C. difficile infection (CDI) is a common debilitating nosocomial infection associated with high mortality. Several CDI outbreaks have been attributed to ribotypes 027, 017, and 078. Clinical and experimental evidence indicates that the nonpathogenic yeast Saccharomyces boulardii CNCM I-745 (S.b) is effective for the prevention of CDI. However, there is no current evidence suggesting this probio...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE There is a lack of broadly applicable measures for risk adjustment in pediatric surgical patients necessary for improving outcomes and patient safety. Our objective was to develop a risk stratification model that predicts mortality after surgical operations in children. METHODS The model was created by using inpatient databases from 1988 to 2006. Patients younger than...

Bankfull discharge was identified in some 30 gravel-bed rivers representing in total c. 40 gauging stations. The catchment sizes vary from 4km2 to nearly 2700km2. Bankfull discharge value increases with basin size. In the case of gravel-bed rivers developed on an impermeable substratum, the following equation emerges: Qb=0·087 A 1·044. Bankfull discharge recurrence interval was determined by fi...

Hyponatremia is a frequent and symptomatic electrolyte disorder for which specific treatments have been lacking. Hyponatremia is attributable to nonosmotic vasopressin stimulation and continued increased fluid intake. In the past, peptidic derivatives of arginine vasopressin proved that blockade of vasopressin V-2 receptors served to improve hyponatremia, however, these antagonists had intrinsi...

Five immortal cell lines derived from a Li-Fraumeni syndrome patient (MDAH 087) with a germline mutant p53 allele were characterized with respect to telomere length and genomic instability. The remaining wild-type p53 allele is lost in the cell lines. Telomerase activity was undetectable in all immortal cell lines. Five subclones of each cell line and five re-subclones of each of the subclones ...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of sitagliptin administered to elderly patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) for 1 year as compared with glimepiride. Patients aged ≥60 years with T2DM and inadequately controlled blood glucose were randomly assigned to sitagliptin 50 mg once daily or glimepiride 0.5 mg once daily for 52 weeks. The primary efficacy endpoint w...

A search for the standard model Higgs boson produced in association with a topquark pair (ttH) is presented, using data samples corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 5.1 fb−1 and 19.7 fb−1 collected in pp collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7 TeV and 8 TeV respectively. The search is based on the following signatures of the Higgs boson decay: H→ hadrons, H→ photons, and H→ lept...

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study was to gain insight into the prevalence of asthma, allergic rhinitis, and eczema among Dutch early adolescents, and to study the impact of several social demographic and individual risk factors. METHODS Cross-sectional survey study using the self-report questionnaires of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC). In January 20...

Pig (Sus scrofa) is an important organism for both agricultural and medical purpose. This study aims to investigate the S. scrofa transcriptome by the use of Roche 454 pyrosequencing. We obtained a total of 558 743 and 528 260 reads for the back-leg muscle and ovary tissue each. The overall 1 087 003 reads give rise to 421 767 341 bp total residues averaging 388 bp per read. The de novo assembl...