A 62-year-old woman with a history of mitral valve regurgitation replacement operation 20 years ago presented to our hospital severe dysphagia, reflux sensation, and retrosternal pain that started half year after receiving transcatheter aortic implantation (TAVI) for the treatment stenosis. Esophagogastroduodenoscopy revealed tortuous oesophagus fluid retention. Barium oesophagography beaklike ...

BACKGROUND Chronic exposure to cadmium (Cd), even at low concentrations, has an adverse impact on the skeletal system. Histologically, primary and secondary osteons as basic structural elements of compact bone can also be affected by several toxicants leading to changes in bone vascularization and mechanical properties of the bone. The current study was designed to investigate the effect of sub...

This paper applies the cognitive hierarchy model of Camerer, Ho and Chong (2004) to the action commitment game of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990). The model generates the heterogeneity of behavior reported in Huck, Müeller and Normann (2002). The model predicts the spike in the leadership quantity in the first period as well as the spike in the Cournot quantity in the second period. The model predi...

The spike detection problem is cast into a delay estimation. Using elementary operational calculus, we obtain an explicit characterization of the spike locations, in terms of short time window iterated integrals of the noisy signal. From this characterization, we derive a joint spike detection and localization system where the decision function is implemented as the output of a digital Volterra...

Endoscopic transpapillary biopsy has been widely performed for the diagnosis of biliary disease. Direct-vision biliary biopsy using peroral cholangioscopy has been reported to be very useful [1–4]. At centers where peroral cholangioscopy is unavailable, biliary biopsy can be performed under fluoroscopic guidance. It is however sometimes difficult to obtain adequate biopsy specimens owing to iss...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Peroral supplementation with trivalent-chromium (Cr) or magnesium (Mg) has been shown to improve insulin resistance (IR). The objective of this study was to determine whether combined peroral supplementation with Cr and Mg improves IR more effectively than Cr or Mg alone. METHODS AND STUDY DESIGN Subjects (n=120, age range 45-59 years old) and diagnosed with IR were ...