Periventricular leukomalacia is the predominant injury in the preterm infant leading to cerebral palsy. Oxygen exposure may be an additional cause of brain injury in these infants. In this study, we investigated pathways of maturation-dependent oligodendrocyte (OL) death induced by hyperoxia in vitro and in vivo. Developing and mature OLs were subjected to 80% oxygen (0-24 h). Lactate dehydroge...

It has been reported that ingestion of cocoa or chocolate reduces blood pressure in the subjects with hypertension. To clarify the hypotensive activity of cocoa, we carried out the research on microcirculation using intravital microscopic technique. First, we estimated the influence of repeated treatment of cocoa on microcirculation. Male rats fed normal diet (ND) or 15% fat containing high fat...

Alternative Estimation Procedures to OLS We have seen that OLS does a nice job in model estimation when the CLRM assumptions are met. We have also seen that violations of the CLRM lead to inefficiency and estimators that are not BLUE. We have also seen that the model y=Xβ+ε can be transformed to produce estimators that are BLUE. We now consider additional estimation techniques to least squares....

There are two broad classes of models used to address the econometric problems caused by skewness in data commonly encountered in health care applications: (1) transformation to deal with skewness (e.g., ordinary least square (OLS) on ln(y)); and (2) alternative weighting approaches based on exponential conditional models (ECM) and generalized linear model (GLM) approaches. In this paper, we en...

Relative performance evaluation has been suggested as a means to overcome information asymmetry between regulators and organizations when assessing e ciency. By comparing similar organizations the relationship between costs and e€ ort can be better isolated. The English Department of Health (DoH) has undertaken relative performance evaluation in comparing the unit costs of acute hospitals usin...

The asymptotic efficiency of OLS and IV estimators is examined in a simple dynamic structural model with a constant and two explanatory variables: the lagged dependent variable and another autoregressive variable, which may also include lagged or instantaneous feedbacks from the dependent variable. The parameter values are such that all variables are stationary. The asymptotic efficiency of OLS...