ObjectivesThe aim was to describe the clinical characteristics and epidemiology of hypocomplementaemic urticarial vasculitis (HUV; anti-C1q vasculitis) in two geographically defined areas of Sweden.MethodsIn the health-care districts surrounding Skåne University Hospital (mean population 950 560) and Linköping University Hospital (mean population 428 503), all incident cases of HUV residing within

Objective: To systematically evaluate variations in single-nucleotide polymorphisms within 13 candidate pain genes in patients differing in phenotype characteristics based on a composite measure of pain sensitivity.Methods: In a case-control study, 149 patients scheduled for laparoscopic cholecystectomy were individually categorized according to preoperative pain sensitivity and postoperative pain

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are considered as the mostpromising alternative power sources with a wide variety of applications owing to their attractive advantages compared to other conventional power sources. During the past decades, the cell performance has been gradually improved. However, the cell performance improvement and cost reduction are still urgently needed due to the r

Trots den snabba utvecklingen av moderna tekniker för narkos och bedövning upplever många patienter smärta efter kirurgi. God smärtlindring efter en operation kan påskynda återhämtningen och därmed minska risken för komplikationer som blodpropp eller infektion. För att uppnå detta måste vi bli bättre på att hitta individer med ökad risk för postoperativ smärta redan innan de sövs. Sedan tidigare kMany patients experience pain after surgery. Postoperative pain may lead to delayed mobilization, persisting pain, and psychosocial distress. Others are given excessive analgesic doses and experience side effects. More optimal use of pain relief has several advantages, such as faster postoperative mobilization and fewer incidents of venous thromboembolism or infection. To achieve this, we must ide

For most applications trying to interpret the real world uncertainties will be an important factor to consider, which is also true for Life-Cycle Assessment used for estimating total environmental impact during the life-cycle of products, services, buildings, structures, roads etc. The construction and usage of infrastructure are major causes of emissions and energy use, thus making it even more i

We analyze the importance of different asset holdings for the interdependence of the yield curves in the Euro area using a spatial VAR model. We find that the cross-border holdings of long-term debt and bank lending are important for the interdependence. We also find that comovement in the Euro area declines after 2008. We show that this decline is not related to the difference among countries in

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition of embedded wh-questions in L3 English in German-dominant heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. Specifically, we investigate whether a higher proficiency in the heritage language Italian increases the potential for CLI from that language. To this end, 21 adult-aged Italian-German early bilinguals and 32 monolingual controls (L1

B-1a cells are innate-like lymphocytes that develop primarily during fetal and neonatal life, whereas adult bone marrow (BM) hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) preferentially give rise to follicular B-2 cells. Functioning at the interface of the innate and adaptive immune systems, B-1a cells provide a non-redundant first line of defense prior to the temporally delayed establishment of a B-2 cell resp

In this paper, we present a study for the identification of stancerelated features in text data from social media. Based on our previous work on stance and our findings on stance patterns, we detected stance-related characteristics in a data set from Twitter and Facebook. We extracted various corpus-, quantitative- and computational-based features that proved to be significant for six stance categ

Bakteriesläktet Aerococcus består av åtta arter av s.k. Grampositiva kocker. Den första arten, A. viridans, beskrevs 1953 och kopplingar gjordes mellan den och en allvarlig sjukdom hos hummer. Det skulle dröja åtskilliga decennier innan nästa aerokockart, A. urinae, upptäcktes. Denna kopplades till urinvägsinfektioner (UVI) och bakteriemi, dvs. växt av bakterier i blodet, hos människa. Därefter haThe genus Aerococcus comprises eight species of Gram-positive cocci. The incidence and the clinical importance of aerococcal infections have been underestimated in the past, due to species identification difficulties. In our first study, we evaluated the usefulness of MALDI-TOF MS as a species identification method for aerococci and found that it had a high sensitivity and specificity. Two populat

Glucocorticoid treatment, a major cause of drug-induced osteoporosis and fractures, is widely used to treat inflammatory conditions and diseases. By contrast, mechanical loading increases bone mass and decreases fracture risk. With these relationships in mind, we investigated whether mechanical loading interacts with GC treatment in bone. Three-month-old female C57BL/6 mice were treated with high-

Circulating vitamin B6 levels have been found to be inversely associated with lung cancer. Most studies have focused on the B6 form pyridoxal 5′-phosphate (PLP), a direct biomarker influenced by inflammation and other factors. Using a functional B6 marker allows further investigation of the potential role of vitamin B6 status in the pathogenesis of lung cancer. We prospectively evaluated the assoc

Background: Diastolic dysfunction (DD) is increasingly common. However, its metabolic determinants are poorly known. This study aims to determine which metabolic and inflammatory features predict DD in initially healthy adults. Methods: We prospectively analyzed the association between metabolic features and DD in 728 initially healthy adults aged 30–60 from Eastern France enrolled in the STANISLA

Background: Participation in everyday life and society is generally seen as essential for health-related outcomes and acknowledged to affect older people’s well-being. Aims: To investigate if aspects of performance- and togetherness-related participation influence on mortality among very old single living people in Sweden. Methods: ENABLE-AGE Survey Study data involving single-living participants

Objective: To explore conditions influencing long-term participation in social and leisure activities among people who have had a stroke. Methods: This study had a qualitative design, using a grounded theory methodology. Data collection was based on in-depth interviews performed 15 years after a first-ever stroke with 10 persons recruited from a population-based stroke cohort in Sweden. The study