BACKGROUND The two-gram salt-restriction-spoons, which can be used to reduce the salt intake of people, had been handed out for free by the Chinese government to the citizens several years ago, but only a small fraction of residents use such a spoon currently. Since no studies have been conducted to investigate relevant influencing factors, this study was designed to explore the determinants of...

Background. Hand function is essential to a person's self-efficacy and greatly affects quality of life. Adapted utensils with handles of increased diameters have historically been used to assist individuals with arthritis or other hand disabilities for feeding, and other related activities of daily living. To date, minimal research has examined the biomechanical effects of modified handles, or ...

Introduction: Analysis of DTI data using voxel-based analysis (VBA) is attractive because it can evaluate all regions of the brain without prior hypotheses about specific regions-of-interest or tedious region-drawing by hand. However, limitations of VBA include misregistration, blurring, and limited statistical power from multiple comparisons. A minor adaptation of VBA called tissue-specific, s...

We consider a regular embedded network composed by two curves, one of them closed, in a convex and smooth domain Ω. The two curves meet only at one point, forming angles of 120 degrees. The non-closed curve has a fixed end point on ∂Ω. We study the evolution by curvature of this network. We show that the maximal time of existence is finite and depends only on the area enclosed in the initial lo...

Good early nutritional conditions may confer a lasting fitness advantage over individuals suffering poor early conditions (a 'silver spoon' effect). Alternatively, if early conditions predict the likely adult environment, adaptive plastic responses might maximize individual performance when developmental and adult conditions match (environmental-matching effect). Here, we test for silver spoon ...

an 8-year old boy with polyarthritis and nail involvement is presented in this report. nail involvement in reiter's syndrome is a rare condition that may include painless erythematous nduration of the base of the nail fold; subungual parakeratotic scaling and thickening opacification, ridging of the nail plate.

A silver spoon effect means that individuals who develop under favourable circumstances enjoy a fitness or performance advantage later in life. While there is large empirical support for silver spoon effects acting on different life-history traits in birds, such as survival and reproduction, the evidence for the carry-over effects of rearing conditions on the quality of future plumage generatio...