BACKGROUND & AIMS HCV-related cirrhosis is a leading risk factor for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Surveillance might detect HCC at a treatable stage. We estimated the clinical and economic consequences of a common HCC surveillance strategy in patients with HCV-related cirrhosis in the context of alternative HCC treatment strategies. METHODS With a Markov model, we examined surveillance wit...

BACKGROUND Recurrent implantation failure (RIF) following embryo transfer (ET) is a major continuing problem in IVF. Women with haemostatic defects may be at increased risk of miscarriage and preclinical pregnancy loss. The fibrinolytic system is considered, at present, the key to new thrombotic pathogenic mechanisms. Patients with unexplained recurrent miscarriage have an impairment of fibrino...

We treated 119 consecutive patients with lymphedema with complex lymphedema therapy (CLT). Lymphedema reductions after CLT averaged 62.6% in the 56 patients with one affected arm and 68.6% in the 38 patients with one affected leg. In the 23 patients with bilateral affected lower limbs, lymphedema volume decreased by 3,681 cm3 in the right leg and by 3,433 cm3 in the left leg. Due to its small n...

Data on genetic and environmental factors influencing PAI-1 levels and their consequent effect on clot lysis in black African populations are limited. We identified polymorphisms in the promoter area of the PAI-1 gene and determined their influence on PAI-1act levels and plasma clot lysis time (CLT). We also describe gene-environment interactions and the effect of urbanisation. Data from 2010 a...

BACKGROUND Previously, we demonstrated that hypofibrinolysis, a decreased capacity to dissolve a blood clot as measured with an overall clot lysis assay, increases the risk of venous thrombosis. Here, we investigated the combined effect of hypofibrinolysis with established risk factors associated with hypercoagulability. METHODS AND FINDINGS Fibrinolytic potential was determined with a plasma...

We explore the relevance of the celebrated Central Limit Theorem (CLT) of statistics to citation averages, namely, Impact Factors (IF). The CLT predicts that, first, due to random fluctuations, the range of IF values that are statistically available to a journal of size n, follows a 1/ √ n behavior. Large journals (high-n), whose IF’s vary within a narrower range, are thus penalized in IF ranki...

Consider throwing n balls at random into m urns, each ball landing in urn i with probability pi . Let S be the resulting number of singletons, i.e., urns containing just one ball. We give an error bound for the Kolmogorov distance from the distribution of S to the normal, and estimates on its variance. These show that if n, m and (pi , 1 ≤ i ≤ m) vary in such a way that supi pi = O(n−1), then S...

Immunoglobulins (Ig) play a key role in protection of fish against bacterial and viral pathogens. Atlantic salmon has three types of Ig (M, D and T), of which IgM is the main actor of the adaptive humoral immunity. Ig heavy chains are encoded with two loci and their variable regions (VR) are produced by somatic recombination of J, D and V genes. While immunological methods detect specific antib...

We apply the theory of products of random matrices to the analysis of multi-users communication channels similar to the Wyner model, that are characterized by short-range intra-cell broadcasting. We study the fluctuations of the per-cell sum-rate capacity in the non-ergodic regime and provide results of the type of central limit theorem (CLT) and large deviations (LD). Our results show that the...

It is well known that the α-stable distribution, while having no closed form density function in the general case, admits a Poisson series representation (PSR) in which the terms of the series are a function of the arrival times of a unit rate Poisson process. In our previous work we have shown how to carry out inference for regression models using this series representation, which leads to a v...