BACKGROUND When added to age, CD4 count and human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) RNA alone (Restricted Index), hemoglobin, FIB-4 Index, hepatitis C virus (HCV), and estimated glomerular filtration rate improve prediction of mortality. Weighted and combined, these 7 routine clinical variables constitute the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS) Index. Because nonroutine biomarkers of inflamm...

Appropriate quantification of added usefulness offered by new markers included in risk prediction algorithms is a problem of active research and debate. Standard methods, including statistical significance and c statistic are useful but not sufficient. Net reclassification improvement (NRI) offers a simple intuitive way of quantifying improvement offered by new markers and has been gaining popu...

Estimating individual readiness of military and civilian nursing personnel for deployment to austere environments challenges the best of us. Despite decades of conflicts, crises, and disasters around the world, measuring individual readiness for deployment remains elusive. However difficult, quantifying individual readiness is critical to provide commanders and leaders with information to drive...

A metamaterial, arranged by stacking layers of planar constituents suitably shaped to be responsive to arbitrarily linearly polarized incident waves is here shown to exhibit 2D-isotropic effective negative refractive index (NRI). The general concept underlying this metamaterial design consists of closely pairing two metallic particles to accomplish, as a result of their tight coupling, both sym...

The Readiness Estimate and Deployability Index measures the level of individual deployment readiness in Army Nurse Corps officers. The primary purposes of this pilot study were to determine the psychometric properties of the measure for Army Reserve component nurses and enlisted medical personnel and to compare the reliability between groups. The convenience sample consisted of 92 subjects. Int...

BACKGROUND Health-related quality of life (QoL) has prognostic value in many cancers. A recent study found that the performance of prognostic systems for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) were improvable. We evaluated the independent prognostic value of QoL for overall survival (OS) and its ability to improve two prognostic systems'performance (Köhne and GERCOR models) for patients with mCRC....

BACKGROUND Prognostic models including age, self-rated health and prior sickness absence (SA) have been found to predict high (≥ 30) SA days and high (≥ 3) SA episodes during 1-year follow-up. More predictors of high SA are needed to improve these SA prognostic models. The purpose of this study was to investigate fatigue as new predictor in SA prognostic models by using risk reclassification me...

Bird species richness is mediated by local, regional, and historical factors, for example, competition, environmental heterogeneity, contemporary, and historical climate. Here, we related bird species richness with phylogenetic relatedness of bird assemblages, plant species richness, topography, contemporary climate, and glacial-interglacial climate change to investigate the relative importance...