OBJECTIVES The home environment is thought to play a key role in early weight trajectories, although direct evidence is limited. There is general agreement that multiple factors exert small individual effects on weight-related outcomes, so use of composite measures could demonstrate stronger effects. This study therefore examined whether composite measures reflecting the 'obesogenic' home envir...

This paper reviews trade policy reform and performance in Africa since the 1980s. African countries have implemented significant trade liberalisation in this period, in particular reducing tariffs. This has usually resulted in an increase in imports, but export growth has often been sluggish so that in many countries the trade deficit has increased. The paper documents trends and performance an...

Publication audit is considered a useful tool to evaluate the progress and plan for the future and we have been doing this exercise for the last couple of years.1-3 A careful look at the statistics for the Year 2014 reveals that there has been an increase in the number of submissions, a trend seen for the last few years consecutively. During the Year 2014, 1577 manuscripts were received from di...

Emotional disclosure by writing or talking about stressful life experiences improves health status in non-clinical populations, but its success in clinical populations, particularly rheumatoid arthritis (RA), has been mixed. In this randomized, controlled trial, we attempted to increase the efficacy of emotional disclosure by having a trained clinician help patients emotionally disclose and pro...

It has recently been claimed that certain amino acids have been increasing in frequency in all living organisms for most of the history of life on earth, while other amino acids have been decreasing in frequency. Three lines of evidence have been offered for this assertion, but each has a more plausible alternative interpretation. Here I show that unequal patterns of gains and losses for partic...

We have calculated the leading Yukawa corrections to the chargino, neutralino and gluino pole masses in the DR ′ scheme in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with the full set of complex parameters. We have performed a numerical analysis for a particular point in the parameter space and found typical corrections of a few tenths of a percent thus exceeding the experimental resoluti...

The need for security protection in Internet-based healthcare applications is generally acknowledged. Most healthcare applications that use the Internet have at least implemented some kind of encryption. Most applications also enforce user authentication and access control policies, and many audit user actions. However, most fall short on providing strong assurances that the security mechanisms...

INTRODUCTION Many low and middle-income countries rely on out-of-pocket payments to help finance health care. These payments can pose financial hardships for households; valid measurement of this type of economic burden is therefore critical. This study examines the validity of five survey measures of economic burden caused by health care payments. METHODS We analyzed 2002/03 World Health Sur...

PURPOSE To estimate a utility-based glaucoma health outcome measure, known as the Glaucoma Utility Index. METHODS Based on focus group studies, involving people with glaucoma, existing profile measures relevant to glaucoma were modified and a six-dimensional profile instrument was developed. Dimensions were: central and near vision; lighting and glare; mobility; activities of daily living; ey...

Article history: Received 16 March 2015 Received in revised form 28 April 2015 Accepted 29 April 2015 Available online 4 May 2015 Editor: M. Cvetič We investigate the nucleon’s rest mass and dispersion relation in the nuclear medium which is holographically described by the thermal charged AdS geometry. With this background, the chiral condensate plays an important role to determine the nucleon...