BACKGROUND: The quality of health care and its costs have been a subject of considerable attention and lively discussion. Various methods have been introduced to measure, assess, and improve the quality of health care. Many professionals in health care have criticized quality work and its methods as being unsuitable for health care. The aim of the study was to obtain a deeper understanding of the

We establish the local well-posedness for a new periodic integrable equation. We show that the equation has classical solutions that blowup in finite time as well as classical solutions which exist globally in time.

Research in the field of cell biology and biomedicine relies on technologies that fractionate cell populations and isolate rare cell types to high purity. A brief overview of methods and commercially available products currently used in cell separations is presented. Cell fractionation by size and density and highly selective affinity-based technologies such as affinity chromatography, fluorescenc

The spectral properties of financial correlation matrices can show features known from completely random matrices. A major reason is noise originating from the finite lengths of the financial time series used to compute the correlation matrix elements. In recent years, various methods have been proposed to reduce this noise, i.e. to clean the correlation matrices. This is of direct practical relev

Background: Job strain (high demands and low decision latitude) has been associated with hypertension and cardiovascular disease, especially in men. Most studies on job strain and hypertension have been cross-sectional, and prospective data are inconsistent. Objective: To prospectively describe the effects of different psychosocial work characteristics on office blood pressure changes. Methods: In

Background For unknown reasons, urinary tract infections (UTIs) are clustered in certain individuals. Here we propose a novel, genetically determined cause of susceptibility to acute pyelonephritis, which is the most severe form of UTI. The IL-8 receptor, CXCR1, was identified as a candidate gene when mIL-8Rh mutant mice developed acute pyelonephritis (APN) with severe tissue damage. Methods and

A total of 42 Swedish patients with biopsy-proven chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection were treated with a natural human leucocyte alpha-interferon (HuIFN-alpha-Le), Alfanative (BioNative AB, Umeå, Sweden) in an open uncontrolled study. Two patients were withdrawn from treatment within 2 weeks due to non-compliance and were omitted from further analysis, and 40 patients (17 females), mean age

Digitonin, which is known to cause extensive damage to cytomembranes in general, was found to have a most remarkable effect on epidermal Langerhans' cells. Thus, it generates a membrane-sandwiching process resulting in the formation of large discs which except for the differences in size have the same morphology as ordinary Birbeck granules. This demonstrates that the cytomembrane of the Langerhan

The green fluorescent protein GFPuv has been genetically engineered to investigate the influence of N-terminal tyrosine extensions in aqueous two-phase systems. Fusions in the N-terminus affected the protein expression, and tags containing three tyrosines and prolines influenced the expression favorably. This effect is probably due to changes in mRNA stability, because the amounts of corresponding

It was proved theoretically and empirically that critical degrees of saturation exist in connection with freezing of porous and brittle materials of different types. It was also proved that damage occurs after one freezing if the actual degree of ssaturation exceeds the critical. Comparisons between the critical degrees of saturation of different materials and those reached in practice in a given

The pseudoscalar meson eta(b) has been searched for in two-photon interactions at LEP II. The data sample corresponds to a total integrated luminosity of 617 pb(-1) at centre-of-mass energies ranging from 161 to 209 GeV. Upper limits at a confidence level of 95% on the product Gamma(gamma gamma) (eta(b)) x BR(eta(b)) are 190, 470 and 660 eV/c(2) for the eta(b) decaying into 4, 6 and 8 charged part