BACKGROUND Cognitive dysfunction affects up to 65% of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and progresses over time. Natalizumab has been shown to be superior to placebo in preserving cognition for the first two years of therapy. OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study are to understand the impact of natalizumab on cognition beyond two years of therapy and to investigate whether baseline characte...

Checkpointing is one of the commonly used techniques to provide fault tolerance in distributed systems so that the system can operate even if one or more components have failed. However, mobile computing systems are constrained by low bandwidth, mobility, lack of stable storage, frequent disconnections and limited battery life. Hence checkpointing protocols which have fewer checkpoints are pref...

The search for the genetic foundation of multiple sclerosis (MS) severity remains elusive. It is, in fact, controversial whether MS severity is a stable feature that predicts future disability progression. If MS severity is not stable, it is unlikely that genotype decisively determines disability progression. An alternative explanation tested here is that the apparent instability of MS severity...

Background: Developing more accessible stop smoking services (SSS) is important, particularly for reaching smokers from socio-economically deprived groups who are more likely to smoke and less likely to quit in comparison to their more affluent counterparts. A drop-in mobile SSS (MSSS) was piloted across 13 locations in socio-economically deprived areas of Nottingham. Methods: Semi-structured t...

Mobile computing systems are made up of different components among which Mobile Support Stations (MSSs) play a key role. This paper proposes an efficient MSS-based non-blocking coordinated checkpointing scheme for mobile computing environment. In the scheme suggested nearly all aspects of checkpointing and their related overheads are forwarded to the MSSs and as a result the workload of Mobile ...

BACKGROUND The clinical course of multiple sclerosis (MS) evolves over many years. Its prognosis is highly variable among affected individuals, i.e. while some suffer from early severe disabilities, others remain ambulatory and functional for many years. We used Multiple Sclerosis Severity Score (MSSS) and the new classification for MS severity Herbert et al. introduced in 2006 according to MSS...

OBJECTIVE Multiple sclerosis is now more common among minority ethnic groups in the UK but little is known about their experiences, especially in advanced stages. We examine disease progression, symptoms and psychosocial concerns among Black Caribbean (BC) and White British (WB) people severely affected by MS. DESIGN Mixed methods study of 43 BC and 43 WB people with MS (PwMS) with an Expande...

Among the astrophysical systems targeted by LISA, stars on relativistic orbits around massive black holes (MBHs) are particularly promising sources. Unfortunately, the prediction for the number and characteristics of such sources suffers from many uncertainties. Stellar dynamical Monte Carlo simulations of the evolution of galactic nucleus models allow more realistic estimates of these quantiti...

A possible measurement of the top quark mass by an energy scan of the tf threshold region at e+ecolliders of fi = 250-500 GeV is discussed. With an integrated luminosity of 1 fb-’ devoted to the energy scan, a top quark msss of about 150 GeV can be determined with an accuracy of M 0.3 GeV, with a comparable systematic uncertainty arising from the few % errors in the cy, measurement at LEP-I. Th...