Approximately 5% of the population worldwide suffer from varieties of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). Prevention and early identification remain the best methods of approaching NIHL. Over the years, numerous methods of improving the outcome in patients presenting with NIHL have been evaluated; however, these are far from sufficient. The present ...

Cover: Cover: Model of oscillatory motion of chromatin domains (ChrD) and replication timing. See article on page 609-616 by Pliss et al, in this issue. Cover design by Priscilla Vazquez.

It is generally believed that there is a beneficial effect of collaterals on death and re-infarction statistics in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) but studies to date are small and inconsistent. To meta-analyse the studies published in this field in order to obtain more powerful information. We searched Medline ...

Pleural effusions can be catagorised in to transudative effusions or exudative effusions. Causes include cardiovascular disease, infection and neoplasm. Diagnosis is the key to determining what management is required. History and examination can elicit the cause of the effusion and radiological investigations can be a useful adjunct. Thoracocentesis and laboratory ...

The uniquely diffuse nature of malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) makes it difficult to diagnose, stage, and treat. In addition, it is a relatively uncommon disease, making adequate prospective trials difficult to perform and leading to several controversies regarding the best management of MPM. Perhaps the greatest area of dispute is ...

Pleural effusions are most often secondary to an underlying condition and may be the first sign of the underlying pathologic condition. The balance between the hydrostatic and oncotic forces dictates pleural fluid homeostasis. The parietal pleura has a more significant role in pleural fluid homeostasis. Its vessels are closer to ...

The treatment of chronic recurrent pleural effusions continues to evolve with the recent emergence of tunneled indwelling pleural catheters (IPCs). Talc pleurodesis has been the standard of care for treatment of recurrent pleural effusions, but IPCs have gained more favor in recent years. IPCs offer several advantages, including a less ...

The two reasonable options for surgical management of malignant pleural effusions are tunneled pleural catheters and video-assisted thoracic surgery with talc pleurodesis. Successful palliation demands balancing the patient's wishes, performance status, and prognosis with the ability to obtain full lung expansion and control fluid production. There is no ideal procedure; ...

Benign pleural effusions are twice as common as malignant effusions and have diverse causes and manifestations, which often makes them a diagnostic challenge. Differentiating effusions as a transudate or exudate is the first, and often helpful, step in directing investigations for diagnosis and management. Congestive heart failure and hepatic hydrothorax ...

There is limited clinical research regarding the changes in peripheral lymphocyte subsets during the early post-operative period of liver transplantation. Serial changes of T cells and B cells in living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) recipients during the early post-transplantion period were prospectively investigated. From June 2010 to February 2011, 27 ...

Chest tubes are placed in the pleural space, either surgically or percutaneously to evacuate abnormal fluid and air. Indications for chest tubes include therapeutic drainage of pleural conditions such as pneumothorax, hemothorax, empyema, chylothorax, and malignant effusions, as well as prophylaxis drainage of air, blood, and other fluids after chest ...

Trapped lung is defined by the inability of the lung to expand and fill the thoracic cavity because of a restricting "peel." This restriction may be secondary to a benign inflammatory or fibrotic cortex or to a malignant visceral pleural tumor. This condition has a significant impact on the patient's ...

Population persistence in a new and stressful environment can be influenced by the plastic phenotypic responses of individuals to this environment, and by the genetic evolution of plasticity itself. This process has recently been investigated theoretically, but testing the quantitative predictions in the wild is challenging because (i) there are ...

Populations subject to severe stress may be rescued by natural selection, but its operation is restricted by ecological and genetic constraints. The cost of natural selection expresses the limited capacity of a population to sustain the load of mortality or sterility required for effective selection. Genostasis expresses the lack of ...

Under changing environmental conditions, intraspecific variation can potentially rescue populations from extinction. There are two principal sources of variation that may ultimately lead to population rescue: genetic diversity and phenotypic plasticity. We compared the potential for evolutionary rescue (through genetic diversity) and plastic rescue (through phenotypic plasticity) by analysing their ...

A factor that may limit the ability of many populations to adapt to changing conditions is the rate at which beneficial mutations can become established. We study the probability that mutations become established in changing environments by extending the classic theory for branching processes. When environments change in time, under ...

The current rapid rate of human-driven environmental change presents wild populations with novel conditions and stresses. Theory and experimental evidence for evolutionary rescue present a promising case for species facing environmental change persisting via adaptation. Here, we assess the potential for evolutionary rescue in wild vertebrates. Available information on evolutionary ...

