Arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury present potential health risks to children who are exposed through inhalation or ingestion. Emerging Market countries experience rapid industrial development that may coincide with the increased release of these metals into the environment. A literature review was conducted for English language articles from the 21st century on pediatric exposures to arsenic,...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to develop new methods for partitioning biochemical reference data, covering in particular nongaussian distributions. METHODS We recently proposed partitioning criteria for gaussian distributions. These criteria relate to proportions of the subgroups outside each of the reference limits of the combined distribution (proportion criteria) and to distances be...

Quantum chemical high level ab initio coupled-cluster and multiconfigurational perturbation methods have been used to compute vertical and adiabatic ionization potentials of the five canonical DNA and RNA nucleobases: uracil, thymine, cytosine, adenine, and guanine. Several states of their cations have been also calculated. The present results represent a systematic compendium of these magnitud...

BACKGROUND Regionally partitioned health indicator values are commonly presented in choropleth maps. Policymakers and health authorities use them among others for health reporting, demand planning and quality assessment. Quite often there are concerns whether the health situation in certain areas can be considered different or equivalent to a reference value. RESULTS Highlighting statisticall...

Twelve Lipid-Research Clinic laboratories performed automated cholesterol analyses on four control-serum pools of known cholesterol concentration, using the Liebermann-Burchard reaction. The analyses were done during a two-year period, with the same standards, methodology, and quality-control procedures. Estimates of analytical bias, variability, and short- and long-term trends for each instrum...

The reference interval for plasma total homocysteine (tHcy) and serum folate concentrations were estimated. Total of 3,154 reference individuals (1,029 men and 2,125 women) were selected based on stringent exclusion criteria. For plasma tHcy concentration (µM/L), reference values (median [5-95 percentile]) were 7.72 (5.03 to 13.80) and 6.09 (3.95-10.19) in men and women, respectively. For serum...

The aim of this study is to investigate if the use of individual, per segment reference values for cardiac strain allows for improved discrimination of pathological deformation. In a cohort of patients with a high likelihood of ischemic heart disease, preliminary results within the subgroup of patients without pathological findings on cardiac MRI suggest a spatial dependency of strain.

OBJECTIVE This study aims to evaluate the characteristics of the corneal sub-basal plexus by performing in vivo confocal microscopy of healthy Brazilians to provide reference values for the Brazilian population. METHOD This study is an observational, cross-sectional, descriptive study comparing corneas from 55 healthy Brazilian individuals across the age span of 20-70 years. RESULTS The ave...

Chatterjee P, Banerjee AK, Das P. A prediction equation for the estimation of vital capacity in nepalese young females. J. Hum. Sport Exerc. Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 27-32, 2011. Till date no effort has been made to evaluate vital capacity of children and young adults in Nepal. At present it is difficult to achieve accuracy in clinical diagnosis because of the lack of a unified standard of the normal...

A prospective study was performed in 109 patients with osteoporotic hip fracture to verify the relationship between 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol levels at admission and functional recovery in elderly patients with hip fracture. 47.7% of all the patients had 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol levels below the reference values of our laboratory. At 1 year of the fracture only 33 patients (30.3%) had ...