The term constipation refers to a symptom or complex of symptoms and not a specific diagnosis. Patients and health care providers often define constipation differently. Most health care providers define constipation based on stool frequency. Patients often use the term constipation to describe a broad set of complaints, including straining, hard or infrequent stools, pain during a bowel movemen...

Objectives: To examine whether elimination of fatal diseases will increase healthcare costs. Design: Mortality data from vital statistics combined with healthcare spending in a cause elimination life table. Costs were allocated to specific diseases through the various healthcare registers. Setting and subjects: The population of the Netherlands, 1988. Main outcome measures: Healthcare costs of ...

During their life cycle, apicomplexan parasites, such as the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, use actomyosin-driven gliding motility to move and invade host cells. For this process, actin filament length and stability are temporally and spatially controlled. In contrast to canonical actin, P. falciparum actin 1 (PfAct1) does not readily polymerize into long, stable filaments. The structu...

Glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), a potential therapeutic factor for Parkinson's disease (PD), exerts its biological effects through the Ret receptor tyrosine kinase. The redistribution of Ret into lipid rafts substantially influences Ret signaling, but the mechanisms underlying Ret translocation remain unclear. The purpose of our study was to further explore the signaling mec...

Enhanced ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation is caused by the thinning ozone and affects photosynthesis and crop yield. Recently, UV-B radiation has been considered as an environmental signal that regulates plant growth. Elucidating the downstream effectors in UV-B-triggered pathways is of particular interest. Previous studies have shown that actin filaments (AFs) play many roles during cell physiol...

In spite of the importance of jasmonates (JAs) as plant growth and stress regulators, the molecular components of their signaling pathway remain largely unknown. By means of a genetic screen that exploits the cross talk between ethylene (ET) and JAs, we describe the identification of several new loci involved in JA signaling and the characterization and positional cloning of one of them, JASMON...

OBJECTIVE To assess the serum vitamin D and ICTP levels in patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) and investigate their relationship with disease activity and bone mineral density (BMD). METHOD 150 patients and 168 controls were included. Serum 25(OH)D, ICTP, C-reaction protein (CRP), Bath AS Disease Activity Index (BASDAI), Bath AS Functional Index (BASFI), and Hip BMD were assessed in pa...

Discourse Representation Theory is a specific name for the work of Hans Kamp in the area of dynamic interpretation of natural language. Also, it has gradually become a generic term for proposals for dynamic interpretation of natural language in the same spirit. These proposals have in common that each new sentence is interpreted in terms of the contribution it makes to an existing piece of inte...

Much medical research is observational. The reporting of observational studies is often of insufficient quality. Poor reporting hampers the assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a study and the generalisability of its results. Taking into account empirical evidence and theoretical considerations, a group of methodologists, researchers, and editors developed the Strengthening the Reporti...

We maximized mutual information between the sensor locations (treated as random variables) to find a near-optimal choice of k sensors. In the original paper, the authors used a gaussian process to model the random variables and they therefore had analytical expressions for the mutual informations. Given data X1, . . . , Xn ∈ R (we have p possible sensor locations and n samples), they fit a gaus...