Cardiovascular disorders are now the leading cause of death in most Western societies. In England and Wales ischaemic heart disease currently accounts for 27%, and cerebrovascular disorders for 13%, of all deaths (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1980). In clinical practice atherosclerosis is the commonest and most important arterial disease, but many other vascular disorders are reco...

Gingivitis and periodontitis are the two most common forms of oral emerging pathologies and recently the attention of researchers has focused on the relationship between abovementioned local pathologies and systemic chronic diseases. Especially several case-control and cohort studies have reported the contribution of obesity and type 2 diabetes due to their alarming spread in our western societ...

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), most studied types are Ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD), are related to an immunological imbalance of the intestinal mucosa, mainly associated with cells of the adaptive immune system, which respond against self-antigens producing chronic inflammatory conditions in these patients1. As CD is a prevalent and very expensive medical condition, its ...

In the same way that medicine, science, the media and many other social institutions shape how individuals experience and interpret everyday life in contemporary western societies, the criminal justice system broadly and its laws and experts specifically presents a unique social environment, imbued with normative processes and procedures that sociologically reflect broader systemic mores, belie...

Recently, researchers have endeavored to extend cultural perspectives of collective remembering by examining communicative or living historical memory (collective memories that emerge from informal communication between ordinary people). The current study examined the content and subjective evaluation open-ended nominations events provided samples 39 societies. Results showed Western societies ...

Using Western theories and perspectives as models, this chapter discusses the cultural interpretation of dying and death in a non-Western society. Also discussed, based on the historical, political, and cultural history of Nigeria, are the implications of dying and death for death preparation, the problem of deathcausation diseases without external symptoms, and the special plight of widows. Su...

We saw above the substantial increase in output per person that occurred in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, and the rapid spread of the new techniques of the Industrial Revolution to other countries in Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. We also saw in Figure 1 in chapter 6 that the increase in output led to at least modest gains in real wages by the 1840s. Yet one of the most a...

Advertisement, omnipresent in the media and daily life, is constitutive of a widespread cultural practice, circulating commodities as well as knowledge. While research studies have long challenged the ways in which advertising and marketing campaigns in western countries employ gendered imagery that objectify women and reinforce power differences between the sexes in order to sell their product...

In this chapter, I examine whether information ethics is culture relative. If it is, different approaches to information ethics are required in different cultures and societies. This would have major implications for the current, predominantly Western approach to information ethics. If it is not, there must be concepts and principles of information ethics that have universal validity. What woul...

Discovering whether social capital endowments in modern societies have been subjected or not to a process of gradual erosion is one of the most debated topics in recent economic literature. This new stream of research has been inaugurated by Putnam’s pioneering studies about social capital trends in the United States. Recently, a considerable work by Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) put a new empha...