OBJECTIVE To investigate the costs and effects of long-term oral anticoagulant treatment after myocardial infarction. DESIGN Cost-effectiveness analysis, based on a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. SETTING Sixty Dutch hospitals. PATIENTS A total of 3404 hospital survivors of acute myocardial infarction randomized within a median period of 4 days after discharge to eithe...

[1] African climate is changing at rates unprecedented in the Late Holocene with profound implications for tropical ecosystems and the global hydrologic cycle. Understanding the specific climate drivers behind tropical ecosystem change is critical for both future and paleomodeling efforts. However, linkages between climate and vegetation in the tropics have been extremely controversial. The Nor...

Children and adolescents on oral anticoagulation therapy (OAT) present special challenges in terms of rapid fluctuations in International Normalised Ratio (INR) values, interruption in daily life due to frequent hospital/doctor visits, and difficulties and pain in the performance of venepuncture. Optimised management of OAT improves the quality of treatment, potentially accomplished by new meth...

BACKGROUND The "fitness" of an infectious pathogen is defined as the ability of the pathogen to survive, reproduce, be transmitted, and cause disease. The fitness of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) relative to drug-susceptible tuberculosis is cited as one of the most important determinants of MDRTB spread and epidemic size. To estimate the relative fitness of drug-resistant tuberculosi...

The primary science instrument of the CloudSat Mission is the Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR). The CPR is a W-band (94 GHz) nadir looking radar (e.g. Tanelli, 2008) with the purpose of measuring backscattered power from hydrometeors (clouds and precipitation). Although the CPR contains an internal calibration system, external calibration using geophysical sources with known normalized radar cross-s...

We present a novel investigation on the enhancement of phase noise in coherent optical transmission system due to electronic chromatic dispersion compensation. Two types of equalizers, including a time domain fiber dispersion finite impulse response (FD-FIR) filter and a frequency domain blind look-up (BLU) filter are applied to mitigate the chromatic dispersion in a 112-Gbit/s polarization div...

Most anticoagulated patients can be safely managed for routine dental treatment in the outpatient setting by following appropriate guidelines. Management should be based on the present level of anticoagulation as assessed by tests, in particular the international normalised ratio (INR), which should be carried out as close to the intervention as possible. A philosophy of minimal, if any, altera...

Self-management is safe and reliable in patients with long-term oral anticoagulation (OAC). However, no study has yet assessed the safety and efficacy of OAC self-management in elderly patients with major thromboembolic and haemorrhagic complications as primary outcomes. In this multi-centre, open, randomised controlled trial, patients aged 60 years or more were randomised into the self-managem...

BACKGROUND Treatment of patients with excessive anticoagulation is routinely done by intravenous phytonadione (vitamin K1). Oral administration of phytonadione has been shown to be an effective alternative to the intravenous route, but these methods have never been compared directly. Our objective was to compare efficacy and safety of intravenous vs oral phytonadione treatment in patients with ...

During treatment with vitamin K antagonists, International Normalized Ratios (INR) are determined periodically to maintain a therapeutic level of anticoagulation. We evaluated two existing methods for therapeutic quality control (linear interpolation and equidivision), with regard to their validity and reproducibility. In addition, we proposed and evaluated a (hybrid) method that takes into acc...