AIMS The coronary artery ligation model in rodents mimics human myocardial infarction (MI). Normally mechanical ventilation and prolonged anesthesia period are needed. Recently, a method has been developed to create MI by popping-out the heart (without ventilation) followed by immediate suture ligation. Mortality is high due to the time-consuming suture ligation process while the heart is expos...

The aim of this study was to determine whether skeletal muscle depletion predicts the prognosis of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) that is being treated with sorafenib. We evaluated 40 consecutive HCC patients who received sorafenib treatment. The skeletal muscle cross-sectional area was measured by computed tomography at the third lumbar vertebra (L3), from which the L3 skeletal m...

BACKGROUND People with diabetes and severe mental illness (SMI) experience poorer outcomes than those with diabetes alone. To improve outcomes, it is necessary to understand the difficulties that people with SMI experience in managing their diabetes. AIMS To identify barriers and enablers to effective diabetes self-management experienced by people with SMI and type 2 diabetes. METHOD Qualit...

Capturing input-output dependency is an important task in statistical data analysis. Mutual information (MI) is a vital tool for this purpose, but it is known to be sensitive to outliers. To cope with this problem, a squared-loss variant of MI (SMI) was proposed, and its supervised estimator has been developed. On the other hand, in real-world classification problems, it is conceivable that onl...

The supersensitivity hypothesis posits that individuals with a severe mental illness (i.e., schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; SMI) are more likely to be diagnosed with a substance abuse as opposed to a substance dependence diagnosis, and experience greater negative consequences associated with substance use at lower levels of consumption, as compared with non-SMI substance abusers. This is th...

INTRODUCTION Patients with severe mental illness (SMI) have higher rates of cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality than the general population. In the UK, data were limited regarding the known prevalence of physical health screening of SMI patients. AIMS A total of 966 patients with SMI from seven geographically varied regions in the UK agreed to participate in a 2-year nurse-le...

Results In total, 75 of182 general practice patientswith SMI and150 of 313 such patientswithout SMI attended the interview.SMIwas associatedwith: raised 10-year CHDrisk scores (OR1⁄41.8,95%CI 1.0^3.1); high-density-lipoprotein (HDL)cholesterollevels51.0mmol/l (OR1⁄44.0, 95% CI1.5^10.7); raised cholesterol/HDLcholesterolratios (OR1⁄41.8,95% CI 1.0^3.2); diabetesmellitus (OR1⁄43.8,95% CI1.1^13.3)...

Doxorubicin-induced cardiomyopathy (DOX-CM) is a severe complication of doxorubicin (DOX) chemotherapy. Characterized by cumulative and irreversible myocardial damage, its pathogenesis has not been fully elucidated. Shengmai Injection (SMI), a Traditional Chinese Medicine, may alleviate myocardial injury and improve heart function in the setting of DOX-CM. As a result of its multi-component and...

BACKGROUND The determinants that promote successful ageing still remain unknown. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the role of skeletal muscle mass and body fat percentage (BF%), in the level of successful ageing. METHODS during 2005-2011, 2663 older (aged 65-100 years) from 21 Mediterranean islands and the rural Mani region (Peloponnesus) of Greece were voluntarily enrolled in the ...

BACKGROUND Clients with severe mental illness (SMI) who use substances are less engaged in treatment than those who do not use substances, and assertive community treatment (ACT) engages and retains clients with SMI and concurrent substance use at a higher rate compared with traditional treatment. This qualitative study aimed to explore the experiences of being recruited to, and remaining in, A...