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The paper empirically examines the differential effects of trade on economic growth and investment based on cross-country data. In general, the results are largely consistent with the positive impact of trade on economic growth as found in the literature. However, the empirical results based on different...

The annual Hajj (pilgrimage) to the Islamic holy shrines at the city of Makkah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the largest yearly recurring mass gatherings worldwide. We aim to evaluate the outcome of outside and inside the hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation to resuscitate cardiopulmonary...

The prevalence of obesity has been increasing in Iran over the past decade. This study aimed to determine the population-attributable fraction (PAF) of hypertension associated with obesity, abdominal obesity, and the joint effect of both in the central provinces of Iran. Prevalence of hypertension was...

Naimaze in kabuki has been known as a narrative creation method, or a group of techniques that combines components in existing kabuki works or in the narratives from other genres for making a new work. Various elements, such as stories, plots, characters, and places, can be used as components in naimaze....

This research focuses on a silicon neuron circuit designed utilizing a qualitative neuronal modeling approach. In this circuit, temperature, fabrication mismatch, and secondary effects of transistors cause the difference between the intended characteristics and those in the implemented circuits. Therefore,...

The cardiovascular effects of long-distance and -duration activities and their relationship with arterial stiffness and cardiac biomarkers are still unclear. This study aimed to assess arterial stiffness and Central Blood Pressure (cBP) and correlate them with cardiac biomarkers in long-distance walkers...

Background: Resistant hypertension is presumed to be common in patients with type-II-diabetes mellitus (type-II-DM) and arterial stiffness has been proposed to play a major role in the development hereof. Our objective with this study was to examine differences in vascular characteristics in patients...

Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, regardless of gender, ethnicity or income. Evidence that vascular age, as opposed to chronological age, is better related to the prognosis of CVD is convincing. Despite recent technological advances for the measurement...

Aim: The aim of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of Microlife Watch BP for measuring bilateral blood pressure (BP) in a clinical setting. Method: 339 patients (85% diabetic) scheduled for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring at the outpatient clinic for endocrinology, Silkeborg Regional Hospital,...

Introduction: Increased adiposity is associated with poorer left ventricular (LV) function but the mediating role of blood pressure (BP) and other cardiovascular measures is unknown. We investigated the roles of potential mediators in adolescents in a UK birth cohort, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents...

Background: Inter-arm differences in brachial systolic blood pressure (SBP) should not theoretically translate to differences in calculated aortic SBP, there being only a single value of aortic blood pressure (BP) at any time. Methods: This study assessed seated brachial and derived aortic SBP in 79...

Objective: Exaggerated exercise blood pressure (BP) is associated with higher left-ventricular mass index (LVMI). Paradoxically, exercise BP and LVMI may be higher with greater fitness, but underlying factors are poorly understood. This study aimed to determine the influence of fitness on exercise BP...

Background: We anticipate that in vascular outpatients followed over time, measured changes in arterial stiffness will be the multifactorial result of pressure-dependence, ageing- related degeneration, wall stress homeostasis, and medical treatment. Carotid ultrasound enables assessment of carotid pulse...

Background: Automated office blood pressure (AutoBP) involving repeated, unobserved blood pressure (BP) readings during one clinic visit provides a practical alternative to daytime ambulatory blood pressure (ABP). However, the number of reading taken and measurement duration have varied across previously...

Background: Wave intensity analysis (WIA) in the aorta offers important clinical and mechanistic insights but is difficult non-invasively. We performed WIA by combining high temporal resolution cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) flow velocity and non-invasive central blood pressure (BP) waveform...

Objective: Rupture of atherosclerotic plaques is ultimately a biomechanical event. We aim to develop and validate a novel method using ultrasound radiofrequency (RF) measurements to determine intraplaque inhomogeneities in the strain distribution with a high axial resolution which may identify rupture-prone...

Background: Increased Left Ventricular Mass Index (LVMI) is a well known risk factor for cardiac morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, it is widely recognized that clinical evolution and progression of established CV diseases are related to a range of psychological characteristics, which may partially...

Background: The study of medium and small-size arteries might be useful in the characterization of vascular adaptation, remodeling and wall ultrastructure modifications occurring with aging and in the presence of cardiovascular risk factors. However, to date, these districts have not been extensively...

We propose the concept of a game system that includes an automatic story-generation function based on a table-top role playing game (TRPG). In this idea, stories are generated or transformed based on communication between a “game master (GM),” who controls the story generation, and “players (PLs),” who...

Disasters, mostly uncontrollable in nature, outbreak with devastating impacts throughout the world every year. Disasters might happen in any part of the world at any time. Though the aftermath of disasters negatively impacts all walks of life it usually creates casualties and affects the socio-economically...

Evaluating the performance of recoverable end-of-life products with respect to a set of specific criteria is challenging. This is due to multi-dimensional nature of the decision making process, multiple evaluation criteria, and subjective and imprecise assessments. To effectively deal with this issue,...

