An accurate determination of evaporative fluxes is critical for efficient water management in semi-arid climates such as the Canadian Prairies. The main achievements this research are design and operation a bench-scale atmosphere simulator, performance evaluation using selected weather scenarios pertaining to regional atmospheric conditions, validation established empirical correlations, estima...

Numerous studies have examined sleep's influence on a range of hippocampus-dependent declarative memory tasks, from text learning to spatial navigation. In this study, we examined the impact of sleep, wake, and time-of-day influences on the processing of declarative information with strong semantic links (semantically related word pairs) and information requiring the formation of novel associat...

OBJECTIVES To understand the role of patient-ventilator asynchrony in the etiology of sleep disruption and determine whether optimizing patient-ventilator interactions by using proportional assist ventilation improves sleep. DESIGN Randomized crossover clinical trial. SETTING A tertiary university medical-surgical intensive care unit. PATIENTS Thirteen patients during weaning from mechani...

BACKGROUND It is well recognized that sleep is severely disturbed in patients in intensive care units (ICU) and that this can compromise their rehabilitation potential. However, it is still difficult to objectively assess sleep quantity and quality and the determinants of sleep disturbance remain unclear. The aim of this study was therefore to evaluate carefully the impact of ICU sound intensit...

OBJECTIVE We aimed to provide information that can be used as a guide to clinicians when advising breastfeeding mothers on normal lactation with regard to the frequency and volume of breastfeedings and the fat content of breast milk. METHODS Mothers (71) of infants who were 1 to 6 months of age and exclusively breastfeeding on demand test-weighed their infants before and after every breastfee...

Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) is a useful tool to establish the diagnosis of hypertension as well as for the monitoring of the response to antihypertensive therapy. We aimed to assess the reproducibility of the circadian blood pressure (BP) pattern (24 h, daytime and night-time BP and heart rate HR), the categorisation of individuals as dippers and non-dippers and the morning BP p...

BACKGROUND Accurate and comfortable methods are needed to determine resting energy expenditure (REE) in older people who are characterized by a lowered metabolic rate. The portable SenseWear® armband (SWA) body monitor, worn on the right upper arm, can easily be used by this age group in an ambulatory manner. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of a behaviour modification program, taught to parents in a single visit to a trained nurse, in improving sleep performance in newborn infants, Australia. DESIGN Randomised controlled trial. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS 268 families with normal newborn infants in the community, recruited between October 1996 and March 1997 from birth notices published in a South...

We have previously demonstrated that prophylactic intake of dexamethasone improves maximal oxygen uptake (Vo(2)max) in high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) susceptible subjects 4 to 6 h after a 2-day climb to 4559 m. However, since with this ascent protocol HAPE usually develops after the first night at 4559 m or later, we hypothesized that a continued dexamethasone prophylaxis would result in ...

Coffee is commonly given daily to toddlers in Guatemala. Possible negative effects of coffee ingestion on cognitive development and sleep patterns were assessed in 132 children 12-24 months of age who had received coffee for > 2 months and were iron deficient on at least one indicator. Children were stratified by initial hemoglobin (A= anemic, Hgb < 10.5 g/dl; NA = 'non-anemic', Hgb > or = 10.5...