BACKGROUND Low health literacy is associated with poorer health and higher mortality. Complex health materials are a barrier to health. AIM To assess the literacy and numeracy skills required to understand and use commonly used English health information materials, and to describe population skills in relation to these. DESIGN AND SETTING An English observational study comparing health mate...

Optimal planning and management of the limited water resources for maximum productivity in agriculture requires quantifying the irrigation applied at a regional scale. However, most efforts involving remote sensing applications in assessing large-scale irrigation applied (IA) have focused on supplying spatial variables for crop models or studying evapotranspiration (ET) inversions, rather than ...

Impaired regulation of hepcidin expression in response to iron loading appears to be the pathogenic mechanism for hereditary hemochromatosis. Iron normally induces expression of the BMP6 ligand, which, in turn, activates the BMP/Smad signaling cascade directing hepcidin expression. The molecular function of the HFE protein, involved in the most common form of hereditary hemochromatosis, is stil...

Tropical endomyocardial fibrosis (EMF) is a neglected disease of poverty that afflicts rural populations in tropical low-income countries, with some certain high-prevalence areas. Tropical EMF is characterized by the deposition of fibrous tissue in the endomyocardium, leading to restrictive physiology. Since the first descriptions in Uganda in 1948, high-frequency areas for EMF have included Af...

0031-9201/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.pepi.2011.10.001 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +81 92 642 2515; fax E-mail addresses: [email protected] [email protected] (S.-i. Karato). Viscosity of the D00 layer of the Earth’s mantle, the lowermost layer in the Earth’s mantle, controls a number of geodynamic processes, but a robust estimate of its viscosity has been hamp...

BACKGROUND Release from prison is associated with a markedly increased risk of both fatal and non-fatal drug overdose, yet the risk factors for overdose in recently released prisoners are poorly understood. The aim of this study was to identify risk and protective factors for non-fatal overdose (NFOD) among a cohort of illicit drug users in Vancouver, Canada, according to recent incarceration. ...

OBJECTIVE To compare formal nurse triage with an informal prioritisation process for waiting times and patient satisfaction. SETTING Accident and emergency department of a district general hospital in the midlands in 1990. DESIGN Patients attending between 8:00 am and 9:00 pm over six weeks were grouped for analysis according to whether triage was operating at time of presentation and by th...

Empirical studies of various K-12 performance measures speak to the potential for improving the performance of the present system. They can address the following question. Given the fixed factors – the basic funding and governance processes that all fifty states share – what are the plausible maximum predicted values of the academic performance measures? For each of several econometric models, ...

Background Adjuvant radiotherapy (RT) after surgical resection of World Health Organization (WHO) grade II meningioma, also known as atypical meningioma (AM), is a topic of controversy. The purpose of this study is to compare overall survival (OS) with or without adjuvant RT after subtotal resection (STR) or gross total resection (GTR) in AM patients diagnosed according to the 2007 WHO classifi...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between herpes zoster (HZ) and the subsequent risk of anterior uveitis during the year following an HZ diagnosis, using a nationwide population-based data set. METHODS This study used the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database. The study cohort consisted of 314,405 patients who received a diagnosis of HZ. The comparison cohort comprised 94...