BACKGROUND Structural myocardial abnormalities have been extensively documented in hypothyroidism. Experimental studies in animal models have also shown involvement of thyroid hormones in gene expression of myocardial collagen. This study was planned to investigate the ability of ultrasonic tissue characterization, as evaluated by integrated backscatter (IBS), to early identify myocardial invol...

PURPOSE We aimed to analyze the treatment outcome and long-term toxicity of 70 Gy hypofractionated intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for localized prostate cancer using a customized rectal balloon. MATERIALS AND METHODS We reviewed medical records of 86 prostate cancer patients who received curative radiotherapy between January 2004 and December 2011 at our institution. Patients were de...

OBJECTIVE Obesity increases morbidity and resource utilization in sepsis patients. Sepsis transitions from early/hyper-inflammatory to late/hypo-inflammatory phase. Majority of sepsis-mortality occurs during the late sepsis; no therapies exist to treat late sepsis. In lean mice, we have shown that sirtuins (SIRTs) modulate this transition. Here, we investigated the role of sirtuins, especially ...

BACKGROUND Severe malnutrition contributes up to 50% of childhood mortality in developing countries is frequently characterised by electrolyte depletion, including low total body phosphate. During therapeutic re-feeding, electrolyte shift from extracellular to intra-cellular compartments may induce hypo-phosphataemia (hypo-P) with resultant increased morbidity and mortality. This biochemical im...

A number of studies have reported that hypo-albuminaemia is powerful predictor of subsequent mortality in ESRF patients (Lowrie 1990, Owen 1993). The precise role of comorbidity, inflammatory/infective conditions and poor nutrition in the hypo-albuminaemia and the increased mortality rate is uncertain (Kaysen 1995). There are no prospective studies demonstrating a reduction in mortality followi...

In this paper we offer a formal account of reasoning with legal cases in terms of argumentation schemes. These schemes, and undercutting attacks associated with them, are formalised as defeasible rules of inference within the ASPIC+ framework. We begin by modelling the style of reasoning with cases developed by Aleven and Ashley in the CATO project, which describes cases using factors, and then...

We extend the applicability of idempotent methods to deterministic dynamic games through the min-max distributive property. This induces a very high curse-of-complexity. A representation of the space of max-plus hypo-convex functions as a min-max linear space is used to obtain a method for attenuating this complexity growth. This is applied in a game of search and deception. The problem is form...

In rodents, insufficient thyroid hormone (TH) gestationally has adverse effects on cerebral cortex development. Comparable studies of humans examining how TH insufficiency affects cortical morphology are limited to children with congenital hypothyroidism or offspring of hypothyroxinemic women; effects on cortex of children born to women with clinically diagnosed hypothyroidism are not known. We...