BACKGROUND We recently reported a relationship between plasma levels of cystatin C and incidence of the metabolic syndrome (MetS) among the first 2,369 subjects who participated in the re-examination study of the population-based Malmö and Diet Cancer Cardiovascular cohort (MDC-CC-re-exam). In this study we aimed to replicate these results and also investigate if cystatin C was causally associa...

OBJECTIVE To improve diagnostic assessment in Moebius syndrome by (1) creating more selective diagnostic subgroups and (2) conducting genetic evaluation in a large patient cohort. DESIGN Prospective, observational study. PARTICIPANTS Attendees of 3 consecutive Moebius syndrome conferences held in the United States, with a prior diagnosis of Moebius syndrome, were invited to participate. M...

Providing reliable video communications over wireless ad-hoc networks is becoming increasingly important as these networks become widely employed in military, homeland defense security, and disaster recovery applications. However, wireless ad-hoc networks have a dynamically changing topology that can cause failures of links and nodes, thus resulting in path loss. Additionally, video communicati...

This paper presents simple yet powerful improvements in color reduction field, targeting interactive high-quality applications. Here maximum distance clustering (MDC) is used to initialize K-means clustering, which eliminates the drawback of clustering-based color reduction that tends to ignore colors with a small number of pixels. Maximum distance clustering’s speed problem due to the problem ...

Our objective was to develop a working definition of nonresponse to analgesic treatment of arthritis, focusing on the measurement of pain on the 0-100 mm pain visual analog scale (VAS). We reviewed the literature to assess the smallest detectable difference (SDD), the minimal detectable change (MDC), and the minimal clinically important difference (MCID). The SDD for improvement reported in thr...

the robustness property can be added to dsc system at the expense of reducing performance, i.e., increasing the sum-rate. the aim of designing robust dsc schemes is to trade off between system robustness and compression efficiency. in this paper, after deriving an inner bound on the rate–distortion region for the quadratic gaussian mdc based rdsc system with two encoders, the structure of the r...

background: ccl22/mdc is a cc chemokine with a critical role in regulation of the immune balance in physiological condition. ccl22/ccr-4 ligation has been documented to participate in the migration of regulatory t (treg) cells and th2 lymphocytes to the site of breast tumors; circumstances that are known to be associated with poor prognosis. objective: to investigate the association of a single...

BACKGROUND The successful treatment of cancer is a major health and political issue for England and Wales and the major developed countries (MDCs). All malignancy deaths by age and sex are analysed to determine how successful the MDCs were in reducing cancer mortality between the end points of 1979-81 and 2000-2, and whether there was any association between each nations 'gross domestic product...

INTRODUCTION Recent trials have demonstrated the effectiveness of multidisciplinary care (MDC) for patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). However, results of the assessment of different programmes in individual countries could be different because of local specificities of health care systems. AIM We sought to determine whether MDC for patients with CHF has an influence on mortality, rate...