Cystic fibrosis is a multiorgan autosomal recessive disease resulting from mutations in a gene located on the long arm of chromosome 7. The disease is usually diagnosed in the first few years of life ...when it typically presents with severe pulmonary manifestations and pancreatic insufficiency; however, a small percentage of patients with less dramatic symptoms is not diagnosed until adolescence or even adulthood. The genotype of each patient seems to influence the various forms of clinical presentation. Although uncommon, acute recurrent pancreatitis can be one of the forms of delayed presentation of cystic fibrosis. We report the case of an 17-year-old man who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis after presenting 2 episodes of acute pancreatitis without associated pancreatic insufficiency. Subsequent study also revealed nasal polyps.
Coordinated punishment requires a specific number of punishers to be effective (otherwise, no damage is inflicted on the target) but it also exhibits returns to scale. While societies often rely on ...this punishment device, its benefits are unclear compared with uncoordinated punishment, where punishment decisions are substitutes. We argue that coordinated punishment can prevent the free-riding of punishers and show, both theoretically and experimentally, that this may be beneficial for cooperation in a team investment game, compared with uncoordinated punishment. Nevertheless, efficiency is not enhanced since punishment is more extensively used when it is coordinated.
We consider a model where each individual (or ethnic minority) is embedded in a network of relationships and decides whether or not she wants to be assimilated to the majority norm. Each individual ...wants her behavior to agree with her personal ideal action or norm but also wants her behavior to be as close as possible to the average assimilation behavior of her peers. We show that there is always convergence to a steady-state and characterize it. We also show that different assimilation norms may emerge in steady state depending on the structure of the network. We then consider an optimal tax/subsidy policy which aim is to reach a certain level of assimilation in the population. We believe that our model sheds light on how the pressure from peers, communities and families affect the long-run assimilation decisions of ethnic minorities.
This paper contributes to explain the persistence of differences in levels of entrepreneurship within and across countries. We analyse in a dynamic setting the mutual relationship among the ...distribution of preferences for entrepreneurship in the population, public administration efficiency, and entrepreneurial productivity when preferences and productivity evolve over time. Individuals with entrepreneurial preferences start their own business, while the other individuals join the public and traditional sectors. In each generation, individuals vote on the taxes the entrepreneurs will pay. Under a balanced public budget, the collected taxes are used to pay the civil servants' wages. The effort of civil servants captures the effort made to generate an efficient normative and regulatory environment, and it will affect the probability of success of entrepreneurship. The dynamic of entrepreneurial productivity is determined by the relative proportion of entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial individuals among generations. We show that an economy can reach two different long-run equilibria: a traditional equilibrium, with a low proportion of entrepreneurs, low productivity, high taxes and an ineffcient Administration and an entrepreneurial equilibrium with a high proportion of entrepreneurs, a higher productivity and lower taxes but enough to implement an efficient Administration. Our main result is that the equilibrium achieved completely depends on the tax policy followed by the different generations. If decisions are made by majority voting in a myopic way, then the initial conditions of the society become crucial. This result explains persistence: an economy evolves around similar levels of entrepreneurship unless some reforms are implemented.
In this paper, we are going to study the use of opioid substances after undergoing a Hematopoietic Stem Cell transplant in Sweden. The purpose of the study is divided into two parts, where the first ...objective is to display the use of opioids within the population using descriptive statistics. The second objective is to model the effect of opioid substances on survival using Cox Proportional Hazard regression. From the descriptive part, we can see that women tend to take opioids to a slightly greater extent than men, and that there are great differences among age groups were younger patients tend to withdraw more opioids. We create three different models measuring the effect of opioid use within the 43 first days after transplant on survival, correcting for four potential confounders: sex, age at transplant, source of transplant and relationship to the donor. The first two models are fitted with different measurements of survival time, and the third model is a stratified Cox regression based on model 2. The three models somewhat differ from each other in terms of estimated hazard ratios, however, we cannot show a statistically significant effect of opioid use within the first 43 days on survival in any of the models.
We present the relationship between the wavelength dependencies of chromatic dispersion and differential group delay parameters in birefringent FBG. This relationship is advantageously exploited to ...directly obtain the grating birefringence value from two experimental measurements.
Objective: the causal relation between rosacea and Helicobacter pylori infection is discussed. We evaluated the clinical evolution of rosacea after infection eradication. Patients and methods: we ...have prospectively studied 44 patients diagnosed with rosacea. Helicobacter pylori infection was determined, and infected patients were treated with eradication therapy. The evolution of dermatological symptoms in a subgroup of 29 infected patients in whom eradication had been achieved was followed during 16.8 (± 17.8) months. Median age was 50.6 (± 14.1) years for 22 women (75.9%) and 7 men (24.1%). Clinical response according to gender and clinical subtype of rosacea was evaluated. Results: complete improvement was observed in 10 patients (34.5%; 95% CI: 18.6-54.3%), relevant improvement in 9 (31.1%; 95% CI: 16-51%), poor improvement in 5 (17.2%; 95% CI: 6.5-36.4%), and absence of improvement in 5 cases (17.2%; 95% CI: 6.5-36.4%). No significant differences in dermatological evolution according to sex were observed. Regarding subtype of rosacea there was a relevant improvement in 83.3% (95% CI: 64.1-93.8%) of cases with papulopustular type as opposed to 36.5% (95% CI: 20-56.1%) of cases with erythematous predominance, p = 0.02. Conclusions: based on these results, the relation between Helicobacter pylori and rosacea is supported, and infection should be investigated in these patients because an appreciable percentage of patients diagnosed with rosacea and Helicobacter pylori infection can benefit from eradication therapy, mainly in the papulopustular subtype.
PDF
