Aim To assess the impact of certain climatic variables on the breeding success of some populations of Bonelli’s eagle (Hieraaetus fasciatus V. 1822) throughout its latitudinal distribution range, in order to account for recent and differential declines in populations. Location Western Mediterranean, from southern Morocco to southern France. Methods Seven populations were considered for the lati...

A sample of 314 consecutive clinical and forensic referrals with mild traumatic brain injury was evaluated using the Meyers Neuropsychological Battery (MNB). A comparison was made of the test performance and performance on the embedded Symptom Validity Tests (SVTs) with a control for multicolinearity utilized. Using the nine embedded SVTs in the MNB, the incidence of poor effort fell at 26% of ...

BACKGROUND Accurate diagnosis of coronary heart disease has the potential to contribute substantially to cost-effective delivery of health services. Recent work by Fleischmann et al (JAMA 1998;280:913-20) represents an effort to summarize the accuracy of exercise echocardiography and exercise single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). METHODS AND RESULTS A critique of the previous wo...

Microalbuminuria is a marker of generalized endothelial dysfunction resulting from arterial stiffness or insulin resistance, and brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity (baPWV) is a good measure of arterial stiffness. We aimed to investigate whether elevated baPWV is independently associated with microalbuminuria. This study included 1,648 individuals aged over 40 who participated in the baseline Mu...

Our aim is to develop methods for identifying a (causal) variant or variants from a dense panel of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are genotyped on the evidence of previous studies. Because a large number of SNPs are in close proximity to each other, the magnitude of linkage disequilibrium (LD) plays an important role. Namely, highly correlated SNPs may hamper standard methods such ...

In regression model, there are several assumptions which have to be fulfilled, one of is the absence multicollinearity between its independent variables. If occurs, parameter estimation model using method least squares results in unbiased estimators, and even estimators likely large variance. Such variance causes hypothesis testing towards tend accept H0, meaning that coefficient insignificant....

Rheumatoid arthritis is a complex disease that appears to involve multiple genetic and environmental factors. Using the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 simulated rheumatoid arthritis data and the structural equation modeling framework, we tested hypothesized "causal" rheumatoid arthritis model(s) by employing a novel latent gene construct approach that models individual genes as latent variables d...

The purpose of this research was to develop an instrument to assess people’s fluency with the computer, e-mail, and the Web (CEW fluency). Such an instrument, tapping into digital divides, could fill the existing void that exists between previously developed computer literacy or experience scales and the ever faster development of Internet technology. The research was conducted in 2 stages. The...

Arterial Blood pressure (BP) is influenced by numerous factors. Guidelines on measurement of BP contain recommendations on the position of the back by advising that the subject should sit with back supported. The objectives of this work are: i) to determine whether unsupported back during BP measurement in sitting position has significant effect on BP, ii) to determine the relationship between ...