AIMS Little is known regarding temporal trends in mortality attributed to heart failure (HF) from a population perspective. The aim of this study was to assess the mortality related to HF as an underlying cause during the last 20 years in seven European countries. METHODS AND RESULTS The number of deaths with HF as the underlying cause was collected in seven European states: Germany, Greece, ...

Evidence suggests that climate change dynamics have been occurring in the northern latitudes for the past two and a half decades. The CENTURY ecosystem model was used for a set of simulations related to the carbon dynamics of interior Alaska taiga forest types. The functional dynamics of three age-classes (young, middle, and mature) of three ecosystem types (white spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) ...

BACKGROUND Early diagnosis of odontogenic cysts due to their silent progression is always a challenging problem for clinicians. OBJECTIVES The current study aimed to evaluate the frequency of odontogenic cysts and related factors in a selected Iranian population. PATIENTS AND METHODS The current cross-sectional study was conducted on 312 patients' recorded data in Taleghani Hospital, Tehran...

OBJECTIVE/HYPOTHESIS The beneficial effect of intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) on reducing the prevalence of postirradiated sudden deafness (PISD) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) survivors has never been mentioned. This study investigated the evolution of PISD in NPC survivors during the past two decades. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective study. METHODS Of the 3,206 NPC patients who under...

OBJECTIVE Candidate gene association studies and genome-wide association studies (GWAs) have identified a large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) loci affecting susceptibility to rheumatoid arthritis (RA). However, for the same locus, some studies have yielded inconsistent results. To assess all the available evidence for association, we performed a meta-analysis on previously pu...

Trachoma and onchocerciasis are the two major infectious causes of blindness worldwide. Twenty years ago, the possibility of achieving worldwide and long-term control of these ancient scourges seemed remote and existing control programmes were deemed to have limited prospects. The picture is very different today: large-scale interventions to control both diseases are not only expanding, but con...

OBJECTIVE To study current epidemiological and clinical features of adult renal cancer in Senegal and the evolution of these features over the two past decades. PATIENTS AND METHODS We conducted a retrospective ten years study (2000-2009) that analyzed all the renal cell cancer in adult admitted in the urology department and the pathology department of the university teaching hospital Aristid...

nasoalveolar molding represents a paradigm shift from traditional presurgical orthopedics in the care of cleft lip and palate patients which has been applied increasingly in the past two decades. this article is a review of recent literature apropos of objectives, appliances, complications and short and long term effects of this technique.

BACKGROUND Limited research is focused on suicides in children aged below 15 years. AIMS To analyse worldwide suicide rates in children aged 10-14 years in two decades: 1990-1999 and 2000-2009. METHOD Suicide data for 81 countries or territories were retrieved from the World Health Organization Mortality Database, and population data from the World Bank data-set. RESULTS In the past two d...

CONTEXT Compared with the Latin American average, adolescent fertility is high in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, countries that also have high poverty levels and poor access to reproductive health care. METHODS For each country, data were drawn from four national health surveys conducted between 1987 and 2007, and analysis focused on trends in sexual and reproductive behavior...