The analyses of observational longitudinal studies involving concurrent changes in treatment and medical conditions present difficulties because of the multitude of directions of potential relationships: past medication influences current symptoms; past symptoms influence current medication; and current medication is associated with current symptoms. In the context of a long-term study of non-r...

Understanding the mechanisms of phytoplankton community assembly is a fundamental issue of aquatic ecology. Here, we use field data from transitional (e.g. coastal lagoons) and coastal water environments to decode patterns of phytoplankton size distribution into organization and adaptive mechanisms. Transitional waters are characterized by higher resource availability and shallower well-mixed w...

BACKGROUND The transitional-CpG sites between weakly methylated genes and densely methylated retroelements are overmethylated in the gastric mucosa infected with Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) and they are undermethylated in the gastric cancers depending on the level of loss of heterozygosity (LOH) events. This study delineated the transitional-CpG methylation patterns of CpG-island-containing...

An understanding of the articular cartilage degenerative process is necessary for the prevention and treatment of joint disease. The present study aimed to examine how long-term immobilization-induced cartilage degeneration is aggravated by remobilization. Sixty 8-week-old male Wistar rats were used in this study. The unilateral knee joint was immobilized using an external fixator for 8 weeks. ...

Adverse events commonly occur during hospital-to-home transitions and cause substantial morbidity. This study evaluated the effectiveness of Fast Forward Rounds (FFR), a novel educational intervention that aims to foster awareness of the essential elements of transitional care in 3rd-year medical students. FFR consists of two 90-minute sessions using lectures, an interactive video, small-group ...

UNLABELLED Lumbosacral transitional vertebrae can alter the biomechanics of weight transfer at the affected spinal segment. Low-back pain may result. This study assessed what skeletal scintigraphy reveals about stress associated with a lumbosacral transitional vertebra in young patients with low-back pain. METHODS The study population included 48 patients (30 male, 18 female; age range, 6-19 ...

Transitional speech units for American English are proposed and constructed via assimilation of active articulatory features. The effectiveness of a feature-based system exploiting the transitional speech units is demonstrated in evaluation experiments, where the new system with use of quadratic regressive states is shown to achieve error rate reduction of 21% compared with the system using onl...

Four infants with myocardial dysfunction associated with a persistent transitional circulation were given dopamine infusions in addition to standard treatment. The condition of each improved strikingly with rapid diminution in heart size as judged by chest x-ray. Dopamine has a place in the management of the sick infant with a persistent transitional circulation.

Following cystectomy for transitional cell carcinoma a 63 year old woman developed recurrent tumours in the upper urinary tract and ileal conduit, suggesting that malignant transitional cells can auto-implant in ileal epithelium. This phenomenon has not been previously reported. We illustrate the value of retrograde urogram via an ileal conduit following cystectomy for cancer.