Background: Mechanical ventilatory support seriously affects speaking and communication, and earlier studies show that many ventilator-supported patients experience difficulties and frustration with their speech and voice production. Since there is a growing number of individuals who require mechanical ventilatory support and there is a paucity of studies that examine ventilator-supported ...

Vibrational communication is one of the least understood channels of communication. Most studies have focused on the role of substrate-borne signals in insect mating behavior, where a male and a female establish a stereotyped duet that enables partner recognition and localization. While the effective communication range of substrate-borne signals may ...

Spontaneous pneumothorax represents a common clinical problem. An overview of relevant and updated information on epidemiology, pathophysiology and cause(s) of spontaneous (primary and secondary) pneumothorax is described.

In the epidemiologic modeling of diseases, the epidemiologic problem oriented approach (EPOA) methodology facilitates the development of systematic and structured knowledge bases, which are crucial for development of models. A detailed understanding of the epidemiology of a given disease provides the essential framework for model development and enables the laying ...

Ante-mortem assays exist for some Transmission Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE). These assays facilitate our understanding of disease pathology and epidemiology; however, the limitations of these ante-mortem assays include the inability to quantify protein amount, poor sensitivity, and/or limited robustness. Here, we utilize a bioinformatics approach to report on problems associated with ...

Frailty stands at the nexus of geriatrics and gerontology, and requires both basic biology and clinical knowledge for its analysis. Understanding frailty difficulties much more than simply adding another outcome measure in epidemiological studies. The major challenge is the identification of multiple feed-forward and feed-back signaling pathways involved in the ...

Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) due to Leishmania tropica Wright has become an increasingly important problem in Al-Haouz province, Morocco. The objective of this paper was to undertake a retrospective analysis of CL between 2000 and 2006 and to study the sandfly fauna for the first time in this focus. The consultation ...

Headache is a critical problem in the emergency department (ED). The main aim for the ED doctor is to distinguish primary forms of headache from secondary forms. In this paper we will briefly review epidemiological data regarding headache in ED, consider the role of diagnostic alarms and "warning symptoms" in ...

Men who have sex with men (MSM) may account for an increasing proportion of China's HIV epidemic, but remain difficult to access for epidemiological studies due to high stigma. We compare the composition of two samples of MSM obtained in Guangzhou, China. The first survey, conducted in 2004, recruited MSM ...

Two issues relating to prescription opioid nonmedical use that to our knowledge have not been comprehensively addressed in the peer-reviewed literature are discussed: Motives for nonmedical use and the extent of nonmedical use of prescription opioids in other countries. The United States' national annual survey on illicit drug use in ...

Epidemiologic evidence makes clear that the likelihood of exposure to environmental contaminants increases in most poor and underserved communities. Despite progress in reducing a number of environmental risk factors for disease, serious environmental problems persist, and those remaining problems are highly complex. Their solution requires meaningful community engagement as well ...

The STROBE guidelines (for Strengthening the Reporting of OBservational Studies in Epidemiology) add to a lengthy catalog of attempts to keep epidemiologists on more or less straight and more or less narrow paths charted by guideline authors. STROBE has an ambitious goal, and may prove highly useful for some. It ...

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to compare characteristics of smokers who did and did not report use of cessation aids as part of a tobacco control program in a military setting (n = 8994). DESIGN: The study is a longitudinal epidemiological study where the relationship between smoking status ...

No epidemiologic study for cystic echinococcosis in México has yet been described. The objective of this work was to determine the prevalence and distribution of human echinococcosis in a community of the state of México and its probable risk factors. A cross-sectional study was performed; household census was used to ...

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact that the marking of the argumentative orientation and the temporal framing of the HIV incidence can have on the intent to adopt preventive behavior and the attitude towards the fight against AIDS. METHODS: We elaborated a text presented as an epidemiological information message about HIV/AIDS ...

The declining prevalence of left-handers with age has resulted in the hypothesis that sinistrality, being the result of a developmental insult, may be associated with a reduced life span. While it is plausible that some individuals become left-handed as a consequence of neurologic impairment, the literature on handedness itself appears ...

Since the discovery of the 32-base-pair deletion in the CCR5 chemokine receptor gene (CCR5-Delta32) and its effect on HIV-1 infection and AIDS progression, many genetic factors affecting AIDS have been identified. Here we quantify the impact of 13 of these factors on AIDS progression using a new statistic based on ...