Whether evolution will be rapid enough to rescue declining populations will depend upon population size, the supply of genetic variation, the degree of maladaptation and the historical direction of selection. We examined whether the level of environmental stress experienced by a population prior to abrupt environmental change affects the probability ...

Laboratory model systems and mathematical models have shed considerable light on the fundamental properties and processes of evolutionary rescue. But it remains to determine the extent to which these model-based findings can help biologists predict when evolution will fail or succeed in rescuing natural populations that are facing novel conditions ...

Adaptive dynamics theory has been devised to account for feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes. Doing so opens new dimensions to and raises new challenges about evolutionary rescue. Adaptive dynamics theory predicts that successive trait substitutions driven by eco-evolutionary feedbacks can gradually erode population size or growth rate, thus potentially ...

Populations need to adapt to sustained climate change, which requires micro-evolutionary change in the long term. A key question is how the rate of this micro-evolutionary change compares with the rate of environmental change, given that theoretically there is a 'critical rate of environmental change' beyond which increased maladaptation leads ...

Evolutionary rescue occurs when a population genetically adapts to a new stressful environment that would otherwise cause its extinction. Forecasting the probability of persistence under stress, including emergence of drug resistance as a special case of interest, requires experimentally validated quantitative predictions. Here, we propose general analytical predictions, based on ...

The ability of a pathogen to cause an epidemic when introduced in a new host population often relies on its ability to adapt to this new environment. Here, we give a brief overview of recent theoretical and empirical studies of such evolutionary emergence of pathogens. We discuss the effects of ...

Predicting how and when adaptive evolution might rescue species from global change, and integrating this process into tools of biodiversity forecasting, has now become an urgent task. Here, we explored whether recent population trends of species can be explained by their past rate of niche evolution, which can be inferred ...

There is concern that the rate of environmental change is now exceeding the capacity of many populations to adapt. Mitigation of biodiversity loss requires science that integrates both ecological and evolutionary responses of populations and communities to rapid environmental change, and can identify the conditions that allow the recovery of ...

Populations facing novel environments can persist by adapting. In nature, the ability to adapt and persist will depend on interactions between coexisting individuals. Here we use an adaptive dynamic model to assess how the potential for evolutionary rescue is affected by intra- and interspecific competition. Intraspecific competition (negative density-dependence) lowers ...

Dispersal is a key determinant of a population's evolutionary potential. It facilitates the propagation of beneficial alleles throughout the distributional range of spatially outspread populations and increases the speed of adaptation. However, when habitat is heterogeneous and individuals are locally adapted, dispersal may, at the same time, reduce fitness through ...

The cover image shows the structure of methane hydrate, a form of water ice containing a large amount of methane within a crystal structure of water. Accurate description of hydrogen-bonding energies between water molecules and van der Waals interactions between guest molecules and host water cages is crucial for study ...

As presented on page 149 by Kenta Yamada and Nobuaki Koga, a method to analyze intramolecular interaction energy is applied to an analysis of the P-O bonding in phosphine oxide in conjunction with a newly developed technique to interpret change in electronic structure upon the interaction. The inside cover picture ...

Chronic exercise training results in numerous skeletal muscle adaptations, including increases in insulin sensitivity and glycogen content. To understand the mechanism leading to increased muscle glycogen, we studied the effects of exercise training on glycogen regulatory proteins in rat skeletal muscle. Female Sprague Dawley rats performed voluntary wheel running for ...

In this review, we aim to discuss the definition, clinical and laboratory features, diagnostics, and management of chronic Lyme. Chronic Lyme is a rare condition caused by long-lasting and ongoing infection with the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb). The most common manifestations are progressive encephalitis, myelitis, acrodermatitis chronica atrophicans with or ...

Targeted therapies have been studied in combination with chemoradiation therapy for esophageal and gastroesophageal junction cancers. To date, the Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2 (HER2) HER2, epidermal growth factor receptor, and vascular endothelial growth factor pathways have been most extensively studied in esophagogastric cancers. However, despite strong preclinical rationale ...

This article discusses the role of patients and self-care enabled through the use of technology. Patients have shown interest in healthcare tools that are artfully designed and based on their wants and personal habits. The expectation is that, as these tools evolve, patients will find sufficient motivation and capability to ...

