OBJECTIVE Our aim was to determine the prevalence of fibromyalgia syndrome (FS) in chronic haemodialysis (HD) patients and to identify possible links between FS and various clinical and laboratory parameters. METHODS We studied 122 chronic HD patients and 89 healthy age- and sex-matched controls, classified according to the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) classification criteria for FS...

Rapid variations of the environmental energy caused by ultrashort laser pulses have induced phase transitions in carbon allotropes, therefore bringing the promise of revealing new carbon phases. Here, by exposing polycrystalline graphite to 25 fs laser pulses at 4 J/cm(2) fluence under standard air atmosphere, we demonstrated the synthesis of translucent micrometer-sized structures carrying dia...

Computational Intelligence (CI) has three main foundations: Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computation (EC) and Fuzzy Systems (FS). Collaborating systems based on these models have been built and installed in prototypes and successful consumer products. However, creativity still is a main human task, in great part due to the presence of subjective values and psychological / emotional responses i...

The paper continues the study of differential Banach *algebras AS and FS of operators associated with symmetric operators S on Hilbert spaces H. The algebra AS is the domain of the largest *-derivation δS of B(H) implemented by S and the algebra FS is the closure of the set of all finite rank operators in AS with respect to the norm ‖A‖ = ‖A‖+‖δS(A)‖. When S is selfadjoint, FS is the domain of ...

We used water and human skin tissue to compare the surgical potential of 100-fs and 200-ps laser pulses. For investigation of threshold behavior of 100-fs and 200-ps pulses, we use water as a model for tissue. In addition to having a lower threshold, we find that energy deposition is much more consistent with 100-fs pulses. We also compared 100-fs and 200-ps laser pulse effects on the surface a...

The identification of parathyroid gland tissue and its distinction from surrounding structures such as thyroidgland, lymphoid, fibroadipose, and, rarely, thymic tissues on frozen section (FS) may be challenging owingto freezing artifact and small biopsy sent for FS. Intraoperative cytology (IC) provides valuable complementary morphologic details. We evaluated a case by IC alone, followed by int...

MOTIVATION Frameshifting (FS) indels and nonsense (NS) variants disrupt the protein-coding sequence downstream of the mutation site by changing the reading frame or introducing a premature termination codon, respectively. Despite such drastic changes to the protein sequence, FS indels and NS variants have been discovered in healthy individuals. How to discriminate disease-causing from neutral F...

BACKGROUND The renal actions of brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) in congestive heart failure (CHF) are associated with increased diuresis and natriuresis, preserved glomerular filtration rate (GFR), and lack of activation of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS). In contrast, diuretic-induced natriuresis may be associated with reduced GFR and RAAS activation. The objective of this stud...

In the striatal microcircuit, fast-spiking (FS) interneurons have an important role in mediating inhibition onto neighboring medium spiny (MS) projection neurons. In this study, we combined computational modeling with in vitro and in vivo electrophysiological measurements to investigate FS cells in terms of their discharge properties and their synaptic efficacies onto MS neurons. In vivo firing...