Phylogenetic analysis of 45 enterovirus 71 (EV71) isolates for 6 years in Yamagata, Japan, clarified that the annual outbreak of hand-foot-and-mouth disease was due to four genetically distinct subgenogroups, including a novel "B5." Our results suggest that the importation of EV71 from surrounding countries has had a major epidemiological impact ...

The determination of methane is of strong interest to the analytical community due to its natural abundance, its potential to cause explosions and its known greenhouse effect. The current report gives a brief overview into the environmental significance of methane and an account of the existing detection protocols for methane ...

Molecular epidemiological investigation was conducted among injecting drug users (IDUs) (n = 11) and heterosexuals (n = 15) in Kunming, Yunnan Province of China. HIV-1 genotypes were determined based on the nucleotide sequences of 2.6-kb gag-RT region. The distribution of genotypes among IDUs was as follows: CRF07_BC (5/11) and CRF08_BC ...

In this paper we consider the well-known Thurstone box problem in exploratory factor analysis. Initial loadings and components are extracted using principal component analysis. Rotating the components towards independence rather than rotating the loadings towards simplicity allows one to accurately recover the dimensions of each box and also produce simple ...

A new system was used to determine the workplace protection factors (WPF) for dust and bioaerosols in agricultural environments. The field study was performed with a subject wearing an N95 filtering facepiece respirator while performing animal feeding, grain harvesting and unloading, and routine investigation of facilities. As expected, the geometric ...

To review the main achievement and problems of study on hand-arm vibration syndrome in China. The epidemiological and clinical study indicate that HAVS was reported from almost provinces in China, the prevalence of VWF ranges from 2.5% to 82.8% in the workers with vibrating tool use. The exposure-response relationship between ...

Despite over US $200 million having been spent researching illnesses following the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, the nature and cause of such illnesses remains controversial. In this narrative review, we discuss some of the methodological issues that have affected epidemiological studies on this topic. These include low-response rates, ascertainment bias, ...

Data from AIDS surveillance systems in the World Health Organization European region (1993-2001) were analysed to describe the main epidemiological aspects of recurrent bacterial pneumonia (RBP) as AIDS-defining illness (ADI) in Europe. Among the 153 756 AIDS cases analysed, 5796 (3.8%) had RBP. The proportion of RBP was higher (8.3%) ...

In Nigeria, most studies concerning HIV/AIDS transmission have looked at the sexual route from both epidemiological and behavioral perspectives. A few have examined the role of blood transfusion and the potential for indigenous surgical practices. None have specifically looked at the transmission of potential barbers. This study distinguished between indigenous ...

Over half of the estimated 50 million people with epilepsy live in Asia, but there has been limited information on the epidemiology, aetiology and management of epilepsy from this region. In this article, we summarise some of the main problems faced by patients and the current treatment options available in ...

Jan Svoboda has had an extraordinary influence on my research. Following our first meeting in 1967, he encouraged me to pursue my tentative evidence for the existence of endogenous retroviruses latent in normal cells. He introduced me to the Czech scientists, Pavel Veselý and Jan Závada, with whom I collaborated ...

This paper contrasts biomedical and epidemiological approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of disease, and uses Collingwood's "principle of the relativity of causes" to show how different approaches focus on different causal factors reflecting different interests. By distinguishing between the etiology of a disease and an epidemic, the paper argues ...

OBJECTIVES: This commentary reviews toxicological information and critically evaluates epidemiological information on the relationship between glycol ethers and congenital malformations. METHODS: The authors identified and assessed toxicological and epidemiological research on glycol ethers used in occupational settings and congenital malformations. Sensitivity analyses evaluated the possible role of methodological problems in ...

The Standardisation Subcommittee of the International Continence Society (ICS) now recognizes overactive bladder (OAB) as a "symptom syndrome suggestive of lower urinary tract dysfunction." It is specifically defined as "urgency, with or without urge incontinence, usually with frequency and nocturia." The ICS definition was not formulated until January 2001 and ...

Occupational low back pain (LBP) is an immense burden for both industry and medicine. Ergonomic and personal risk factors result in LBP, but psychosocial factors can influence LBP disability. Epidemiologic studies clearly indicate the role of mechanical loads on the etiology of occupational LBP. Occupational exposures such as lifting, particularly ...

In this paper we trace the history of epidemiology from 1800 to the present time. The history is highly selective because our purpose is to illuminate the evolving relationship of epidemiology with demography. We first describe the common "prehistory" of these two disciplines in the early nineteenth century, and then ...

