BACKGROUND Social networks are theorized as significant influences in the innovation adoption and behavior change processes. Our understanding of how social networks operate within healthcare settings is limited. As a result, our ability to design optimal interventions that employ social networks as a method of fostering planned behavior change is also limited. Through this proposed project, we...

Prior research suggests that acoustical degradation impacts encoding of items into memory, especially in elderly subjects. We here aimed to investigate whether acoustically degraded items that are initially encoded into memory are more prone to forgetting as a function of age. Young and old participants were tested with a vocoded and unvocoded serial list learning task involving immediate and d...

Does long-term care insurance help purchasers preserve their assets and avoid Medicaid? The purpose of this issue brief is to explore the complex interaction of Medicaid and private long-term care insurance and highlight the policy implications for those who may "fall through the cracks" in their coverage.

we aimed to evaluate clinical, high resolution computed tomography (hrct) and pulmonary function test (pft) findings after 18-23 years of exposure in veterans of sulphur mustard (sm) exposure. we performed a cross-sectional study of 106 patients. inclusion criteria were 1: documented exposure to sm as confirmed by toxicological analysis of their urine and vesicular fluid after exposure 2: singl...

in the present study, saffron was dried using a heat pump-assisted hybrid photovoltaic-thermal solar dryer. the effect of different drying air temperatures at three levels (40, 50, and 60oc) and two different modes of the dryer (with and without heat pump system) were investigated on drying behaviour of saffron. after collecting the pertinent data, eleven drying models were used to describe dry...

in this article we consider relative iteration of entire functions and studycomparative growth of the maximum term of iterated entire functions withthat of the maximum term of the related functions.

the influence of long-term mixed organic and inorganic contamination on soil microbial activity, community structure and genetic diversity was investigated in soil samples from a coke oven plant located in upper silesia, poland. the tested soils were heavily contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (pahs) and heavy metals. the microbial communities were characterized using the phospho...

introduction: langerhans cell histiocytosis (lch) is a rare disease characterized by clonal prolifera-tion of histiocytosis in different tissues. permanent consequences (pc) described among subjects with langerhans cell histiocytosis (lch).in this study we report the prevalence of permanent sequel among long – term survivors of lch in our center. methods: we had 30 cases of lch from 1989 – 2001...

background: it has been documented that cytokines play important roles in the induction of normal functions of the placenta. it has been hypothesized that abnormal expression of the cytokines may be associated with unsuccessful pregnancy. objective: the aim of this study was to compare the serum levels of interleukin-17a (il-17a) and tumor growth factor (tgf-ß) in pre-term, term neonates, and t...

BACKGROUND Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is claimed to have a variety of benefits, but almost all published results are anecdotal. We characterized the resident population in long-term care facilities desiring AAT and determined whether AAT can objectively improve loneliness. METHODS Of 62 residents, 45 met inclusion criteria for the study. These 45 residents were administered the Demographic...