OBJECTIVE Stroke is the second most common cause of death and the leading cause of adult disability. Both stroke patients and their family can therefore experience increased traumatic stress level. METHODS The participants are close relatives of patients (n=65) who had a first time stroke (CRPWS) hospitalized. A control group (CG) (n=61), who had no history of chronic illness in their family ...

AIM The study aimed to describe end of life for patients treated with maintenance haemodialysis as narrated by their close relatives. INTRODUCTION Many patients undergoing haemodialysis are older, have several comorbidities and underestimated symptoms and are in their last year of life. To improve care, we need to know more about their end-of-life situation. DESIGN Qualitative and descripti...

The present study aimed to (1) identify the difficulties most frequently reported by individuals with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) at the time of discharge from a sub-acute rehabilitation brain injury unit as well as difficulties reported by their relatives, (2) compare patients' and relatives' reports of patient difficulties, and (3) explore the role of injury severity, disability and o...

BACKGROUND Relatives of patients with early onset colorectal cancer, a feature of hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC), are at increased risk of colorectal cancer. AIMS To investigate risk in relatives of patients with multiple primary cancers, another feature of HNPCC. METHODS Details were obtained on patients from one region who had developed colorectal cancer and a separate...

A fluorescent heteroduplex method was developed to assess the presence of 16S rRNA gene (rDNA) sequences from Bacillus anthracis and close relatives in PCR-amplified 16S rDNA sequence mixtures from environmental samples. The method uses a single-stranded, fluorescent DNA probe, 464 nucleotides in length, derived from a B. anthracis 16S rRNA gene. The probe contains a unique, engineered deletion...

Apicomplexans are a major lineage of parasites, including causative agents of malaria and toxoplasmosis. How such highly adapted parasites evolved from free-living ancestors is poorly understood, particularly because they contain nonphotosynthetic plastids with which they have a complex metabolic dependency. Here, we examine the origin of apicomplexan parasitism by resolving the evolutionary di...

Background. Studies of ancestry are difficult in the tomato because it crosses with many wild relatives and species in the tomato clade that have diverged very recently. As a result, the phylogeny in relation to its closest relatives remains uncertain. By using the coding sequence from Solanum lycopersicum, S. galapagense, S. pimpinellifolium, S. corneliomuelleri, and S. tuberosum and the genom...

Advancing technology has rendered the Internet a viable medium for collaborative computing, via mechanisms such as Web-Based Computing and Grid-Computing. We present a “pebble game” that abstracts the process of scheduling a computation-dag for computing over the Internet, including a novel formal criterion for comparing the qualities of competing schedules. Within this formal setting, we ident...

To better understand the evolutionary history of a group of organisms, an accurate estimate of the species phylogeny must be known. Traditionally, gene trees have served as a proxy for the species tree, although it was acknowledged early on that these trees represented different evolutionary processes. Discordances among gene trees and between the gene trees and the species tree are also expect...

Legal issues + Patients’ rights under the Human Rights Act must be taken into account in decision making. + Neither patients nor relatives can demand treatment which the health care team judges to be inappropriate, but all eVorts will be made to accommodate wishes and preferences. + In England, Wales and Northern Ireland relatives and people close to the patient are not entitled in law to take ...