The data from an epidemiological study on multiple sclerosis in Australia have been analysed to determine the relation between the prevalence of the disease and educational level, and the association between level of disability and employment status. There was a significantly higher frequency of multiple sclerosis in those who left school at an older age and achieved a higher educational level....

OBJECTIVES The University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test, a test of olfactory function that is widely used by otolaryngologists, geriatricians, and neurologists, has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In some instances, cultural and socioeconomic factors have necessitated changes in the odorant items or the response alternatives to make the test scores congruent with N...

Vietnam has experienced rapid economic growth following the transition, which began in the mid 1980s, from a planned agriculture based economy to a more market orientated one. In this paper, the associations between socioeconomic variables and mortality for 41,000 adults in Northern Vietnam followed from January 1999 to March 2008 are estimated using Cox's proportionally hazard models. Also, we...

Food security has been identified as an important issue for elderly people's quality of life and ageing in place. A food security index composed of three indicators (food intake, food quality and food affordability) was developed to measure the food security status of community-living elderly people. Food security was then examined among community-living elderly in the central urban districts o...

An earlier study (Lane & Albee, 1963) reported that school-age children who later become schizophrenic adults show a significant decline in intelligence-test performance between early and late childhood. Because a control group of 872 children from the same school system showed a slight gain in IQ score on the same two tests taken at the same ages, it was concluded that the decline in IQ repres...

Our ability to regulate behavior based on past experience has thus far been examined using single movements. However, natural behavior typically involves a sequence of movements. Here, we examined the effect of previous trial type on the concurrent planning of sequential saccades using a unique paradigm. The task consisted of two trial types: no-shift trials, which implicitly encouraged the con...

A pseudo-strain energy function (pseudo-SEF) describing the biomechanical properties of large conduit arteries under the influence of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) tone is proposed. In contrast to previous models that include the effects of smooth muscle contraction through generation of an active stress, in this study we consider the vascular muscle as a structural element whose contribution to...

The precise function of the supplementary eye field (SEF) is poorly understood. Although electrophysiological and functional imaging studies are important for demonstrating when SEF neurones are active, lesion studies are critical to establish the functions for which the SEF is essential. Here we report a series of investigations performed on an extremely rare individual with a highly focal les...

Browsing and grazing ruminants are thought to differ in the degree their rumen contents are stratified-which may be due to different characteristics of their respective forages, to particular adaptations of the animals, or both. However, this stratification is difficult to measure in live animals. The papillation of the rumen has been suggested as an anatomical proxy for stratification-with eve...

PURPOSE The auditory steady-state evoked response (ASSR) is an evoked potential which provides a sensitive measure of the effects of general anaesthetics on the brain. We used pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic (PK-PD) modelling to compare the effects of sufentanil on the amplitude of the ASSR with its effect on spectral edge frequency (SEF) of the electroencephalogram. METHODS Nine patients sch...