Concerns have been raised within the nuclear medicine field about the accuracy of measurements of 89Sr. The 85Sr impurity present in the 89Sr solution has a significant effect on the response of radionuclide calibrators used in hospitals. A comparison was conducted between the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and the UK hospital physics community. Only 58% of the results were within 5% of the...

A direct comparison was made between the air kerma primary standards used for the measurements of low-energy x rays at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). The comparison was conducted at the NPL using NPL reference radiation qualities between 10 kV and 80 kV. The results show the primary air-kerma standards to agree within 0.6 % ...

The genetic predisposition to addiction to opioids and other substances is transmitted as a complex genetic trait, which investigators are attempting to characterize using genetic linkage and association. We now report a high-density genome-wide linkage study of opioid dependence. We ascertained 305 DSM-IV opioid dependent affected sibling pairs from an ethnically mixed population of methadone ...

This briefing presents the state of play of non-performing loans (NPL) in the euro area, and provides an overview of the various measures implemented across Member States to facilitate their resolution. The first section briefly presents the various levels of NPL ratios and coverage ratios in the euro area, across Member States, sectors, and groups of banks. The second section explains the detr...

Although various therapies are available to treat cancers, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, cancer has been the leading cause of death in Japan for the last 30 years, and new therapeutic modalities are urgently needed. As a new modality, there has recently been great interest in oncolytic virotherapy, with measles virus being a candidate virus expected to show strong antitumor...

Measurements, performed at NBS, NPL, and PTB, on helium-neon lasers stabilized on the Lamb dip, have shown that the wavelengths of these lasers fell within approximately 1 part in 10(7). Beyond this limit, different lasers were found to emit different wavelengths. In addition, the wavelength of a given laser may vary during the life of its discharge tube. Pressure shifts appear to be a major ca...

The pathogenesis of all forms of psoriasis remains obscure. Segregation analysis and twin studies together with ethnic differences in disease frequency all point to an underlying genetic susceptibility to psoriasis, which is both complex and likely to reflect the action of a number of genes. We performed a genome wide analysis using a total of 271 polymorphic autosomal markers on 284 sib relati...

Several methods have been proposed for linkage analysis of complex traits with unknown mode of inheritance. These methods include the LOD score maximized over disease models (MMLS) and the "nonparametric" linkage (NPL) statistic. In previous work, we evaluated the increase of type I error when maximizing over two or more genetic models, and we compared the power of MMLS to detect linkage, in a ...