OBJECTIVES This research sought to describe the association between country of birth and gallbladder disease (GBD) in Mexican Americans, identify subgroups at especially high risk, and identify risk factors that may mediate a birthplace-GBD association. DESIGN Cross-sectional. METHODS Our study population included 4157 Mexican Americans aged 20-74 who participated in the 1988-94 third Natio...

—We propose the concept of Gap Between Displays (GBD) as a component of immersion in virtual environment systems. We hypothesized that GBD may reduce users' task performance in some cases, and choosing appropriate stimuli in GBD can alleviate its negative effects. We performed two empirical experiments to test the two hypotheses. Using a four-screen CAVE™ as the experiment platform, we carefull...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Kawasaki disease (KD) is an acute systemic vasculitis in children which causes coronary arterial dilatation (CAD) and gallbladder distension (GBD). There is a dearth of investigating the relationship between the severity of KD and GBD with lipid profiles. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A total of 80 patients with 'complete KD' who were diagnosed from January 2005 to May 2009 w...

BACKGROUND We assessed the quality of Global Burden of Disease-2010 (GBD-2010) estimates of road injury deaths by comparing with government statistics for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries that report to the International Road Traffic Accident Database (IRTAD). METHODS We obtained tabulated data for 25 OECD countries that report to IRTAD and also report v...

We present protocols for threshold cryptography in the GBD public-key cryptosystem. Both threshold decryption and threshold key generation are covered, in the “honest-butcurious” setting. This shows that it is possible to perform GBD computations in a distributed manner during both key generation and decryption, without revealing the private key to any party. GBD threshold decryption is similar...

Although cirrhosis is a known risk factor for gallstones, little is known about gallbladder disease (GBD) in individuals with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. We determined the association between chronic HCV infection and GBD in a representative sample of adults in the United States. Data on HCV infection and GBD were available for 13,465 persons 20 to 74 years of age who participated in the...

We present protocols for threshold decryption and threshold key generation in the GBD public-key cryptosystem in the “honest-butcurious” setting. These allow GBD computations to be performed in a distributed manner during both key generation and decryption, without revealing the private key to any party. GBD threshold decryption is similar to El-Gamal threshold decryption. GBD threshold key gen...

Objective To discuss the relevance of heparanase and syndecan-1 and regulation of the heparanase-syndecan1 axis in the invasiveness of gallbladder carcinoma cells. Methods 1. Generation of a gallbladder cancer cell line overexpressing a heparanase (GBD-SD) transgene. 2. Western blot analysis of syndecan-1 levels of GBD-SD and control gallbladder carcinoma (GBC-SD) cells. 3. RT-PCR analysis of s...

Nanomolar concentrations of native fibronectin and its RGDS-containing cell-binding domain have previously been reported to stimulate fibroblast migration in the transmembrane (or 'Boyden chamber') assay; in contrast, the gelatin-binding domain (GBD) of fibronectin has consistently been reported to be devoid of migration-stimulating activity in this assay. We have examined the effects of fibron...