An interesting feature of type IIB flux compactifications is the natural presence of strongly warped regions or ‘throats’. These regions allow for a 5d Randall-Sundrum model interpretation with a large hierarchy between the UV and IR brane. We show that, in the 5d description, the flux stabilization of this hierarchy (or, equivalently, of the brane-to-brane distance) can be understood as an imp...

OBJECTIVE To help facilitate economic evaluations of oncology treatments, we mapped responses on cancer-specific instrument to generic preference-based measures. METHODS Cancer patients (n = 367) completed one cancer-specific instrument, the FACT-G, and two preference-based measures, the EQ-5D and SF-6D. Responses were randomly divided to form development (n = 184) and cross-validation (n = 1...

OBJECTIVES The purposes of this study were to analyse and compare aspects of validity (concurrent and discriminant) of the two widely used indirect utility instruments, the EuroQol-5D (EQ-5D) and the Short Form-6D (SF-6D) in a representative cohort of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS Five hundred and eighty-three consecutive adult patients (435 women, 148 men) with RA and refe...

BACKGROUND Systemic sclerosis is a chronic disabling disease that is often associated with severe physical and psychological impairment. Nonetheless, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with systemic sclerosis is often left behind in clinical practice and research. One of the reasons for this lack of evaluation is the current use of tools, such as the short form-36 (SF-36) questi...

BACKGROUND Scoliosis is a common spinal deformity that occurs often during adolescence. Previous studies suggested that adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) patients can have various aspects of their lives being affected, due to disease presentation and/or treatment received. It is important to define a reliable instrument based on which the affected patients' health-related quality of life ca...

In this paper, we comprehensively review the five-dimensional (5D) fully-covariant theory of gravitation developed by Zhang two decades ago and its recent applications in astrophysics and cosmology. This 5D gravity describes not only the fields, but also the matter and its motion in a 5D spacetime. The greatest advantage of this theory is that there does not exist any unknown parameter, so that...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) instruments have been of increasing interest for evaluation of medical treatments over the past 10-15 years. In this prospective, long-term follow-up study we investigated the influence of preoperative factors and the change in HRQoL over time after lumbar disc herniation surgery. METHODS 117 patients surgically treated for lumbar ...

OBJECTIVE To test the feasibility and validity of the EQ-5D (a widely used generic (disease non-specific) quality of life (QoL) instrument which allows comparisons between different patient groups and the general population) to assess QoL in patients with Parkinson's disease. METHODS All 124 patients with Parkinson's disease seen in a community based study on the prevalence of parkinsonism we...

PURPOSE This randomised trial was designed to investigate the activity and toxicity of continuous infusion etoposide phosphate (EP), targeting a plasma etoposide concentration of either 3 micrograms/ml for five days (5d) or 1 microgram/ml for 15 days (15d), in previously untreated SCLC patients with extensive disease. PATIENTS AND METHODS EP was used as a single agent. Plasma etoposide concen...

BACKGROUND Accurately assessing changes in the quality of life of older people living permanently in nursing homes is important. The multi-attribute utility instrument most commonly used and recommended to assess health-related quality of life in the nursing home population is the three-level EuroQol EQ-5D-3L. To date, there have been no studies using the Health Utilities Index Mark III (HUI3)....