Vacuum-assisted closure has been adopted as the first-line treatment for poststernotomy mediastinitis as a result of the excellent clinical outcome achieved with its use. Scientific evidence regarding the mechanisms by which vacuum-assisted closure promotes wound healing has started to emerge, although knowledge regarding the effects on heart and lung function is still limited. The organs in the m

Only a small percentage of alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG) administered lumenally to pigs appears in the portal circulation. This has been attributed to mucosal metabolism, and possibly by limited absorption. Although transporters for di- and tricarboxylic acids, which includes the sodium-dependent transporter NaDC-1, have been detected in the small intestine, correlations with functional assays are lac

Aim. This paper reports a study comparing the socio-demographic data, quality of life (QoL) and symptoms of older people living at home with and without help. Background. Despite growing numbers of older people worldwide, little is know about the differences between older people receiving help to live at home and those not receiving this, especially as regards QoL and symptoms. Not only symptoms b

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of a genotype to modify its phenotypic characteristics in response to different environments. Theory predicts that adaptive plasticity should primarily evolve in organisms that experience heterogeneous environments. An organism's dispersal rate is a key component in these models, because the degree of dispersal partly determines the extent of environmental hete

In view of the rising proportion of elderly in the population, diffusion of medical technologies to the elderly is a particularly interesting phenomenon, with respect to both quality of life and health care costs. Using data on all carotid endarterectomies (CEAs) performed in Sweden, we explore the pattern of age diffusion 1982-1999. The overall rates of CEA are considerably lower in Sweden than i

Earlier research performed on axially loaded concrete prisms shows that crack widths close to reinforcement are smaller and less dependent on concrete cover than crack widths at the concrete surface. To check practical applicability of these results a similar experimental investigation of cracking behaviour has been undertaken for beams loaded in bending. The influence of steel stress and concrete

The molecular relationship of placental mammals has attracted great interest in recent years. However, 2 crucial and conflicting hypotheses remain, one with respect to the position of the root of the eutherian tree and the other the relationship between the orders Rodentia, Lagomorpha (rabbits, hares), and Primates. Although most mitochondrial (mt) analyses have suggested that rodents have a basal

Radiative lifetimes of 11 odd-parity levels of neutral rhenium (Re I) were measured using time-resolved laser-induced fluorescence techniques. For ten levels, there were no previous results available. The new results have been used to assess the accuracy of calculations with a Hartree-Fock-plus-relativistic-corrections model that takes configuration interaction and core-polarization effects into a

The aim of this study was to determine the test-retest (two occasions seven days part) reproducibility of isokinetic (Biodex) concentric (CON) and eccentric (ECC) ankle dorsiflexor strength and fatigue measurements in older subjects using several statistical methods. Thirty healthy men (n=15) and women (n=15) aged between 70 and 85 years participated in the study. To determine the reproducibility

Flameless combustion is an attractive solution to address existing problems of emissions and stability when operating gas turbine combustors. Theoretical, numerical and experimental approaches were used to study the flameless gas turbine combustor. The emissions and combustion stability were measured and the limits of the flameless regime are discussed. Using experimental techniques and Large Eddy

We calculate the electronic states of the low bandgap polyfluorene-based copolymer DiO-PFDTBT, which consists of alternating 9,9-dioctyl-9H-fluorene and 4,7-di-thiophen-2-ylbenzo[1,2,5]thiadiazole (TBT) units, and compare with the steady-state absorption, emission, and excitation spectrum. Using the semiempirical quantum-chemical (ZINDO) method we can assign the characteristic bands of the "camel-

We report the clinical MRI and histopathological features of five consecutive cases of spinal paraganglioma. Three intradural tumours were found in the typical location (two at the L4, one at the S2 level); one intradural extramedullary tumour arose at an unusual level, from the ventral C2 root, and one extradural tumour growing along the L5 nerve root sheath had an aggressive growth pattern with

European Americans are often treated as a homogeneous group, but in fact form a structured population due to historical immigration of diverse source populations. Discerning the ancestry of European Americans genotyped in association studies is important in order to prevent false-positive or false-negative associations due to population stratification and to identify genetic variants whose contrib

Biomaterials research will always require a range of techniques to examine structure and function on a range of length scales and in a range of settings. Neutron scattering provides a unique way of disentangling the molecular and structural complexity of biomaterials through study of the constituent components. We examine how the technique has been used to study surface immobilized proteins and li

In the present article we continue investigating the algebraic dependence of commuting elements in q-deformed Heisenberg algebras. We provide a simple proof that the 0-chain subalgebra is a maximal commutative subalgebra when q is of free type and that it coincides with the centralizer (commutant) of any one of its elements dierent from the scalar multiples of the unity. We review the Burchnall-Ch

In order to reduce the effort of the controller design in the customized image convolution processor, a controller synthesis tool is developed based on [9] to support the design flow from a system or algorithm specification to RTL level VHDL. Architecture extensions to basic FSMs structures are implemented with the purpose of optimizing controller design for area and power consumption. Together wi

N1s x-ray absorption spectra of bi-isonicotinic acid (2,28-bipyridine–4,48-dicarboxylic acid! on rutile TiO2(110) have been studied experimentally and quantum chemically. Differences between multilayer and monolayer spectra are explained by the adsorbate bonding to the substrate. A connection to the electronic coupling in dye-sensitized electrochemical devices is made.