Information technology (IT) holds potential for transforming business practices in important ways. For example, it can assist in setting up an infrastructure which supports complex, multiparty trading and transactions among pharmaceutical manufacturers, wholesalers, hospitals, pharmacies, medical supply...

I discuss the connection of the three different questions: The existence of the Gibbs steady state distributions for the stochastic differential equations, the notion and the existence of the conservation laws for such equations, and the convergence of the smooth random perturbations of dynamical systems...

Among the diverse clinical manifestations of Disorders of Sex Development (DSD), the ambiguous look of genitalia is the most typical disorder. In this condition, the sex of the newborn cannot be readily differentiated because of atypical appearance of the external genitalia. Thus, the treatment of such...

Fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD) is a non-atherosclerotic non-inflammatory arterial disease of unknown origin. We previously showed the presence of triple signal (TS) at ultrasound within common carotid artery (CCA) wall. We aimed at coupling TS presence with microconstituents of the vessel wall. We included...

Background: Wave reflection (caused by a stiffness increase from large to small arteries) has been considered to protect against high microvasculature Pulse Pressures (mPP) (1). However, according to transmission line theory, Transmission (T) and Reflection (R) coefficients are proportional (T = 1+R),...

Objective: Prior studies have suggested that the principal determinants of arterial stiffening are age, BP and others CV risk factors such as dyslipidemia and diabetes. However, scanty data are available on the role of psychological factors on arterial stiffness. The aim of the current cross-sectional...

Background: Flow-mediated slowing (FMS) assesses the slowing of pulse wave velocity (PWV) in response to reactive hyperaemia, to provide a measure of endothelial function. We assessed the reproducibility of FMS and whether the technique is sensitive to the influence of age. FMS was compared to the commonly...

Background: Association of Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring (ABPM) with mortality depends on cardiac function in hemodialysis patients. Evidence for the predictive power of central Systolic Pressure (cSBP) is inconclusive. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the additional information of ambulatory...

Aim: Established essential hypertension (EH) is associated with increased arterial stiffness and peripheral resistance, but the extent of vascular changes in persons genetically predisposed for EH is uncertain. Methods: Participants from the Danish Hypertension Prevention Project (DHyPP) (having two...

Background: Endurance training improves vascular function and skeletal muscle perfusion. NIRS can measure changes in oxygenated haemoglobin (oxy-Hb) in the skeletal muscle microvascular bed. Therefore, combined with arterial occlusion, NIRS has the potential to assess microvascular function within skeletal...

Background: Physical activity (PA) is beneficial for baroreflex sensitivity (BRS), but it is unclear whether the type of PA has similar effects on the neural (nBRS) or vascular (carotid stiffness) components of BRS. We sought to determine this in healthy adults from a community- based study via assessment...

Background: Cognitive impairment and elevated arterial stiffness are described in arterial hypertension (AH), but its correlations are not well studied. Objectives: To study the cognitive function at different domains and arterial properties in patients with AH stage 1 to 3 compared to normotensives...

Purpose: In MRI, thoracic aorta pulse wave velocity (TAPWV) is usually estimated by 2D phase contrast (PC) with either in plane or through plane velocity acquisition. Thanks to technological improvement, 4D PC with full coverage of the TA and 3 dimension velocity encoding thought time can be now achievable...

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a wireless communication network, which does not rely on any centralized management or a pre-existing infrastructure. Various certificate authorities (CAs) distributed over the network, each with a periodically updated share of the secrete key, is usually adopted. Elliptic...

This paper addresses the problem of generating multi-step-ahead bandwidth prediction. Variation of bandwidth is modeled as a Nu-Support Vector Regression (Nu-SVR) procedure. A parallel procedure is proposed to hybridize constant and binary Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) together for optimizing feature...

We extend the notion of deformation to inverse operations of restrictions of completely integrable systems to regular or singular locus, and call the extended notion prolongation. We show that a prolongability determines uniquely a Fuchsian ordinary differential equation of rank three with three regular...

This study reports the awareness, access, and utilization of health insurance by the urban poor in Delhi, India. The study included 2998 households from 85 urban clusters spread across Delhi. The data were collected through a pretested, interviewer-administered questionnaire. Logistic regression was...

This paper is an empirical application of the micro-founded measure of trade costs by Head and Mayer (2004) and Novy (2013). The derived micro-founded measure, consistent with the Ricardian and heterogeneous firm’s models of trade, captures all trade costs components that hitherto have been impossible...

Different separated protein fractions by the electrophoretic method in polyacrylamide gel were used to classify two different types of honeys, Galician honeys and commercial honeys produced and packaged outside of Galicia. Random forest, artificial neural network, and support vector machine models were...

Cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of mortality and morbidity in Western countries, but the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. Genetic polymorphisms, once thought to represent a major determinant of cardiovascular risk, individually and collectively, only explain a tiny fraction...