BACKGROUND Oral corticosteroids were used to control stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) decades ago. However, recent guidelines do not recommend long-term oral corticosteroids (LTOC) use for stable COPD patients, partly because it causes side-effects such as respiratory muscle deterioration and immunosuppression. Nonetheless, the impact of LTOC on life prognosis for stable COPD...

in the economic literature, firm entry and exit are considered as two basic concepts and the time interval between them, known as life duration, is almost a neglected subject in iranian economy. accordingly, this study tries to investigate the life duration of new firms in food and beverage industry as one of the most manufacturing industries in iran during 1996-2005. factors affecting the life...

PURPOSE Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) plays important roles in the modulation of apoptosis, angiogenesis, immune response, and tumor invasion. Elevated COX-2 expression has been reported to be correlated with reduced survival after radiotherapy. This study examined whether genetic variations in the COX-2 gene are associated with different survival in inoperable locally advanced non-small cell lung c...

Tires represent a critical spare part in mines. There is a shortage of medium and large tires. In addition, with increased mining activities and the creation of new mines, the demand for tires has increased significantly. Thus, it is particularly important for mining engineers to identify tire characteristics and correctly manage the spare part inventory. Spare parts management is critical from...

Extensions of the traditional Cox proportional hazard model, concerning the following features are often desirable in applications: Simultaneous nonparametric estimation of baseline hazard and usual fixed covariate effects, modelling and detection of time–varying covariate effects and nonlinear functional forms of metrical covariates, and inclusion of frailty components. In this paper, we devel...

BACKGROUND Many studies have reported several transcriptionally deregulated microRNAs (miRNAs) in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) tissue in comparison with benign thyroid nodules and normal thyroid tissues. However, the correlation between miRNA expressions and PTC recurrence still remains unclear. METHODS The PTC patients who scheduled to undergo total thyroidectomy by the same surgical team ...

The Bayesian approach to analyzing semi-parametric models are gaining popularity in practice. For the Cox proportional hazard model, it has been shown recently that the posterior is consistent and leads to asymptotically accurate confidence intervals under a Lévy process prior on the cumulative hazard rate. The explicit expression of the posterior distribution together with independent incremen...

BACKGROUND Cox proportional hazard model is a popular choice in modeling the survival data, but sometimes proportionality assumption is not satisfied. One of the tools for handling the non-proportional effects is the multiplicative-additive model named "Cox-Aalen model". Recently these flexible regression models developed for competing risks setting. The aim of this paper is showing the applica...

OBJECTIVE A high plasma sphingomyelin level has been associated with subclinical atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and worse prognosis in subjects with acute coronary syndromes. We wanted to assess the predictive value of plasma sphingomyelin levels for incident coronary heart disease (CHD) events in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. METHODS AND RESULTS The plasma sphingomyel...