CONTEXT Some veterans are eligible to enroll simultaneously in a Medicare Advantage (MA) plan and the Veterans Affairs health care system (VA). This scenario produces the potential for redundant federal spending because MA plans would receive payments to insure veterans who receive care from the VA, another taxpayer-funded health plan. OBJECTIVE To quantify the prevalence of dual enrollment i...

Background: Acute-phase patients sometimes require hemodialysis therapy without vascular access (VA) present on admission. These patients require VA creation to continue hemodialysis after discharge. The risk of early VA failure in acute-phase conditions is considered high due to the unstable nature of the patients’ condition. Hence, optimal timing of VA creation is not established. Methods: Th...

PURPOSE To determine the relationship between the size of a halo induced by a glare source and forward scatter or visual acuity (VA) in healthy eyes. METHOD Measurements were made in the right eyes of 51 healthy individuals of mean age 29.3 ± 7.5 years. Halo radius was measured using the Vision Monitor and low luminance (1 cd/m(2)) optotypes presented at a distance of 2.5 m. The visual angle ...

Visual analytics (VA) system development started in academic research institutions where novel visualization techniques and open source toolkits were developed. Simultaneously, small software companies, sometimes spin-offs from academic research institutions, built solutions for specific application domains. In recent years we observed the following trend: some small VA companies grew exponenti...

First-generation adenovirus vectors (FG AdVs) expressing short-hairpin RNA (shRNA) effectively downregulate the expressions of target genes. However, this vector, in fact, expresses not only the transgene product, but also virus-associated RNAs (VA RNAs) that disturb cellular RNAi machinery. We have established a production method for VA-deleted AdVs lacking expression of VA RNAs. Here, we show...

The presence or absence of ventriculoatrial (VA) conduction in the human heart is assessed by investigating whether 1:1 retrograde atrial capture is observed during constant cycle length ventricular pacing. In this study, a new pacing protocol for assessing VA conduction was designed in which the ventricular extrastimulus was delivered during basic ventricular and atrial simultaneous pacing (VE...

Recent advances in Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care data systems have greatly increased access to operational pharmacy information. This article presents a brief guide to VA pharmacy data sources: the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture files, the Pharmacy Benefits Management database, Decision Support System (DSS) National Data Extracts for inpatient ...

RNA Sequencing of Mouse Sinoatrial Node Reveals an Upstream Regulatory Role for Islet-1 in Cardiac Pacemaker Cells Vasanth Vedantham, Giselle Galang, Melissa Evangelista, Rahul C. Deo, Deepak Srivastava . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 797 Macrophage Sortilin Promotes LDL Uptake, Foam Cell Formation, and Atherosclerosis Ke...