INTRODUCTION Biliary atresia (BA) is a fatal disease in children. Its main pathological feature is progressive immune-mediated cholangiopathy. Interleukin (IL)-12, IL-18, and interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) play important roles in various immunological diseases. THE OBJECTIVE was to investigate whether these serum markers were associated with clinical outcome in BA. METHODS Serum levels of IL-...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare the outcome of 3 months vs. 18 months of amiodarone treatment after atrial fibrillation (AF) conversion in patients who experienced the first episode of persistent AF. METHODS We included 51 patients who experienced the first episode of persistent AF receiving amiodarone (600 mg) daily for 4-6 weeks. If AF persisted, electrical cardioversion (EC...

BACKGROUND Effective vaccination against HPV 16 and HPV 18 to prevent cervical cancer will require a high level of sustained protection against infection and precancerous lesions. Our aim was to assess the long-term efficacy, immunogenicity, and safety of a bivalent HPV-16/18 L1 virus-like particle AS04 vaccine against incident and persistent infection with HPV 16 and HPV 18 and their associate...

The aim of the 'Uncertain Population of Europe'(UPE) project was to compute long-term stochastic (probabilistic) population forecasts for 18 European countries. We developed a general methodology for constructing predictive distributions for fertility, mortality and migration. The assumptions underlying stochastic population forecasts can be assessed by analysing errors in past forecasts or mod...

Apart from IDF, term frequencies are also important and we would like to incorporate them into our scoring function. From now on, we will treat Aj as a random variable that denotes the number of occurrences of term j in a document. So, what should P (Aj = a) and P (Aj = a|Rq = y) be? In other words, how do we model the distributions of these random variables? Here we have two options: continuou...

Literature on mother-child feeding interactions during the transition to self-feeding in preterm populations is lacking, particularly through observational methods. The present research study aims to look at the longitudinal patterns of mother-toddler feeding interactions, comparing preterm and full term dyads. To this end, a multi-method approach was used to collect data from 27 preterm to 20 ...

The aim of the study was to examine the stimulatory effect of the inflammatory agent lipopolysaccharide (LPS) on the capacity of human term placenta to secrete interleukin (IL)-15 and IL-18. Isolated placental cotyledons from normal human term deliveries were dually perfused for ten hours with perfusion medium alone (n=5) or with perfusion medium containing LPS (1 microg/kg perfused placental t...