The aim of this study was to estimate the population burden of respiratory diseases in the Zasavje region of Slovenia that can be attributed to outdoor air pollution in order to gain relevant grounds for evidence based public health activities. In 2008, 981 schoolchildren (age 6 to 12 years) were observed in a prevalence study. The prevalence of chronic respiratory diseases (CRD) and frequent a...

BACKGROUND Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) may manifest with heterogeneous patterns according to ethnic origins. The purpose of this study was to describe the influence of various Iranian ethnic origins on clinical measures in patients with AS. METHODS 0ne hundred sixty-three AS patients diagnosed by modified New York 1984 criteria were enrolled consecutively. The patients were classified into Fa...

BACKGROUND Fatty aldehydes are industrially relevant compounds, which also represent a common metabolic intermediate in the microbial synthesis of various oleochemicals, including alkanes, fatty alcohols and wax esters. The key enzymes in biological fatty aldehyde production are the fatty acyl-CoA/ACP reductases (FARs) which reduce the activated acyl molecules to fatty aldehydes. Due to the dis...

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is the leading cause of end-stage failure of the kidney, but the efficacy of currently available strategies for the prevention of DN remains unsatisfactory. In this study, we investigated the effects of free anthraquinones (FARs) extract, which was extracted from the rhubarb and purified by macroporous resin DM130 with gradient mixtures of ethanol/water as the lelution...

BACKGROUND Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory and demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, which is accompanied by significant disabilities. Although there are some published data regarding the epidemiological features of MS in other parts of Iran, scarce data are available about the prevalence and demographic characteristics of MS in Fars province. The current study ...

This paper presents an investigation into two fuzzy association rule mining models for enhancing prediction performance. The first model (the FCM-Apriori model) integrates Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) and the Apriori approach for road traffic performance prediction. FCM is used to define the membership functions of fuzzy sets and the Apriori approach is employed to identify the Fuzzy Association Rules (...

The Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) gathers data on fatal traffic accidents in the United States. Data are collected at the state level for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which publishes results in an Annual Report (NHTSA 1985). An important methodological concern with FARS data is the high level of nonresponse for certain variables, particularly blood alcoho...