Background: The education of undergraduate dental students in endodontics should be of high standards to enable newly graduate dentists to deal with the most commonly encountered endodontic clinical problems. Hence, the objective of this study is to evaluate radiographically the quality of root canal fillings done by undergraduate students in the College of Dentistry, King Khalid University, Sa...

OBJECTIVE Craving for benzodiazepines has never been examined as a factor of relapse after successful benzodiazepine discontinuation. In this study, we examined the predictive value of craving on benzodiazepine relapse. METHOD A stepped-care intervention trial aimed to discontinue long-term benzodiazepine use in general practice. The first step was the sending of a letter to users advising th...

Some patients with severe asthma are difficult to control and suffer from frequent exacerbations, whereas others remain stable with anti-inflammatory therapy. To investigate mechanisms of exacerbations, we compared 13 patients 20 to 51 yr of age (11 female, two male) with difficult-to-control asthma (two or more exacerbations during the previous year) and 15 patients 20 to 47 yr of age (13 fema...

Turns in microfabricated capillary electrophoresis channels generally result in degraded separation quality. To circumvent this limitation, channels were constructed with different types of turns to determine the design that minimizes turn-induced band broadening. In particular, tapered turns were created by narrowing the separation channel width before the start of a turn and widening the chan...

OBJECTIVES Targeted treatment is effective in the short term in achieving low disease activity or even remission in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The benefits of long-term targeted treatment are discussed based on the BeSt study results. METHODS The BeSt study has incorporated 7 years of targeted treatment, aiming at low disease activity (DAS =<2.4), and including both treatment in...

OBJECTIVE To document the management of and outcomes for patients receiving narcotic replacement and tapering with long-acting morphine preparations during pregnancy. DESIGN A prospective cohort study over 18 months. SETTING Northwestern Ontario. PARTICIPANTS All 600 births at Meno Ya Win Health Centre in Sioux Lookout, Ont, from January 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013, including 166 narcotic-e...

BACKGROUNDS Evaluating the efficacy of the loading and tapering dose of Phenobarbital versus oral Morphine in the management of NAS. METHODS This randomized, open-label, controlled trial was conducted on 60 neonates born to illicit drugs dependent mothers at Vali-Asr and Akbar-Abadi hospitals, Tehran, Iran, who exhibited NAS requiring medical therapy. The neonates were randomized to receive e...

BACKGROUND Cervical spinal canal tapering may increase CSF velocities and pressures. One report suggests that the cervical spinal canal tapers more steeply in patients with Chiari I than in healthy subjects. The goal of this study was to test the conclusion by measuring spinal canal tapering in another cohort of patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS Consecutive patients with scoliosis and MR imagin...

INTRODUCTION We report a case of bilateral herpetic keratitis developing after rapid oral corticosteroid tapering in a patient with pemphigus foliaceus, which was followed by unilateral neurotrophic keratitis that was treated with amniotic membrane transplantation. CASE PRESENTATION A 71-year-old Korean man developed bilateral herpetic keratitis one week after rapid tapering of systemic corti...

Likelihood approaches for large irregularly spaced spatial datasets are often very difficult, if not infeasible, to use due to computational limitations. Even when we can assume normality, exact calculations of the likelihood for a Gaussian spatial process observed at n locations requires O(n) operations. We present a version of Whittle’s approximation to the Gaussian log likelihood for spatial...