This article discusses the role of data in the reform of the U.S. healthcare system by focusing on electronic health records (EHRs) and the role of stakeholders. Review of research published between 2005 and 2012 was conducted in 2012. Published literature supports the benefit of information technology in the healthcare ...

The aim of the study was to investigate immunoglobulin levels in patients with epilepsy using the antiepileptic drugs (AED) levetiracetam (LEV), carbamazepine (CBZ), or lamotrigine (LTG). A total of 211 patients and 80 controls (age: 18-45 years) of both genders were included. The patients had been treated with either LEV (n = 47), ...

Clostridium difficile remains an important cause of infectious colitis, particularly in healthcare facilities. This review summarizes recent advances in the epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment of this endemic pathogen. C. difficile infection (CDI) hospitalizations and mortality rates have increased over the last decade. The BI/NAP1/027 strain has been responsible for epidemics ...

Although insufficiently studied, schools of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) provide substantial insight into the transformation of medicine in the United States. Scholars have suggested that the increasing acceptance of CAM is due to its alignment with biomedical models of professionalization, education, research, and practice. At West Coast University, students ...

The zebra finch is a superb natural animal model to study cognition and as such could contribute to the further understanding of nicotinic intervention therapies for patients suffering from cognitive impairment as observed in neurodegenerative disorders. Manual analysis of data produced by this model is extremely labour intensive, error-prone, and ...

Surgical resection remains the mainstay of potentially curative therapy for gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) tumors. However, because of the location of the tumor at the boundary between the esophagus and stomach, GEJ tumors have been a source of controversy in regard to their definition, classification, staging and surgical management. The definition ...

Haplotyping problem has been the subject of extensive research in recent years, and is one of the hottest areas of Computational Biology today. In this paper, we study the single individual Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) haplotype reconstruction problem. A heuristic algorithm is proposed for assembling a pair of haplotypes from ...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) added preventive services for women, recommended by the IOM, to healthcare coverage requirements beginning in August 2011. The current review provides evidence on the economic impact of services that will be covered under the ACA, focusing on IOM-recommended measures that ...

Positron emission tomography (PET) is now widely used in the initial evaluation of esophageal and gastroesophageal junction tumors. It can detect otherwise occult metastases, affecting staging and treatment in a significant proportion of patients. The intensity of PET uptake before treatment has been correlated with outcomes, but it remains uncertain ...

A doublet of a fluoropyrimidine and a platinum compound remains the reference regimen in palliative chemotherapy for esophagogastric cancers. Newer regimens involve the substitution of infusional 5-fluorouracil (FU) for a shorter infusional schedule or oral 5-FU prodrugs and the replacement of cisplatin with oxaliplatin. Although the addition of epirubicin to ...

A symposium was held in October 2011 on skin cleansing and its role in basic skin care. The meeting was attended by an international group of leading dermatologists.

The individual haplotyping problem is the computational problem of constructing two haplotypes from one's DNA fragments. We proposed parameterised algorithms for computational models Minimum SNP Removal (MSR) and Minimum Fragment Removal (MFR) of the problem. For m DNA fragments and n SNPs, our algorithms solve MSR and MFR in O(2<SUP ...

Endogenous cardiotonic steroids (CTS) exert long-term effects on salt and blood pressure homeostasis. Here we discuss recent observations on mechanisms of salt sensitivity that involve endogenous ouabain and novel pathways in the brain and discuss their possible relationship to arterial and renal function in hypertension. Chronic elevation of brain sodium ...

The understanding of stroke has changed in the recent years from rehabilitation to an emergency approach. We review existing data from symptom recognition to thrombolysis and identify challenges in the different phases of patient treatment. Implementation of treatment in dedicated stroke units with a multidisciplinary team exclusively treating stroke patients ...

Long-standing persistent (LSP) atrial fibrillation is the most challenging arrhythmia to treat. Catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation has reached satisfactory results for the long-term treatment of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, but not for the treatment of LSP atrial fibrillation. Several approaches with various outcomes have been described in the literature. The ...

In acute ischemic stroke, rapid revascularization of the cerebral 'penumbra volume' is the key to better patient outcome. The largest and most proximal cerebral thrombotic artery occlusions can in most cases only be opened by intra-arterial intervention. The use of intra-arterial revascularization is rapidly expanding throughout Europe and North America, ...

Chronic immune-mediated demyelinating polyneuropathies can often lead to severe neurologic disability. Literature review and personal experience with these types of neuropathies. It is important to recognize these immune-mediated neuropathies as they respond to treatment.