Introduction Comorbidities influence the prognosis, clinical outcomes, disease activity, and treatment response in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA patients have a high-comorbidity burden necessitating their study. Comorbidity indices are used to measure comorbidities and to study their impacts on different outcomes. A large number of such indices are used in clinical research. Some indices have b...

Development of competence has been one of the major issues and goals of modern academic design and engineering education. Nevertheless, our literature study revealed that we are still far from a common interpretation of design competence. There are different views on it which we called reductionist and holistic. In the reductionist view, design competence is considered to be not else than a set...

The competence of a cell to respond to the signalling molecule retinoic acid (RA) is thought to depend largely on its repertoire of cognate zinc finger nuclear receptors. XCYP26 is an RA hydroxylase that is expressed differentially during early Xenopus development. In Xenopus embryos, XCYP26 can rescue developmental defects induced by application of exogenous RA, suggesting that the enzymatic m...

Lifelong competence development is a fundamental premise for an information society, as well as major aim and challenge. Facing the variety of learning programs and qualification measures, problems emerge in supporting lifelong learning. Efficient competence development necessitates providing learners with learning opportunities which are appropriate for their current knowledge and for their in...

AIM To examine the attitudes and intentions of general dental practitioners (GDPs) who work within the remit of the National Health Service (NHS) to provide relative analgesia (RA) for paediatric extractions. METHODS All 45 GDPs working within the boundaries of one Trust were asked to complete a questionnaire to assess demography, etc., intention and attitudes to provide RA for paediatric ext...

This paper shows similarities and differences in perceptions and competences regarding spirituality and spiritual care of nurses in different health care settings. Research on this specific topic is limited and can contribute towards a nuanced implementation of spiritual care in different nursing care settings. Four hundred forty nine nurses in different health care settings completed a questio...

Advances in vehicular networks, embedded devices and cloud computing will enable the formation of vehicular clouds of computing, communication, sensing, power and physical resources. Owing to the dynamic nature of the vehicular cloud, continuous monitoring on trust attributes in necessary to enforce service-level agreement, This paper proposes RA-VTrust, Reputationbased Adaptive Vehicular Trust...

Stereotype research depicts the generic immigrant as incompetent and untrustworthy. The current research expands this image, specifying key information dimensions (e.g. nationality, socioeconomic status) about immigrants. To see how perceivers differentiate among particular immigrant groups, we extend a model of intergroup perception, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu...

This paper posits that innovation as a competence generic from individuals and the environment in which they are engaged. It focuses on individuals by proposing a method for measuring innovation as a competence. It is postulated here that innovation as a competence involves a set of competencies such as: visioning, ability to generate ideas, internal and external networking relationship, owners...

OBJECTIVE Fatigue is an important outcome for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The purpose of this study was to identify the scales being used to measure RA fatigue, and to systematically examine the evidence for their validation. METHODS Articles measuring fatigue in RA were sought using the terms RA and fatigue, and RA and tiredness, plus scale, questionnaire, inventory, and checkli...