British Journal of General Practice, December 2012 667 INTRODUCTION Fragility fractures result from mechanical forces that would not ordinarily result in fracture. The World Health Organization (WHO) has quantified this as forces equivalent to a fall from a standing height or less. Reduced bone density is a major risk factor for fragility fractures. The prevalence of osteoporosis increases mark...

This piece argues that by intermediating society’s savings and allocating them to their best uses, financial systems have a critical function for economies’ growth. However, financial sectors can also be a source of fragility. Critically, recent policy approaches towards the financial sector have focused more on the size of the sector rather than its intermediating function, which might have le...

The main HIV co-morbidities include coronary heart disease (CHD), metabolic syndrome and lipodystrophy, renal impairment, fragility fractures, neurocognitive disease, and the emerging complications of insulin resistance and fragility fractures. The evidence base for toxicities seen with ART is gained mainly from comparative efficacy studies of ART regimens, where toxicity is not the primary end...

In this paper symbolic quantifier elimination methods are used to explore the fragility of feedback compensators, and to design feedback systems with non-fragile compensators. A compensator is said to be fragile if given variations in compensator parameters result in significant deterioration of feedback performance. The issue of fragility is important in understanding the level of acurracy req...

We analyze and explore option fragility, the notion that option incentives are fragile due to their non-linear payoff structure. Option incentives become weaker as options fall underwater, leading to pressures to reprice options or restore incentives through additional grants of equitybased pay. We build a detailed data set on executives’ portfolios of stock and options and find that executive ...

BACKGROUND Osteoporosis and associated fragility fractures are a major health problem; they are more common in women over 50 years old. Fracture liaison nurses have been widely used in secondary care to promote the recognition of fragility fractures and to promote the use of bone-sparing medication to reduce the risk of recurrent facture. OBJECTIVE Audit the impact of a primary care based fra...

In the scope of a scenario-based risk analysis, this study aims to quantify and rank various types of epistemic uncertainties that enter into the derivation of fragility functions for common buildings. Using a numerical model of a test structure (a reinforced concrete five-story building with infill panels on the first two floors), a first type of uncertainty is introduced, consisting of the me...

One critical issue in process management is that managers can only rely on their experience when they make decisions in designing their business processes. To provide effective decision-making support, a simulation based approach (PMT:Process Management Tool) has been developed to quantitatively predict the performance of designed processes. In this paper, two types of automotive design process...

Chromosome fragility in two families not exhibiting amplification of the CGG trinucleotide associated with the fragile X site has been examined. Fluorescence in situ hybridisation with cosmid DNA from loci immediately flanking FRAXA and other distal loci have confirmed that cytogenetic fragility in these subjects is the result of expression of a new folate sensitive fragile X site, FRAXE.

We simulate binary soft-disk systems in two dimensions and investigate how the dynamics slow as the area fraction is increased toward the glass transition. The "fragility" quantifies how sensitively the relaxation time scale depends on the area fraction, and the fragility strongly depends on the composition of the mixture. We confirm prior results for mixtures of particles with similar sizes, w...