BACKGROUND The accuracy of echocardiographic parameters of right ventricular (RV) function has not been sufficiently validated in patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH). The aim of this study was to evaluate whether echocardiographic measurements reliably reflect RV systolic function in PH using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI)-derived RV ejection fraction (RVEF) as a gold standard....

Many elections specialists take seriously V.O.Key’s hypothesis (1966) that much voting is retrospective: citizens reward good performance by becoming more likely to vote for the incumbent and punish bad performance by becoming less likely. Earlier (Bendor, Siegel, and Kumar 2005) we formalized Key’s verbal theory. Our model shows that people endogenously develop partisan voting tendencies, even...

Purpose: Mesh technique is the standard for inguinal hernia repair because of less recurrence, but it is inferior or equal to sutured technique in case of other post-operative complications such as chronic pain. This clinical trial set out to compare these two techniques. Materials and Methods: A total number of 322 cases of unilateral inguinal hernia in participants older than 18 years old wer...

OBJECTIVES To measure the importance of religion among nursing home residents, describe their use of religious coping strategies, and examine the association between religiousness, religious coping, and psychological well-being. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING Two nursing facilities in Boston, Massachusetts. PARTICIPANTS One hundred forty cognitively intact to moderately impaired lo...

4 Per Alström, Keith N. Barnes, Urban Olsson, F. Keith Barker, Paulette Bloomer, 5 Aleem Ahmed Khan, Masood Ahmed Qureshi, Alban Guillaumet, Pierre-André Crochet, 6 Peter G. Ryan 7 8 a Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese 9 Academy of Sciences, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, P. R. China 10 b Swedish Species Information Centre, Swedish Univer...

BACKGROUND Menstrually related migraine (MRM) affects more than half of female migraineurs. Because such migraines are often predictable, they provide a suitable target for treatment in the mild pain phase. The present study was designed to provide prospective data on the efficacy of almotriptan for treatment of MRM. METHODS Premenopausal women with MRM were randomized to almotriptan (N = 74)...

BACKGROUND Individuals differ in their blood pressure (BP) response to changes in dietary sodium (Na+) intake. It is possible that differences in BP responses to dietary Na+ are influenced by genes. METHODS A total of 35 older (62.9 +/- 1.2 years) hypertensive subjects had their mean arterial blood pressure (MABP) determined after 8 days of low (20 mmol/day) and high (200 mmol/day) Na+ intake...

In addition to its central role controlling systemic calcium homeostasis, the extracellular calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) can be found onmultiple cell types not associated with controlling plasma calcium. The endocrine pancreas is one such tissue, and it is apparent that the receptor plays an important role in regulating b-cell function. During exocytosis, divalent cations are coreleased with...

In this paper we show that symmetric Venn diagrams for n sets exist for every prime n, settling an open question. Until this time, n = 11 was the largest prime for which the existence of such diagrams had been proven. We show that the problem can be reduced to finding a symmetric chain decomposition, satisfying a certain cover property, in a subposet of the Boolean lattice Bn, and prove that su...

A physically based duality theory for first order elliptic systems is shorn to be of central importance in connection with the Galerkin finite element solution of these systems. Using this theory in conjunction with a certain hypothesis concerning approximation spaces, optimal error estimates for Galerkin type approximations are demonstrated. An example of a grid which satisfies the hypothesis ...