OBJECTIVE: To examine the mortality risk of blood transfusions when donor information, postdonation treatment, and a wide selection of risk factors are taken into account. METHODS: A retrospective study was performed on 9907 patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting and/or aortic valve replacement. Several transfusion-related risk factors, including age of blood products, sex of don

Stories about another country are often viewed as filled with stereotypes and prejudices. Still there are other ways to organize foreign experiences, especially for actors needing to achieve an attitude of proximity. This article analyzes arrival stories, in this case Swedish businessmen’s stories about their first arrival to a post-communist country, in order to show how such stories may be used

Artificial neural network (ANN) ensembles have long suffered from a lack of interpretability. This has severely limited the practical usability of ANNs in settings where an erroneous decision can be disastrous. Several attempts have been made to alleviate this problem. Many of them are based on decomposing the decision boundary of the ANN into a set of rules. We explore and compare a set of new me

The widening inequalities in smoking are one of the growing public health challenges in western countries, where smoking and smoking cessation patterns are unequally distributed among the populations. Inequalities in smoking and smoking cessation are closely associated with factors such as socioeconomic status, psychosocial and cultural factors. In Sweden, individuals with low socioeconomic status

One of the primary reasons for hospitalisation among elderly individuals with heart failure (HF) is poor self-care. Self-awareness of having HF may be a key-element in successful self-care. The prevalence of self-awareness of HF, and how it is affected by age-and HF-related factors, remains poorly understood. The aims of the present study were to determine the prevalence of self-awareness of HF in

During the last twenty years archaeology has experienced a technological revolution that spans scientific achieve-ments and day-to-day practices. The tools and methods from this digital change have also strongly impacted archaeology. Image-based 3D modeling is becoming more common when documenting archaeological features but is still not implement-ed as standard in field excavation projects. When

Abstract is not available

The European forest carbon balance studied by various methods shows different results. We compared the regional and national net primary production (NPP) estimated by the forest inventory-based model EFISCEN and the climate-based terrestrial ecosystem models (TEMs: BIOME-BGC, ORCHIDEE, and JULES), and single forests NPP derived from the international network of eddy-covariance towers (FLUXNET). In

We report on fabrication and electron transport measurements of lateral InGaAs quantum dots defined by wet chemical etching. The tunneling barriers and dot potential are tuned using both etching-defined in-plane gates and a local top gate. Transport measurements performed at low temperature show Coulomb diamonds with excited states in the bias spectroscopy indicating the effects of quantum confine

BACKGROUND: Phthalates are used as plasticizers in soft polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and in a large number of consumer products. Because of reported health risks, diisononyl phthalate (DiNP) has been introduced as a replacement for di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) in soft PVC. This raises concerns because animal data suggest that DiNP may have antiandrogenic properties similar to those of DEHP. The a

Popular Abstract in Swedish Mitralisklaffen (lat. valva mitralis; valva bicuspidalis) är den klaff i hjärtat som finns mellan vänster förmak och vänster kammare. Till utseendet liknar klaffen påvens huvudbonad, mitra, varifrån namnet härstämmar. Mitralisklaffen består av två segelliknande flikar (klaffblad) med en upphängningsapparat som fäster sig i vänster-kammarens vägg. När vänster kammare konNormalization of life expectancy after mitral valve surgery is highly dependent on early diagnosis and referral for surgical treatment. Among cases treated surgically, the majority (60–70%) have a degenerative etiology, which is also easiest to repair. The general aim of this thesis was to bring research on treatment of degenerative mitral regurgitation a step further in order to improve clinical

BACKGROUND: Dercum's disease (DD) is characterised by obesity and chronic pain (> 3 months) in the adipose tissue. The pathogenesis of DD is unknown, but inflammatory components have been proposed. In previous reports and studies, an inconsistent picture of the histological appearance of the adipose tissue in DD has been described. The aim of this investigation was to examine the histological app

Ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) is the most frequently used type of orthosis in children with cerebral palsy (CP). AFOs are designed either to improve function or to prevent or treat muscle contractures. The purpose of the present study was to analyse the use of, the indications for, and the outcome of using AFO, relative to age and gross motor function in a total population of children with cerebral pa

Paracellular permeability is determined by the complex structures of junctions that are located between the epithelial cells. Already in 1996, it was shown that the human probiotic strain Lactobacillus plantarum 299v and the rat-originating strain Lactobacillus reuteri R2LC could reduce this permeability in a methotrexate-induced colitis model in the rat. Subsequently, many animal models and cell

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) and metabolic syndrome (MetS) are major health problems associated with cardiovascular disease. Both diseases are influenced by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. The aim of this thesis was to identify genetic risk factors for T2D, particularly T2D associated with obesity, and for MetS. To achieve this goal, we 1) followed-up a region linked to obese T2D in a

The production of neutral strange hadrons is investigated using deep-inelastic scattering events measured with the H1 detector at HERA. The measurements are made in the phase space defined by the negative four-momentum transfer squared of the photon 2 < Q(2) < 100 GeV2 and the inelasticity 0.1 < y < 0.6. The K-s(0) s and Lambda((Lambda) over bar) production cross sections and their ratios are dete