LETTERS Do I need to be an endocrinologist to diagnose Cushing's disease? Around October 1999, while playing cricket after a long time, I fell down for no apparent reason. The same event happened a month later. Being mainly concerned about unexplained falls, I sought help from neurological colleagues. Two neurologists examined me and both reassured me: " your exam is normal and there is nothing...

Since Carlsen and co-workers reported in 1992 that sperm counts have decreased during the second half of the last century in Western societies, there has been widespread anxiety about the adverse effects of environmental pollutants on human fecundity. The Carlsen report was followed by several re-analyses of their data set and by many studies on time trends in sperm quality and on secular trend...

SUMMARY Eating disorders are common, life-threatening conditions in Western countries, but until relatively recently they were regarded as uncommon in non-Western cultures. However, the prevalence of eating disorders in many of the more affluent non-Western countries is rising rapidly as community members, particularly young women, internalize the 'thin ideal' that has been widely promoted by t...

BACKGROUND Idiopathic membranous nephropathy (IMN) is a common cause of nephrotic syndrome (NS) in adults in Western countries. In 2012, the KDIGO (Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes) working group published guidelines for the management of glomerulonephritis, thus providing a template for the treatment of this condition. While being aware of the impact of the clinicians' acumen and that...

Even though most clinical data on cachexia have been reported from Western countries, cachexia may be a growing problem in Asia as well, as the population in this area of the world is considerably larger. Considering the current definitions of obesity and sarcopenia in Japan, which are different from the ones in Western countries, the lack of a distinct cachexia definition in Japan is strinking...

We define as South Asian countries those countries that start with Iran and end with Bangladesh in Asia. Wethen use export statistics in terms of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) for 14 industrial sectors tomeasure distances of export capabilities for these countries in relation to the “Western” developed and EastAsian countries. Statistical methods such as multidimensional scaling and ...

We use a difference-in-differences strategy that compares Communist with Western European countries to test the effect of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe on the flow of book translations between countries. We find that translations of Western European titles into former non-Soviet Communist countries increased by a factor of eight with the fall of Communism and reached Western level...

Hans Geser Zuerich, September 2011 Abstract The association between leftism and ecologism is analyzed comparatively in a sample of 27 countries, based on data stemming from the fifth wave of World Values Survey (conducted 2005-2007). As a first major result, it is found that the Western countries (encompassing Western European, USA, Canada and Australia) stand out as a distinct group with a hig...