BACKGROUNDS/AIMS Aging of population is leading to more operative treatments on elderly patients in various aspects. Growing numbers of patients are going through operations about cholecystitis in the same sense. We tried to survey them anew about remarkably increasing octogenarian patients and the outcome after operative management for cholecystitis seeking to improve treatment result. METHO...

The patent laws are in the U.S. Constitution dating back from 1790 to 1793 to promote, as articulated by one of the framers, Thomas Jefferson, and protect ‘any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new or useful improvement thereof ’. Although the U.S. Congress in 1952 replaced the word ‘art’ with the word ‘process’, the Congress, as well as the courts, have...

Life is normally expected to proceed through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. What happens then if death occurs at some earlier phase of life and not at a far distant time in people’s everyday lives? This will most often be a sudden and unexpected death. How do the nearest family, friends and acquaintances of the deceased cope with this? How and why are new rituals created, how are they...

in recent years, the relationship between insertion and deletion (indel) polymorphisms in promoter region (23 bp) and intron 1 (12 bp) of prnp gene (prion protein coding gene) and their relationship to susceptibility of classical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (bse) have been reported. insertions of these two polymorphisms increase resistance to classical bse, while the deletions of these two...