Objective - To determine if the dipeptidyl peptidase 4 inhibitor vildagliptin more effectively than the sulfonylurea glimepiride inhibits glucagon levels during meal. Research design and methods - Glucagon responses to a standard meal were measured at baseline and study endpoint (mean 1.8 years) in a trial evaluating add-on therapy to metformin with vildagliptin 50 mg bid compared to glimepiride u

The two major aims of this study are (1) To test the performance of the Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm (LRA) to quantify past landscape changes using historical maps and related written sources, and (2) to use the LRA and map reconstructions for a better understanding of the origin of landscape diversity and the recent loss of species diversity. Southern Sweden, hemiboreal vegetation zone. The

A series of aromatic multiblock copolymers based on alternating segments of hydrophilic sulfonated polysulfone (PSU) and hydrophobic polyfluoroether (PFE) were prepared and characterized as proton exchange membranes. PSU precursor blocks were synthesized by polycondensation of dichlorodiphenylsulfone and resorcinol, and PFE precursor blocks were prepared by combining decafluorobiphenyl and isoprop

tmospherically important data are gained from cloud condensation nucleus counter (CCNC) analysis of aerosols that are particle mobility separated using differential mobility analysers (I)MA). We present relaxed step functions that can be fitted to these data to obtain critical diameters or critical supersaturations. The step functions are based on the DMA transfer function. We treat the case with

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