BACKGROUND Although clinical trials have shown that proper management of diabetes can improve outcomes, and treatment guidelines are widespread, glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels in the United States are rising. Since process measures are improving, poor glycemic control may reflect the failure of health care providers to intensify diabetes therapy when indicated--clinical inertia. We asked wh...

BACKGROUND Intensified food production, i.e. agricultural intensification and industrialized livestock operations may have adverse effects on human health and promote disease emergence via numerous mechanisms resulting in either direct impacts on humans or indirect impacts related to animal and environmental health. For example, while biodiversity is intentionally decreased in intensive food pr...

During the last 50 years, agricultural intensification has caused many wild plant and animal species to go extinct regionally or nationally and has profoundly changed the functioning of agro-ecosystems. Agricultural intensification has many components, such as loss of landscape elements, enlarged farm and field sizes and larger inputs of fertilizer and pesticides. However, very little is known ...

Previous studies have established that work intensification was an important feature of European labor markets during much of the 1990s [Green and McIntosh, 2001; Green, 2001; Burchell, Lapido, and Wilkinson, 2002]. In the UK, this process was the continuation of one of the processes of change at workplaces that had begun at least several years earlier during the 1980s. Following from these fin...

BACKGROUND Immune hyperactivation in immunodiscordant patients can induce residual HIV replication and limit CD4 T cell recovery. We assessed the impact of raltegravir intensification on CD4 T cell recovery and viral persistence. METHODS We performed a randomized, controlled, pilot trial. Patients with CD4 T cell counts <350 cells/mm(3) despite suppressive antiretroviral therapy were randomiz...

BACKGROUND Blood pressure, lipid, and glycemic control are essential for reducing cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Many health care systems have successfully shifted aspects of chronic disease management, including population-based outreach programs designed to address CVD risk factor control, to non-physicians. The purpose of this study is to evaluate provision of new information to non-phys...

BACKGROUND Standard remission induction chemotherapy consisting of anthracycline plus cytarabine (3+7) is administered for adult acute myeloid leukemia (AML). However, the effects of intensified regimen on complete remission (CR), relapse and overall survival (OS) remain unknown. METHODS We analyzed 1195 patients treated with idarubicin plus cytarabine/BHAC (3+7) from 2002 to 2013. Among them...

Land-use and land-cover change research needs to pay more attention to processes of land-cover modification, and especially to agricultural land intensification. The objective of this paper is to review the different modelling approaches that have been used in land-use/land-cover change research from the perspective of their utility for the study and prediction of changes in land-use intensific...

Hurricane intensification has been studied by scientists for decades and one phenomenon that appears to always accompany the intensification is the presence of hot towers of cumulous clouds that stretches to 15 km high, touching the top of the troposphere (Figure 1a &b). The hypothesis of Hot towers was first proposed in 1958 by Riehl and Malkus (Anthes, 1999), who wrote in conclusion from thei...

It is only relatively recently that extremal optimisation (EO) has been applied to combinatorial optimisation problems. As such, there have been only a few attempts to extend the paradigm to include standard search mechanisms that are routinely used by other techniques such as genetic algorithms, tabu search and ant colony optimisation. The key way to begin this process is to augment EO with at...