OBJECTIVE To assess the acute effects of blood transfusion on insulin sensitivity and pancreatic β-cell function in thalassemia patients. METHODS Fifty children and adolescents with β-thalassemia/HbE disease were enrolled in a prospective cohort study. Hemoglobin, serum ferritin and oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) were performed prior to, and one week after blood transfusion. Insulin sensi...

Iron-induced heart failure is the primary cause of death in thalassemia major patients who receive continuous transfusions. Recent studies have suggested that diastolic function is impaired prior to systolic function in process of hemochromatosis, but they did not come to agreement on the first impaired diastolic index. Additionally, serum ferritin concentration is not a reliable indicator of b...

This paper presents an optimal power flow method based on the generation rescheduling priority to enhance transient stability in power systems. In order to determine the generation rescheduling priority the energy margin sensitivity indices are calculated. The candidate generators for generation rescheduling are determined by the energy margin sensitivity indices and then optimal power flow (OP...

BACKGROUND The accuracy of echocardiographic parameters of right ventricular (RV) function has not been sufficiently validated in patients with pulmonary hypertension (PH). The aim of this study was to evaluate whether echocardiographic measurements reliably reflect RV systolic function in PH using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI)-derived RV ejection fraction (RVEF) as a gold standard....

Data on respiratory symptoms and pulmonary function were obtained for 2736 Portland cement plant workers and 755 controls. Personal dust samples contained a geometric mean concentration of 0.57 mg/m3 for respirable dust and 2.90 mg/m3 for total dust. Cement workers and controls had similar prevalences of symptoms, except that 5.4% of the cement workers had dyspnoea compared with 2.7% of the con...

restructuring the recent developments in the power system and problems arising from construction as well as the maintenance of large power plants lead to increase in using the distributed generation (dg) resources. dg units due to its specifications, technology and location network connectivity can improve system and load point reliability indices. in this paper, the allocation and sizing of di...

in this context, a novel structure has been proposed for simple differential evolutionary (de) algorithm to solve optimal recloser placement. for this, an operator is added to de algorithm to adapt concept of the problem. other contribution of this work is formulating a novel objective function. the proposed objective function has been formulated to improve four reliability indices which consis...

OBJECTIVE To test the effect of heart disease and heart surgery on lung function. DESIGN A pulmonary function study of children undergoing surgery for atrial septal defect (ASD). SETTINGS University hospital. PATIENTS 26 children tested before surgery (at mean (SD) age 11.8 (3.8) years) and 24 patients tested 1.8 (0.2) years after surgical correction. METHODS Lung volumes, lung elastici...