Patients requiring tracheostomies tend to have a longer length of stay due to their underlying disease. After a thorough literature search, Garrubba and colleagues found only three studies assessing the impact of multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) on tracheostomy patients on the ward. One consistent observation was the decreased time to decannulation after institution of MDT care when compared with...

Excision from the chromosome is the first step during the transfer of conjugative transposons (CTns) to a recipient. We previously showed that the excision of CTnDOT is more complex than the excision of lambdoid phages and CTns such as Tn916. The excision in vivo of CTnDOT utilizes four CTnDOT-encoded proteins, IntDOT, Xis2c, Xis2d, and Exc, and a host factor. We previously developed an in vitr...

The long-term removal of unwanted hair has become one of the most common and popular cosmetic laser treatments being performed around the world. This manuscript will review a variety of lasers and light sources that have been and are currently being used for epilation of the skin. All of the lasers and light systems currently available do work for long-term hair removal; it is the responsibilit...

Pseudo-tumoral hepatic tuberculosis is rare. It is characterized by non-specific symptoms and radiological polymorphism. Diagnosis is problematic. This article presents three cases, each clinically different from each other, that illustrate how difficult diagnosis can be. The definitive diagnosis of pseudo-tumoral hepatic tuberculosis was reached on the basis of histo-logical examination of sur...

AIMS The approach to infected cardiac devices has changed during recent decades. Optimal treatment is still a matter of debate, especially in pacemaker-dependent patients. Therefore, we investigated the management and outcome of patients with pacemaker infections in a single centre over four decades. METHODS AND RESULTS We conducted a retrospective analysis of 4212 patients and extracted thos...

OBJECTIVE To determine the relative importance of different risk factors for the development of surgical-site infections (SSIs) in orthopedic surgery with prosthetic implants. DESIGN In a cohort of 272 patients, the following possible risk factors were studied: age, gender, method of hair removal, duration of operation, surgeon, underlying illness, and nasal carriage of Staphylococcus aureus....

To address several fundamental questions regarding how multiwhisker tactile stimuli are integrated and processed by the trigeminal somatosensory system, a novel behavioral task was developed that required rats to discriminate the width of either a wide or narrow aperture using only their large mystacial vibrissae. Rats quickly acquired this task and could accurately discriminate between apertur...

In the Bay of Fundy, Atlantic sturgeon from endangered and threatened populations in the USA and Canada migrate through Minas Passage to enter and leave Minas Basin. A total of 132 sub-adult and adult Atlantic sturgeon were tagged in Minas Basin during the summers of 2010-2014 using pressure measuring, uniquely coded, acoustic transmitters with a four or eight year life span. The aim of this st...

INTRODUCTION This study was performed to observe the efficacy of a modified surgical wound dressing applied as part of decannulation wound care after tracheotomy. METHODS Eighty-four patients were randomly allocated into a traditional care group, a surgical wound dressing group, and a modified surgical wound dressing group. Each group comprised 28 patients. The following outcomes were observe...

We study the robustness properties of multiplex networks consisting of multiple layers of distinct types of links, focusing on the role of correlations between degrees of a node in different layers. We use generating function formalism to address various notions of the network robustness relevant to multiplex networks, such as the resilience of ordinary and mutual connectivity under random or t...