OBJECTIVE To demonstrate the potential of the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) for the calculation of a performance measure for eye exams in the diabetic population using Veterans Health Administration (VA) administrative data. DESIGN We calculated a 1-year HEDIS-defined patient denominator and three alternative denominators that considered coding factors in identifying a...

Obesity negatively affects multiple metabolic pathways, but little is known about the impact of obesity on vitamin A (VA)[retinol (ROL)], a nutrient that regulates expression of genes in numerous pathways essential for human development and health. We demonstrate that obese mice, generated from a high fat diet (HFD) or by genetic mutations (i.e., ob/ob; db/db), have greatly reduced ROL levels i...

Morphological characteristics of 108 cases of uni- and bilateral aplasia of the vertebral artery (VA) in reports or images of retrospective studies, including one recent case, published between 1967 and 2016 are analyzed. Incidence, gender, persistence of carotid-vertebrobasilar anastomosis (CVBA), associated with other vascular variants, and vascular pathology in each group of uni- and bilater...

A vertebral artery (VA) terminating in a posterior inferior cerebellar artery (PICA) is often considered to be a normal variation associated with VA hypoplasia. We aimed to investigate the clinical significance of this cerebrovascular variant. A total of 80 patients with clinically evident cerebrovascular events in posterior circulation were examined by duplex sonography and magnetic resonance ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate changes in visual acuity (VA) over time in patients with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) and mutations in the CEP290 gene. METHODS Visual acuity was determined at the initial and most recent visits of 43 patients with LCA and CEP290 mutations. The main outcome measures included the best-corrected VA at the initial and most recent visits, as well as the correlation betwe...

Human Adenovirus type 5 encodes two short RNA polymerase III transcripts, the virus-associated (VA) RNAI and VA RNAII, which can adopt stable hairpin structures that resemble micro-RNA precursors. The terminal stems of the VA RNAs are processed into small RNAs (mivaRNAs) that are incorporated into RISC. It has been reported that VA RNAI has two transcription initiation sites, which produce two ...

Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA Biology Department, Reed College, Portland OR, USA Department of Statistics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA RedOwl Analytics, San Francisco, CA, USA Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA Center ...