Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects more than 250 million people around the world. In addition to daily symptoms and functional limitation, living with COPD are susceptible acute deteriorations in respiratory health. People say that these exacerbations most disruptive aspect of their frequent associated rapid progression, impaired quality life, excess mortality. Exacerbations t...

The production of rich multilingual speech corpus resources on a large scale is a requirement for many linguistic, phonetic and technological tasks, in both research and application domains. It is also time-consuming and therefore expensive. In particular the human component in the resource creation process is prone to inconsistencies, a situation which has frequently been documented in studies...

We investigated the possibility of temperature dependent lattice distortions in the pyrochlore compound Tb2Ti2O7 by measuring the internal magnetic field distribution, using muon spin resonance, and comparing it to the susceptibility. The measurements are done at temperatures as low as 70 mK and external fields up to 6 kG. We find that the evolution of the width of the field distribution can be...

Status asthmaticus (SA) is an acute respiratory failure combining an acute bronchospastic reaction with a severe airway inflammation. We previously reported an important influx of neutrophils and an increased secretion of interleukin-8 (IL-8) in patients with SA. The aim of this prospective study was to evaluate in bronchial lavage (BL) of patients with SA (n = 9) under mechanical ventilation (...

T he 2001 Winter Meeting of the British Thoracic Society covered a wide range of respiratory topics. Over 300 papers were presented and a number of lively symposia were delivered by internationally renowned speakers. ASTHMA During 2001 there has been much interest in the progress of new treatments in asthma as clinical trials of several agents targeting the Th1/Th2 imbalance have been published...

Background: One of the most important principles that govern life is inheritance of genes. There are over 200 traits that are transmitted from generation to generation in humans. When one of the two parents expresses the trait, there is 25-50% likelihood of passing it to any of the children; but if both parents have it, the probability doubles (50-100%). There are three main types of bent littl...