BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to describe the design, methods, and baseline characteristics of children enrolled in the Personalized Addition lenses Clinical Trial (PACT). PACT aims to test the myopia control efficacy of progressive addition lenses (PALs) with personalized addition values compared with standard (+2.00 D) addition PALs and single vision lenses (SVLs). METHODS PACT is a ...

Antibiotics have increasingly lost their impact to kill bacteria efficiently during the last 10 years. The emergence and dissemination of superbugs with resistance to multiple antibiotic classes have occurred among Gram-positive and Gram-negative strains including Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter...

One of the key mediators of the antiviral and antiproliferative actions of interferon is double-stranded-RNA-dependent protein kinase (PKR). PKR activity is also involved in the regulation of cell proliferation, apoptosis and signal transduction. We have recently identified PACT, a novel protein activator of PKR, as an important modulator of PKR activity in cells in the absence of viral infecti...

Background A number of important applications in medicine and biomedical research, including quality of care surveillance and identification of prospective study subjects, require identification of large cohorts of patients with specific clinical characteristics. Currently used conventional techniques are either labor-intensive or imprecise, while natural language processing-based applications ...

BACKGROUND The side effects and burden of anticoagulant treatments may contribute to poor compliance and consequently to treatment failure. A specific questionnaire is necessary to assess patients' needs and their perceptions of anticoagulant treatment. METHODS A conceptual model of expectation and satisfaction with anticoagulant treatment was designed by an advisory board and used to guide p...

Tissue optical clearing technique shows a great potential for neural imaging with high resolution, especially for connectomics in brain. The passive clarity technique (PACT) is a relative simple clearing method based on incubation, which has a great advantage on tissue transparency, fluorescence preservation and immunostaining compatibility for imaging tissue blocks. However, this method suffer...

PURPOSE The Providing Assistance to Caregivers in Transition (PACT) program offers nursing home discharge planning and case management for individuals in the transitional period following a return to the community. The PACT program targeted individuals newly admitted to nursing homes and worked with a family caregiver to develop and implement a nursing home discharge plan. DESIGN AND METHOD R...

Small RNAs guide RNA-induced silencing complexes (RISCs) to bind to cognate mRNA transcripts and trigger silencing of protein expression during RNA interference (RNAi) in eukaryotes. A fundamental aspect of this process is the asymmetric loading of one strand of a short interfering RNA (siRNA) or microRNA (miRNA) duplex onto RISCs for correct target recognition. Here, we use a reconstituted sys...

Background: Aphasia rehabilitation should comprise a family-centred approach, involving main conversation partners in the rehabilitation process as soon as possible. A standardised approach to conversation partner training (CPT) became available in the Netherlands with the release of Partners of Aphasic clients Conversation Training (PACT). PACT was introduced in clinical practice in a multicen...