The changing global climate is having profound effects on coastal marine ecosystems around the world. Structure, functioning, and resilience, however, can vary geographically, depending on species composition, local oceanographic forcing, and other pressures from human activities and use. Understanding ecological responses to environmental change and predicting changes in the structure and functioning of whole ecosystems require large-scale, long-term studies, yet most studies trade spatial extent for temporal duration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The proportion of survivors of acute respiratory failure is growing; yet, many do not regain full function and require prolonged admission in an acute or post-acute care facility. Little is known about their trajectory of functional recovery. We sought to determine whether prolonged admission influenced the trajectory of physical function recovery and whether patient age modified the recuperation rate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Respir Crit Care Med
October 2016
Introduction: Prescription medication overdose is the fastest growing drug-related problem in the USA. The growing nature of this problem necessitates the implementation of improved monitoring strategies for investigating the prevalence and patterns of abuse of specific medications.
Objectives: Our primary aims were to assess the possibility of utilizing social media as a resource for automatic monitoring of prescription medication abuse and to devise an automatic classification technique that can identify potentially abuse-indicating user posts.
Rationale: Early physical therapy (PT) interventions may benefit patients with acute respiratory failure by preventing or attenuating neuromuscular weakness. However, the optimal dosage of these interventions is currently unknown.
Objectives: To determine whether an intensive PT program significantly improves long-term physical functional performance compared with a standard-of-care PT program.
Meta-analyses of field studies have shown that biomass, density, species richness, and size of organisms protected by no-take marine reserves generally increase over time. The magnitude and timing of changes in these response variables, however, vary greatly and depend upon the taxonomic groups protected, size and type of reserve, oceanographic regime, and time since the reserve was implemented. We conducted collaborative, fishery-independent surveys of fishes for seven years in and near newly created marine protected areas (MPAs) in central California, USA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Single-tablet ibuprofen/famotidine is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the relief of signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis and to decrease the risk of developing upper gastrointestinal (GI) ulcers in patients taking ibuprofen for those indications. Currently, little is known about the cost impact of gastroprotective therapies, and an estimate of the financial consequences of adopting these therapies will be helpful to decision makers.
Objectives: The goal of this study was to review a model that evaluates the expected financial impact to US health care plans from the introduction of single-tablet ibuprofen/famotidine into the chronic NSAID user population.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2010
Networks of marine reserves are increasingly a major component of many ecosystem-based management plans designed to conserve biodiversity, protect the structure and function of ecosystems, and rebuild and sustain fisheries. There is a growing need for scientific guidance in the design of network-wide monitoring programs to evaluate the efficacy of reserves at meeting their conservation and management goals. Here, we present an evaluation of the Channel Islands reserve network, which was established in 2003 off the coast of southern California.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetab Syndr Relat Disord
December 2009
Background: Although cardiovascular disease causes substantial morbidity and mortality, how individual and groups of risk factors contribute to cardiovascular outcomes is incompletely understood. This study evaluated cardiometabolic risk factors and their relationship to prevalent diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and stroke.
Methods: We used retrospective data from 3 integrated health-care systems that systematically collect and store detailed patient-level data.
The objective of this study was to investigate potential for traumatic brain injuries (TBI) using a newly developed, geometrically detailed, finite element head model (FEHM) within the concept of a simulated injury monitor (SIMon). The new FEHM is comprised of several parts: cerebrum, cerebellum, falx, tentorium, combined pia-arachnoid complex (PAC) with cerebro-spinal fluid (CSF), ventricles, brainstem, and parasagittal blood vessels. The model's topology was derived from human computer tomography (CT) scans and then uniformly scaled such that the mass of the brain represents the mass of a 50th percentile male's brain (1.
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