Invasive methods involving bronchoscopy allow identification of the site of airway inflammation, although within the peripheral airways further distinctions are difficult. The method of induced sputum refers only to the central airways, and the analysis of exhaled NO to the airways as a whole. Therefore there is still a need for more refined tools to asses airway inflammation.

Pulmonary involvement is a common complication of vasculitides, especially small vessel vasculitides. This review provides an overview of vasculitic manifestations of the lung as well as of other organs involved in vasculitides. Furthermore, it provides the diagnostic procedures required to asses a patient with vasculitic lung involvement and gives an overview of current treatment strategies.

Background Multiple studies document specific personality traits, relatively homogeneous in the structural aspect. We attempt to extrapolate a purely psychological examination approach, applying the clinical conceptualizations of H. Akiskal. This study aims to asses the existence of statistically significant differences between the TEMPSA scale ratings of subjects serving a prison sentence and ...

BACKGROUND It has been shown that possible influence of body weight is more evident for coronary than aortic atherosclerosis; and more in men than women. Coronary heart disease due to obesity in males becomes significant when body mass index (BMI) exceeds 30 (30% overweight) and does not affect the life expectancy particularly in women. This study was conducted to asses the relation of thicknes...

We survey and asses the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on countries, on cities in developed countries (the US) and on villages in developing countries. We also consider the endogenous formation of political jurisdictions and we highlight several open issues in need of further research.

In recent years cosmic rays have been suggested for civil applications. In this work a specific simulation to asses the feasibility of a muon based monitoring system for historical buildings static stability is presented. In particular the monitoring of the wooden vaulted roof of the “Palazzo della Loggia” of the City of Brescia will be described and the corresponding results will be presented.

We provide a simulation procedure for obtaining discretely observed values of OrnsteinUhlenbeck processes with given (self-decomposable) marginal distribution. The method proposed, based on inversion of the characteristic function, completely circumvent problems encountered when trying to reproduce small jumps of Lévy processes. We provide error bounds for our procedure and asses numerically it...

In this paper we present a sampling algorithm for constrained strings representing the state of parameters of a universal grammar. This sampling algorithm has been used to asses statistical significance of the parametric comparison method, a new syntactic-based approach to reconstruct linguistic phylogeny.

Long-distance migrations of wildlife have been identified as important biological phenomena, but their conservation remains a major challenge. The Mongolian Gobi is one of the last refuges for the Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) and other threatened migratory mammals. Using historic and current distribution ranges, population genetics, and telemetry data we assessed the connectivity of the wi...