PURPOSE To determine the relationship between the American Medical Association's (AMA) functional vision score (FVS) and vision-specific quality of life in retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients using the National Eye Institute's Visual Functioning Questionnaire (NEI-VFQ 25). METHODS One hundred eight patients with RP participated in the study. We measured best-corrected visual acuity, conducted ...

OBJECTIVE To prospectively compare inpatient and outpatient utilization rates between prepaid (PPD) and fee-for-service (FFS) insurance coverage for patients with chronic disease. DATA SOURCE/STUDY SETTING Data from the Medical Outcomes Study, a longitudinal observational study of chronic disease patients conducted in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. STUDY DESIGN A four-year prospective st...

A precise knowledge of nuclear parton distribution functions (nPDFs) is---among other things---important for the unambiguous interpretation hard process data taken in $pA$ and $AA$ collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) LHC. The available fixed target deep inelastic scattering (DIS) Drell-Yan (DY) lepton pair production mainly constrain light quark distributions. It is hence cruci...

Professor Naoki Ikegami’s “Fee-for-service payment – an evil practice that must be stamped out” summarizes many of the failings of alternatives to fee-for-service (FFS) payment systems. His article also offers several suggestions for improving FFS systems. However, even powerful arguments against many of the alternatives to FFS, does not make a convincing argument for FFS systems. In addition, ...

Forest structure and species composition in many western U.S. coniferous forests have been altered through fire exclusion, past and ongoing harvesting practices, and livestock grazing over the 20th century. The effects of these activities have been most pronounced in seasonally dry, low and mid-elevation coniferous forests that once experienced frequent, low to moderate intensity, fire regimes....

BACKGROUND We have observed that molecular response, as defined by a PCR-negative status during the first year of therapy, along with beta 2-microglobulin (beta 2M), was the most important variable associated with failure-free survival (FFS) in follicular lymphoma (FL). Herein, we present an update of the previously published MDACC series. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 116 patients (male:fe...

Fee-For-Service (FFS) contracts, first introduced in 2004, dramatically changed the way the pharmaceutical distribution supply chains are designed, managed, and operated. Investment buying (IB), forward buying in anticipation of drug price increases, used to be the way the distributors made most of their profits! FFS contracts limit the amount of inventory distributors can carry at any time (by...

New York City Firefighters (FDNY-FFs) were exposed to particulate matter and combustion/pyrolysis products during and after the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse. Ten months after the collapse, induced sputum (IS) samples were obtained from 39 highly exposed FDNY-FFs (caught in the dust cloud during the collapse on 11 September 2001) and compared to controls to determine whether a unique patter...

To determine the clinical significance of BCL-2 expression in Hodgkin-Reed-Sternberg (HRS) cells of classical Hodgkin disease (cHD), we correlated its expression with presenting clinical and laboratory features and failure-free survival (FFS). Eligible patients were untreated and negative for HIV-1; they had biopsyproven cHD. BCL-2 expression was determined immunohistochemically in available pr...

Pairings on elliptic curves over finite fields are crucial for constructing various cryptographic schemes. The ηT pairing on supersingular curves over GF(3) is particularly popular since it is efficiently implementable. Taking into account the Menezes-Okamoto-Vanstone (MOV) attack, the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) in GF(3) becomes a concern for the security of cryptosystems using ηT pairing...