Experimental and clinical data suggest a role of sex steroids in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis (MS). Scant information is available about the potential effect of oral contraceptive (OC) use on the prognosis of the disease. We aimed to evaluate this. The study population consisted of 132 women with relapsing-remitting MS before receiving disease modifying treatment and a mean disease du...

Abstract—To improve the performance of network and reduce implementation cost, many switching fabrics have been proposed, among which Shared Bus, Shared Memory, Crossbar and Multipath Self-routing Switching Structure (MSSS) are especially noteworthy. The first three are not suitable for large-scale expansion because of bandwidth bottleneck or inefficient ability to schedule I/O match. MSSS is f...

It is unclear how cognitive impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) is influenced by physical disability, fatigue, and depression. Our aim was to identify the strongest clinical predictors for cognitive impairment in relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) patients. The clinical risk factors included in the analysis were physical disability (EDSS), fatigue (FSS), the somatic and nonsomatic components of de...

Mass storage systems (MSSs) play a key role in data-intensive parallel computing. Most contemporary MSSs are implemented as redundant arrays of independent/inexpensive disks (RAID) in which commodity disks are tied together with proprietary controller hardware. The performance of such systems can be difficult to predict because most internal details of the controller behavior are not public. We...

Background. Spasticity is prevalent and disabling in persons with multiple sclerosis (MS), and the development of the Multiple Sclerosis Spasticity Scale-88 (MSSS-88) provides an opportunity for examining the perceived impact of spasticity and its association with gait in this population. Purpose. This study examined the association between the perceived impact of spasticity and spatio-temporal...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether vitamin D is associated with multiple sclerosis (MS) status and disease severity in African Americans. METHODS Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D was compared in a cross-sectional sample of 339 African Americans with MS and 342 African American controls. Correlations between disease severity (Multiple Sclerosis Severity Score [MSSS]) and 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels were so...

Recent studies suggest ultraviolet radiation (UVR)/vitamin D is protective against the development of multiple sclerosis (MS). We determined if outcome in MS is associated with the surrogate for host pigmentation, skin type, and parameters of UVR exposure. We used a validated questionnaire to determine skin type and UVR exposure during childhood (0-16 years), and early adult life (17-40 years),...

multiple sclerosis (ms) is an inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system. it is a clinically heterogeneous disorder especially in terms of disease severity. current investigations suggest that genes and gene-gene interactions not only influence on susceptibility to ms but also affect the disease severity. in this study, we investigated the contribution of the hladrb1*1501 ...

[1] A study of the retrieval of sea surface roughness using Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSSR) from satellite is presented. Delay-Doppler Maps (DDMs) from the SSTL UK-DMC satellite are analyzed to retrieve directional Mean Square Slopes (MSSs). Results are compared to theoretically-derived MSSs and in situ measurements from co-located buoys of the National Data Buoy Center...

This research presents a new integrated framework for the design of management support systems (MSSs). Three different views of decision making (outcome, process, and leaming) are combined with three different role (automate, informate, and stimulate) and system (restrictiveness, guidance, and customizability) perspectives. The role perspective focuses on the intended impact of the MSS on the d...