Cryptosporidiosis was recognised in human beings in 1976, and was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s as a cause of severe diarrhoeal illness in patients with AIDS. It is now additionally recognised as a major cause of waterborne diarrhoeal illness in developed regions, and as a pathogen with long-term effect ...

Tungiasis is caused by the flea Tunga penetrans. Growing urbanization, improved housing and use of appropriate footwear presumably have led to an overall reduction of the occurrence of this ectoparasitosis within the last decades. However, it is still highly prevalent where people live in extreme poverty, occurring in many Latin ...

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has challenged the resourcefulness of epidemiology and epidemiologists. In response to the challenge, epidemiologists have used existing epidemiologic strategies, expanded existing strategies, and developed new strategies to answer key questions about the transmission of HIV, the natural history of HIV at the molecular, host, and community levels, ...

At least for the early years of the twenty-first century we can anticipate some of the advances to be made in mapping, positional cloning, pooling of evidence over samples for linkage and allelic association, and fully parametric methods that combine the latter with segregation analysis. This preoccupation with problems the ...

BACKGROUND: In the last decades, attention to cholera epidemiology increased, as cholera epidemics became a worldwide health problem. Detailed investigation of V. cholerae interactions with its host and with other organisms in the environment suggests that cholera dynamics is much more complex than previously thought. Here, I formulate a mathematical ...

The first outbreak of citrus tristeza disease in Spain caused by Citrus tristeza virus (CTV) was recorded in 1957 in the Valencian Community (VC). In total c. 40 million trees, mainly of sweet orange and mandarin grafted on sour orange rootstocks, declined due to CTV. Large-scale surveys in different municipalities ...

A prospective population-based study was conducted in Australia and New Zealand during 1994-1997 to elucidate the epidemiology of cryptococcosis due to Cryptococcus neoformans var. neoformans (CNVN) and C. neoformans var. gattii (CNVG) and to relate clinical manifestations to host immune status and cryptococcal variety. The mean annual incidence per 10(6) ...

Turkey is an iodine deficiency area. The overall goitre prevalence is thought to be 30%, and most epidemiological studies give figures compatible with mild to moderate iodine deficiency. However, it is suspected that there are regions where iodine deficiency might be more severe than previously known. In this study the ...

Situated in Southeastern Europe, with a surface of 237,500 km2 and a population of over 22 million, Romania was a special case in the evolution of global AIDS crisis. After the first reported case in a homosexual male in 1985, five years elapsed till the epidemiological investigations done in the ...

Statisticians working in psychiatric epidemiology regularly confront a variety of problems that are rare in other branches of epidemiology. These problems range from the frequent absence of 'objective' biological markers and consequent reliance on informant and self-reports of considerable fallability, to the perhaps corresponding frequent use of multivariate statistical methods ...

To carry out epidemiological studies at a regional level, one may need to link information collected by medical doctors working either in hospitals or in private offices or laboratories. The first problem is to respect the European legislation on nominal data processing, which does not allow the linkage of nominal ...

Understanding the epidemiology of equine colic is directly relevant to the management of individual horses with colic. In this article, the epidemiology of colic is reviewed with emphasis on epidemiologic studies that have identified specific factors associated with increased risk of colic and epidemiologic studies that are designed to predict ...

Most researchers rely only on large samples for the assessment of onchocerciasis prevalence in communities where it is endemic. However, because of the large population that must be included in the sample and the cost of surveys, several alternative methods are being explored. One is the selection of a small ...

The epidemiologic transition theory presented first by Omran [Omram. A. R. (1971) The epidemiologic transition: a theory of the epidemiology of population change, Mildbank Quarterly 49(4), 509-538] was designed to explain global trends in the dynamic relationship between epidemiological phenomena and demographic change. This paper argues that universalizing this theory ...

Two particular issues make the interpretation of epidemiological studies in asthma problematic. The first is the lack of any clear definition of asthma. This is a perennial area of controversy. Thirty-eight years ago a Ciba Foundation guest symposium addressed this issue and suggested a solution. However, as J. G. Scadding, ...

I review problems inherent in considering the genetic epidemiology of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The major area of concern is in case definition, both in assigning criteria and in establishing time of onset of disease, since presentation fluctuates throughout life. Other problem areas include selection of case and controls and the ...

In the past decade the concept of spondyloarthropathy has become well established, and appropriate classification criteria have been developed. Now it is time to better define the terms in common use in order to facilitate scientific communication. Recently, new therapeutic approaches have been tested, but the design of some of ...