BACKGROUND Our paper addresses three major public health issues: cholesterol, statins and policies to prevent cardiovascular disease. DISCUSSION Total cholesterol levels in whole populations have fallen substantially in the USA, UK and most other developed countries. This has greatly contributed to decreases in cardiovascular disease deaths. The evidence identifying diet as the major contribu...

We prove that every planar poset P of height h has dimension at most 192h + 96. This improves on previous exponential bounds and is best possible up to a constant factor. We complement this result with a construction of planar posets of height h and dimension at least (4/3)h− 2. (G. Joret) Computer Science Department, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium (P. Micek) Theoretical Compu...

Common cancers have been demarcated into 'hereditary' or 'sporadic' ('non-hereditary') types historically. Such distinctions initially arose from work identifying rare, highly penetrant germline mutations causing 'hereditary' cancer. While rare mutations are important in particular families, most cases in the general population are 'sporadic'. Twin studies have suggested that many 'sporadic' ca...

The primary role of the vascular system is to carry blood and oxygen to tissue. This task is complicated by the vastly differing needs of tissues for oxygen according to their metabolism. Moreover, the metabolic activity in a given organ, and thereby its need of blood flow and oxygen, may dramatically change in time scales varying from seconds (during the onset of muscular exercise for example)...