Objectives: To study the prevalence of comorbid conditions at diagnosis and during follow-up in a cohort of patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) followed prospectively over 20 years, and to identify possible early predictive factors for future comorbidities. Methods: A community-based cohort of 183 patients (mean age 52 years, 63% female) with early RA was recruited between 1985 and 1989.

The region of North Africa (NA) represents a striking locality regarding migration with several migration patterns, namely emigration in the form of labour export to Europe and North America and, to a lesser extent, to the Arab Gulf area. The latter has increased enormously in the last decade because of the political instability in most of the NA countries. The aim of the present chapter was to ex

Rationale: Atrial fibrillation (AF) increases the risk of stroke and it can be reduced by treatment with warfarin. Some patients consider that warfarin is a stressful treatment with undesired effects and the perceived barriers include unwillingness to take it. Knowledge of patients resisting warfarin treatment may be useful for the potential threat to maintaining shared decision-making in the cons

Lack of or dysfunction in osteoclasts result in osteopetrosis, a group of rare but often severe, genetic disorders affecting skeletal tissue. Increase in bone mass results in skeletal malformation and bone marrow failure that may be fatal. Many of the underlying defects have lately been characterized in humans and in animal models of the disease. In humans, these defects often involve mutations in

Following the implementation of advanced treatment procedures in radiotherapy, there is a need for dynamic dose verification in 3D. Gel dosimetry could potentially be used for such measurements. However, recently published data show that certain types of gels have a dose rate and fractionation dependence. The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using a polymer gel dosimeter for

The observation that neural grafts can induce dyskinesias has severely hindered the development of a transplantation therapy for Parkinson's disease (PD). We addressed the hypothesis that inflammatory responses within and around an intrastriatal graft containing dopamine neurons can trigger dyskinetic behaviors. We subjected rats to unilateral nigrostriatal lesions with 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)

The t(6;9)(p22;q34) chromosomal translocation is found in a subset of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The translocation results in a fusion between the nuclear phosphoprotein DEK and the nucleoporin NUP214 (previously CAN). The mechanism by which the fusion protein DEK-NUP214 contributes to leukemia development has not been identified, and disruptions of normal cellular functions by DE

Objectives: To investigate the reliability, validity and responsiveness of a new Patient-Specific Leisure Scale (PSLS), constructed to identify goals and outcomes for individual patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).Methods: Forty-nine patients with RA were used to evaluate test-retest reliability, and 100 consecutive RA patients were used for construct validity. Twenty-five RA patients, commenc

Moraxella catarrhalis (M. catarrhalis) is a human-restricted commensal of the normal bacterial flora in the upper respiratory tract of children, and - during the previous two decades - has been recognised as a true human pathogen. M. catarrhalis is the third most common pathogen causing acute otitis media in children, which is the most common reason to visit a paediatrician during childhood. Acute

Tailbiting codes encoded by feedback convolutional encoders are studied. A condition for when tailbiting will work is given and it Is described how the encoder starting state can be obtained for feedback encoders in both controller and observer canonical forms. Finally, results from a search for systematic feedback encoders that encode tailbiting codes with good decoding bit error probabilities ar

Psychological theories have traditionally assumed that moral judgment is caused by a reasoning process. This idea was challenged in two experiments. In the first participants were asked to make judgments in tasks set up to produce a conflict between intuition and reason. In the second, participants made judgments of morally questionable actions that were described either in a vividly disgusting wa

In this paper error bounds for truncated balanced linear time-varying systems in discrete time are obtained. The analysis is based on direct calculations with the time-varying observability and controllability Lyapunov inequalities. The obtained bounds in the induced l-script -norm generalize well-known error-bound formulas for time-invariant systems. The case of time-varying state-space dimension

Charge pair photogeneration was investigated by ultrafast absorption spectroscopy for different excitation photon energies in poly[3-(2(')-methoxy-5(')octylphenyl)thiophene] (POMeOPT) film with and without an external electric field. Electric field-assisted charge pair photogeneration in POMeOPT occurs from vibrationally relaxed singlet excitons during their entire lifetime and charge pair formati

Characterization of soil respiration rates and δ13C values of soil-respired CO2 are often based on measurements at a particular time of day. A study by Gower et al. (2001) in a boreal forest demonstrated diurnal patterns of soil CO2 flux using transparent measurement chambers that included the understory vegetation. It is unclear whether these diurnal patterns were solely the result of photosynthe

Popular Abstract in Swedish Prioriteringar av olika slag har alltid genomförts inom hälso- och sjukvård, vilket har inneburit att vissa verksamheter och patienter har prioriterats och andra har valts bort. Tidigare studier som har varit fokuserade på allmänhetens syn på vem eller vilka som ska prioriteras, har framförallt varit riktade till yngre och medelålders personer. I dessa studier framkommeThe aim of this thesis was to investigate older people's views and experience of prioritisation and resource allocation in health care, which is important because older people are the group that use public health care and service most. The aim was also to investigate differences in the view of prioritisation and resource allocation in relation to age, gender, housing, health-related quality of lif

Popular Abstract in Swedish Avhandlingen, som består av tre delar, handlar om olika metoder för att undersöka algebraiska begrepp med hjälp av datorberäkningar. I första delen visar vi att en viss Liealgebra inte, till skillnad från många andra Liealgebror av liknande typ, kan brytas ned i vinkelräta komponenter av en speciellt enkel typ. Andra delen handlar om vilka polynom som kan bildas genomThis thesis consists of a collection of articles all using and/or developing algorithmic methods for the investigation of different algebraic structures. Part A concerns orthogonal decompositions of simple Lie algebras. The main result of this part is that the symplectic Lie algebra C3 has no orthogonal decomposition of so called monomial type. This was achieved by developing an algorithm for fin

Churches and elite in Trøndelag: A review of Jan Brendalsmos dissertation "Kirkebygg og kirkebyggere. Bygherrer i Trøndelag ca. 1000-1600" (Churuch buildings and church builders in Trøndelag ca. 1000-1600), Oslo 2006.