Background: Levels of plasma brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) have been shown to be elevated in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) especially in connection with cor pulmonale (CP) and the late stages of the disease. BNP is also raised in left sided heart failure which sometimes coincides with COPD. Whether BNP is elevated in subjects with mild-moderate stable COPD and normal left ventricu

Organisms have evolved the ability to tolerate toxic substances in their environments, often by producing metabolic enzymes that efficiently detoxify the toxicant. Inorganic arsenic is one of the most toxic and carcinogenic substances in the environment, but many organisms, including humans, metabolise inorganic arsenic to less toxic metabolites. This multistep process produces mono-, di-, and tri

Background: Modern anaesthesia workstations are reassuringly tight and are equipped with effective gas monitoring, thus providing good opportunities for low/minimal flow anaesthesia. A prerequisite for effective low flow anaesthesia is the possibility to rapidly increase and decrease gas concentrations in the circle system, thereby controlling the depth of anaesthesia. Methods: We studied the wash

With peroral levodopa treatment, a majority of patients develop motor fluctuations and dyskinesia already within a few years of therapy. Device-aided Parkinson (PD) therapies refer to deep brain stimulation (DBS), levodopa-carbidopa intestinal gel infusion (LCIG), and subcutaneous infusion of the dopamine agonist apomorphine and represent effective strategies counteracting motor fluctuations and d

Microseismic monitoring of hydrofrac is an actively developing technology utilizing various acquizition arrays. In this paper we consider processing of microseismic data recorded by specific surface network geometry-patch arrays (far separated local receiver groups). The project aim is to produce an optimal partial stacking of the data within patches for improving a signal to noise ratio for micro

Income diversification is considered one of the important household strategies for securing rural livelihoods. We investigate its patterns and determinants using data on 1,747 farm households collected in 2007-2008 from six regions in rural Senegal and Kenya. The empirical investigation shows that the regional variation in income diversification does not follow any clear patterns, with push and pu

What are the pedagogical impacts of internationalisation on the development of higher education in Europe? How can we proceed in this process and take a pedagogical stance on the issue? This theoretical article is partly based on a series of empirical studies, conducted by the author, investigating students' and teachers' experiences and understanding of an internationalised educational context in

Geometrically designed III-V nanowire arrays are promising candidates for disruptive optoelectronics due to the possibility of obtaining a strongly enhanced absorption resulting from nanophotonic resonance effects. With normally incident light on such vertical nanowire arrays, the absorption spectra exhibit peaks that originate from excitation of HE1m waveguide modes in the constituent nanowires.

Soft particles such as polymeric microgels can form ultra-dense phases, where the average center-to-center distance a s can be smaller than the initial unperturbed particle diameter σ 0, due to their ability to interpenetrate and compress. However, despite of the effort devoted to microgels at ultrahigh densities, we know surprisingly little about their response to their environment at effective v

The excitation intensity dependent carrier dynamics of blends with PC[70]BM of three new medium-band gap conjugated polymers with central chalcogen heteroatoms, PBDTfDTBX (X = O, T(Sulphur), Se) were studied. The PBDTfDTBX polymers (Poly[4,8-bis(5-(2-butyloctyl)thiophene-2-yl)benzo[1,2-b;4,5-b′]dithiophene-alt-4,7-bis(4-(2-ethylhexyl)-2-thienyl)-dithieno[3′,2′:3,4;2″,3″:5,6]benzo[1,2-c][1,2,5] fur

The aim of the study was to assess possible relationships between adipocyte fatty acid-binding protein (FABP4) and total body fat (TBF), abdominal fat, body fat distribution, aerobic fitness, blood pressure, cardiac dimensions and the increase in body fat over 2 years in a community sample of children. A cross-sectional study was used in a community sample of 170 (92 boys and 78 girls) children ag

BACKGROUND: National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the h

Coreference resolution is the identification of phrases that refer to the same entity in a text. Current techniques to solve coreferences use machine-learning algorithms, which require large annotated data sets. Such annotated Resources are no tavailable for most languages today. In this paper, we describe a method for solving coreferences for Swedish and German using distant supervision that does

Introduction: International guidelines recommend a bundle of care, including targeted temperature management (TTM), in post cardiac arrest survivors. Aside from a few small surveys in different European countries, adherence to the European Resuscitation Council (ERC) and European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) recommendations are unknown. Methods: This international European telephone

Magnetization Transfer Contrast (MTC) and Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) experiments measure the transfer of magnetization from molecular protons to the solvent water protons, an effect that becomes apparent as an MRI signal loss ("saturation"). This allows molecular information to be accessed with the enhanced sensitivity of MRI. In analogy to Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS),

Background: Early identification of predictors for a poor long-term outcome in patients who survive the initial phase of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) may facilitate future clinical research, the process of care and information provided to relatives. The aim of this study was to determine the association between variables available from the patient's history and status at intensive care ad