15 Pt/C layer pairs (period 4.23 nm, total thickness 63.45 nm) was fabricated on a glass substrate. A 2 MeV Au2þ ion beam was rastered on the sample to...

The brains of 14 rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) between 4 and 35 years old were examined to determine the effects of aging on the thickness, neuronal frequency, fine structure, surface area, and volume of striate cortex. The effects of aging were ascertained by comparing the striate cortex in the six monkeys between 4 and 12 years of age with that of the eight monkeys over 25 years of age. The...

Comics are powerful visual messages that convey immediate visceral meaning in ways that conventional texts often cannot. This article's authors created comic strips to teach anatomy more interestingly and effectively. Four-frame comic strips were conceptualized from a set of anatomy-related humorous stories gathered from the authors' collective imagination. The comics were drawn on paper and th...

This work addresses the problem of efficiently learning action schemas using a bounded number of samples (interactions with the environment). We consider schemas in two languages— traditional STRIPS, and a new language STRIPS+WS that extends STRIPS to allow for the creation of new objects when an action is executed. This modification allows STRIPS+WS to model web services and can be used to des...

Introduction. There are several bladder dysfunctions that are associated with oxidative stress to the urinary bladder. Two experimental models are known to cause this type of bladder damage. The first is direct oxidative damage caused by hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The second is oxidative damage caused by ischemia followed by reperfusion (I/R). The specific aim of this study is to directly compar...

As one of the most renewable resources on Earth, bamboo has recently attracted increasing interest for its promising applications in sustainable structural purposes. Its superior mechanical properties arising from the unique functionally-graded (FG) hierarchical structure also make bamboo an excellent candidate for bio-mimicking purposes in advanced material design. However, despite its well-do...