It has been shown that αA-mini-chaperone, a peptide representing the chaperone binding site in αA-crystallin, prevents destabilized protein aggregation. αA-Mini-chaperone has been shown to form amyloid fibrils. This study was undertaken to improve the stability of αA-mini-chaperone while preserving its anti-aggregation activity by fusing the flexible and solvent-exposed C-terminal 164-173 regio...

The present study determined the ability of the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) to predict care need in older people. We analysed the datasets of the Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Aging. The 1999 survey containing the MNA items served as the baseline and the 2003 survey served as the endpoint. Of the 4440 participants, 2890 were aged ≥ 65 years and served as subjects in the present study. Afte...

We investigate known security flaws in the context of security ceremonies to gain an understanding of the ceremony analysis process. The term security ceremonies is used to describe a system of protocols and humans which interact for a specific purpose. Security ceremonies and ceremony analysis is an area of research in its infancy, and we explore the basic principles involved to better underst...

We would like to thank the editors and referees for their considerable efforts that improved our paper, and all of the discussants for their feedback, and their thoughtful and stimulating comments. Linear models are central in applied statistics, and inference for adaptive linear modeling is an important active area of research. Our paper is clearly not the last word on the subject! Several of ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE High-dose chemotherapy and autologous bone marrow transplantation (ABMT) has become the standard approach for most patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin's disease. Disease status at transplant has been correlated with outcome following ABMT. In light of this, we employ mini-BEAM (BCNU, etoposide, cytarabine and melphalan) salvage therapy in order to achieve a sta...

BACKGROUND Minimally invasive cardiac surgical techniques are increasingly applied in the treatment and management of a variety of adult ventricular septal defects (VSDs). However, repair of adult subarterial VSDs via left anterior mini-thoracotomy is rarely reported. The present study aimed to determine the feasibility and safety of the left anterior mini-thoracotomy for the repair of adult su...

to measure soil water content (or soil matric suction) in thin layers of about 30mm, conventional gypsum blocks are not suitable. to carry out the task, mini-gypsum blocks were constructed using plaster of paris in an innovative fashion. a power relationship was found between the soil water content and the mini-gypsum blocks’ readings in kω. the calibration results showed that readings of m...

The aim of the study was to compare three different methods of radial artery harvesting with regard to postoperative complications and perioperative stress of the patient. A total of 60 patients admitted for coronary artery bypass surgery were randomized into three groups. Each patient underwent extraction of radial artery, all performed by a single surgeon. The radial artery was harvested by o...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of the inter-radicular septum width in the insertion site of self-drilling mini-implants on the stability degree of these anchorage devices. Methods: The sample consisted of 40 mini-implants inserted in the inter-radicular septum between maxillary second premolars and first molars in 21 patients to provide skeletal anchorage for...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the postoperative three-dimensional (3D) changes in the proximal segments after mandibular setback sagittal split ramus osteotomy and to compare the changes between the conventional mini-plate fixation and semi-rigid sliding plate fixation. METHODS Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) images were used to evaluate the postoperative 3D ...