UNLABELLED BACKGROUND The consumption of dietary supplements is widely spread and on the rise. These dietary supplements are generally used without prescriptions, proper counseling or any awareness of their health risk. The current study aimed at analyzing the metals in 33 samples of imported dietary supplements highly consumed by the Lebanese population, using 3 different techniques, to ens...

Motivated by the need to meaningfully implement the Institute of Medicine's (IOM's) definition of health care disparity, this paper proposes statistical frameworks that lay out explicitly the needed causal assumptions for defining disparity measures. Our key emphasis is that a scientifically defensible disparity measure must take into account the direction of the causal relationship between all...

The amplification factor of dihydropyridine (DHP)/ryanodine receptors was defined as the amount of Ca2+ released from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) relative to the influx of Ca2+ through L-type Ca2+ channels in rat ventricular myocytes. The amplification factor showed steep voltage dependence at potentials negative to -10 mV but was less dependent on voltage at potentials positive to this val...

background: routine repeat testing of critical laboratory values is very common these days to increase their accuracy and to avoid reporting false or infeasible results. we figure that repeat testing of critical laboratory values has any benefits or not.   methods : we examined 2233 repeated critical laboratory values in 13 different hematology and chemistry tests including: hemoglobin, white b...

In this paper, the stress intensity factor (SIF) expression for defected butt welds containing undercut and inclined lack of penetration (LOP) subject to far-field tensile stress is derived. Some of the standards such as ISO 5817 and BS EN 25817 have specified allowable limits for the length of the undercut and LOP defects and for the height of the weld. In addition, EN 29692 standard has deter...

A priority queue, a container data structure equipped with the operations insert and delete-minimum, can re-order its input in various ways, depending both on the input and on the sequence of operations used. If a given input σ can produce a particular output τ then (σ, τ) is said to be an allowable pair. It is shown that allowable pairs on a fixed multiset are in one-to-one correspondence with...