The natural disease course of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is often punctuated by exacerbations: acute events of symptom worsening associated with significant morbidity and healthcare resource utilization; reduced quality of life; and increased risk of hospitalization and death. The Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) recommend that patients at risk of ...

A framework for the autonomous management of clustered server systems called LAMA (Large-scale system’s Autonomous Management Agent) is proposed in this paper. LAMA is based on agents, which are distributed over the nodes and built on JINI infrastructure. There are two classes of agents: a grand LAMA and ordinary LAMAs. An ordinary LAMA abstracts an individual node and performs node-wide config...

OBJECTIVE Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) represents a burden on patients and health systems. Roflumilast, an oral, selective phosphodiesterase-4-inhibitor reduces exacerbations and improves lung function in severe/very severe COPD patients with a history of exacerbations. This study aimed to estimate the lifetime cost and outcomes of roflumilast added-on to commonly used COPD regi...

BACKGROUND The place of long-acting β agonist/long-acting muscarinic antagonist (LABA/LAMA) combinations in stable patients with COPD is not well defined. The purpose of this study was to systematically review the efficacy and safety of LABA/LAMA combinations. METHODS Several databases and manufacturers' websites were searched for relevant clinical trials. Randomised control trials, at least ...

OBJECTIVE The combination of a long-acting muscarinic antagonist (LAMA) and a long-acting β2-agonist (LABA) in a single inhaler is a viable treatment option for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Here, we systematically review the current knowledge on double bronchodilation for the treatment of COPD, with a specific focus on its efficacy versus placebo and/or monotherap...

Aicardi-Goutieres syndrome (AGS) is an inflammatory genetic disease inherited in an autosomal recessive manner. Common features of this disease are encephalopathy, splenomegaly and hepatomegaly, muscle stiffness, irritability, unstoppable crying, seizures and dilation in growth. According to previous studies, primary genes responsible for this Syndromes are as followed: TREX 1, RNASEH2A, RNASEH...

The current guidelines on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) recommend the prominent use of bronchodilators, including long-acting β2-agonists (LABAs) and long-acting muscarinic antagonists (LAMAs), while inhaled corticosteroids are recommended only in patients with severe disease or frequent exacerbations. LABA-LAMA combinations are indicated when single bronchodilators are insuffici...

A problem that we had encountered in the aggregation process, is how to aggregate the elements that have cardinality 1. The purpose of this article is to present a new aggregation operator of linguistic labels that uses the cardinality of these elements, the linguistic aggregation of majority additive (LAMA) operator. We also present an extension of the LAMA operator under the two-tuple fuzzy l...

As Santa Clara prepares to host the Dalai Lama on Monday, Feb. 24, it is worth examining the surprising parallels between the writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola—the founder of the Jesuit order—and a Buddhist text that played an important role in the spiritual formation of the Dalai Lama, The Way of the Bodhisattva by the eighth-century monk Śāntideva. While Ignatian spirituality and Tibetan Bud...