BACKGROUND Many neurological diseases are accompanied by an increase in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) protein concentration, which indicates dysfunction of the blood-CSF/blood-brain barrier. However, the significance CSF protein concentration of patients with cryptococcal meningitis (CM) is not fully understood. The aim of the present was to determine whether CSF protein concentrations correlat...

Global fisheries face significant challenges in the coming years due to climate change. Understanding and anticipating impacts of change is a necessity for implementing appropriate management. This study uses panel dataset individual fishing vessels examine how variation ocean temperature affects fish harvest. Using American lobster (Homarus americanus) fishery Maritimes region Canada as case s...

Many processes of interest in social science research are recorded as nominal variables with two or more categories such as employment status, occupation, political preference and self-reported health status. With panel data it is possible to analyse the transitions of individuals between different states of the outcome variable. The generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) often used to analyse n...

Gene-environment (GE) interaction has important implications in the etiology of complex diseases that are caused by a combination of genetic factors and environment variables. Several authors have developed GE analysis in the context of independent subjects or longitudinal data using a gene-set. In this paper, we propose to analyze GE interaction for discrete and continuous phenotypes in family...

Despite remarkable gains in life expectancy and declining mortality in the 21st century, in many places mostly in developing countries, adult mortality has increased in part due to HIV/AIDS or continued abject poverty levels. Moreover many factors including behavioural, socio-economic and demographic variables work simultaneously to impact on risk of mortality. Understanding risk factors of adu...

BACKGROUND Individual patient data meta-analyses (IPD-MA) are often performed using a one-stage approach-- a form of generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) for binary outcomes. We compare (i) one-stage to two-stage approaches (ii) the performance of two estimation procedures (Penalized Quasi-likelihood-PQL and Adaptive Gaussian Hermite Quadrature-AGHQ) for GLMMs with binary outcomes within the o...

Traits differentially adapt plant species to particular conditions generating compositional shifts along environmental gradients. As a result, community-scale trait values show concomitant shifts, termed trait‒environment relationships. Trait‒environment relationships are often assessed by evaluating community-weighted mean (CWM) traits observed Regression-based approaches (CWMr) assume that lo...

1. The role of individual experience vs. the use of conspecific cues on breeding dispersal decisions have seldom been determined in colonial birds. We studied causes of breeding dispersal in the lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni ), a species that breeds in colonies of variable size as well as solitarily. During a 6-year study in Spain, we gathered information on 486 subsequent breeding attempts an...

BACKGROUND In many medical studies the likelihood ratio test (LRT) has been widely applied to examine whether the random effects variance component is zero within the mixed effects models framework; whereas little work about likelihood-ratio based variance component test has been done in the generalized linear mixed models (GLMM), where the response is discrete and the log-likelihood cannot be ...