BACKGROUND Accumulating evidence suggests an increased risk of stroke after herpes zoster (HZ). This risk is elevated in immunocompromised patients. The incidence of HZ in Asia is higher than in Western countries. However, the epidemiology of HZ and HZ-related stroke among rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients in Asia remains unclear. METHODS AND RESULTS We conducted a retrospective cohort study...

In this paper, we investigate the theoretical guarantees of penalized l1-minimization (also called Basis Pursuit Denoising or Lasso) in terms of sparsity pattern recovery (support and sign consistency) from noisy measurements with non-necessarily random noise, when the sensing operator belongs to the Gaussian ensemble (i.e. random design matrix with i.i.d. Gaussian entries). More precisely, we ...

Portable wireless communication systems are increasingly in demand small sizes for human convenience. In systems, the performance, size, and unit cost very important. A band−pass filter is important to sharp cut–off frequency characteristics, selectivity systems. The has three types of techniques transmission−zero method, stub−loaded resonator, stepped impedance resonator cut−off characteristic...

OBJECTIVE To examine risk factors for injury to married women from domestic violence in Hong Kong. DESIGN Case control study. SETTING Regional public hospital, Hong Kong. PATIENTS All married women aged 18 to 60 years who attended an accident and emergency department for treatment of a domestic violence injury from January 2004 to June 2005. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Social and health chara...

This paper uses micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to document that the wage structure in West Germany was remarkably stable over the period 1984–97, with little variation over time in wage or earnings inequality among and within different skill groups. The paper investigates a number of possible explanations for the stability of the wage structure and concludes that it is attribut...

Clinical fractures predict increased mortality risk, but few studies report mortality based on prevalent radiographically defined vertebral fracture. This study examined whether radiographically defined vertebral fracture is a risk factor for mortality in older adults. The 1,580 participants in California (631 men, 949 women) were aged > or =50 years in 1992-1996. Lateral spine radiographs, and...

PURPOSE To evaluate the reliability (inter- and intra-observer variability) of 4 hip anatomies using 2-dimensional pelvic computed tomography (CT). METHODS Two-dimensional pelvic CT of 10 men and 10 women aged 33 to 89 (mean, 69) years presenting with non-orthopaedic conditions within one month were evaluated by 3 observers. The centre-edge angle of Wiberg, the Sharp angle, the acetabular dep...

This case-control study was associated with a regional register of ectopic pregnancy between 1993 and 2000 in France. It included 803 cases of ectopic pregnancy and 1,683 deliveries and was powerful enough to investigate all ectopic pregnancy risk factors. The main risk factors were infectious history (adjusted attributable risk = 0.33; adjusted odds ratio for previous pelvic infectious disease...