Dementia: Dementia is a term used to describe a collection of symptoms including memory loss, problems with reasoning and communication skills and a reduction in a person’s abilities and skills in carrying out daily activities such as washing, dressing, cooking and caring for self. Dementia is a progressive condition, which means that the symptoms will gradually get worse; the rate of decline v...

Countries around the world are experiencing an ever-increasing need to make choices in investments in health and healthcare. This makes it incumbent upon them to have formal processes in place to optimize the legitimacy of eventual decisions. There is now growing experience among countries of the implementation of stakeholder participation, and a developing convergence of methods to support dec...

BACKGROUND We sought to assess the benefit-risk balance of FOLFIRINOX versus gemcitabine in patients with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma. METHODS We used generalized pairwise comparisons. This statistical method permits the simultaneous analysis of several prioritized outcome measures. The first priority outcome was survival time (OS). Differences in OS that exceeded two months were con...

Tap water samples were collected from 180 families in four agricultural (KYR: Keyir, KRW: Kariwak, YTR: Yatur, DW: Dawanqi) and two pastoral areas (B: Bulong and Y: Yangchang) in Bay County, Xinjiang, China, and levels of seven trace elements (Cd, Cr, As Ni, Pb, Zn, Se) were analyzed using inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to assess potential health risks. Remarkable spatial...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To determine the Oncology Nursing Society's (ONS's) research priorities for 2001-2005 for oncology nursing across the entire scope of cancer care, including prevention, detection, treatment, and palliative care. DESIGN A cross-sectional, mailed survey. SAMPLE Stratified by the general member group (i.e., a random sample of 1,850 ONS members) and researcher group (i.e., ce...

The order of species arrival during community assembly can greatly affect species coexistence, but the strength of these effects, known as priority effects, appears highly variable across species and ecosystems. Furthermore, the causes of this variation remain unclear despite their fundamental importance in understanding species coexistence. Here, we show that one potential cause is environment...

We present an efficient and practical lock-free implementation of a concurrent priority queue that is suitable for both fully concurrent (large multi-processor) systems as well as pre-emptive (multi-process) systems. Many algorithms for concurrent priority queues are based on mutual exclusion. However, mutual exclusion causes blocking which has several drawbacks and degrades the system’s overal...