STUDY DESIGN Retrospective study of prospectively collected data. OBJECTIVE To analyze the modified frailty index (mFI) as a predictor of adverse postoperative events following posterior lumbar fusion. METHODS The American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) database including all adult patients undergoing posterior lumbar interbody fusion or transf...

IMPORTANCE The increasing number of elderly and comorbid patients undergoing surgical procedures raises interest in better identifying patients at increased risk of morbidity and mortality, independent of age. Frailty has been identified as a predictor of surgical complications. OBJECTIVE To establish the implications of frailty as a predictor of morbidity and mortality in inpatient otolaryng...

BACKGROUND Previous in vitro and animal studies demonstrated that transcription factors p-STAT6 and PU.1 are required to induce interleukin (IL)-9 secretion by T helper (Th) 9 cells. It is believed that n factor-kappaB (NF-κB) plays a role in eosinophil survival. The importance of these transcription factors in the pathogenesis of allergic asthma (AA) in humans is poorly understood. We evaluate...

Much of the literature on microfinance performance has concentrated on the effects of institution-specific practices, but there have been comparatively few attempts to analyze how the broader economic environment affects the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Drawing on the work of Ahlin and Lin (2006), who find that numerous macroeconomic indicators affect MFI performance, this p...

Maximal frequent itemsets (MFI) are crucial to many tasks in data mining. Since the MaxMiner algorithm first introduced enumeration trees for mining MFI in 1998, there have been several methods proposed to use depth first search to improve performance. To further improve the performance of mining MFI, we proposed a technique to gather and pass tail (of a node) information to determine the next ...

The Thy-1 gene is expressed in a tissue- and stage-specific pattern and has a typical 1.6kb methylation-free island (MFI) covering about 600bp upstream and downstream of the two alternative first exons. By microinjection of a mouse Thy-1.1/human Thy-1 gene into fertilized eggs, we were able to show that the MFI is restored in the transgenic mice. The flanking sequence became methylated, but the...

this study attempts to examine the operational efficiency of thirty-two microfinance institutions in india. operational efficiency in microfinance institutions refers to how well microfinance institutions allocate the input resources. since the study is an exploratory nature, therefore, the data are collected from mix market on annual basis. it covers the seven-year period ranging from 2005-06 ...

OBJECTIVES To explore in which contexts ratings of multiple dimensions of fatigue are useful in fibromyalgia, and to compare multidimensional fatigue between women with fibromyalgia and healthy women. DESIGN A cross-sectional study. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory (MFI-20), comprising 5 subscales of fatigue, was compared with the 1-dimensional subscale of fatigue...

ZAP-70 is a critical protein tyrosine kinase in T-cell activation and proliferation processes. Defective recruitment of ZAP-70 molecules results in termination of the T-cell receptor (TCR) signal transduction pathway. Impairment of this pathway is one of the early markers of disease progression in HIV-1 infected individuals. T-cell dysfunction in HIV infected patients may be connected to a defe...

The encapsulation of metal clusters (Pt, Ru, Rh) within MFI was achieved by exchanging cationic metal precursors into a parent zeolite (BEA, FAU), reducing them with H2 to form metal clusters, and transforming these zeolites into daughter structures of higher framework density (MFI) under hydrothermal conditions. These transformations required MFI seeds or organic templates for FAU parent zeoli...