Idioms of resilience: Mental health and migration in India.

Background: Resilience has proved to be a versatile notion to explain why people are not defeated by hardship and adversity, yet so far, we know little of how it might apply to communities and cultures in low to middle income countries.

Aim: This paper aims to explore the notion of resilience in cross-cultural context through considering the lived experience of internal migration.

Methods: A sample of 30 participants with experience of migration was recruited from a low-income slum dwelling neighbourhood in the city of Pune, India.

On the need for an ecologically dimensioned medical humanities.

Increasing calls from medical professionals and scholars suggest an urgent need for better and more widespread understandings of the ecological dimensions of health. Such calls have included: two recent special commissions on impacts of climate change on health; and recognition by senior figures from the WHO and United Nations of relationships between human impacts on the natural world and disease pandemics, with some suggesting prevention of future pandemics may require a radical reassessment of modernity's relationship with the natural world.Among the medical humanities as a whole, however, calls for better and more widespread understandings of the ecological dimensions of health have not always been as prominent, or urgently expressed, as they might be.

Hypertension in the Very Elderly Trial (HYVET): protocol for the main trial.

A number of trials and meta-analyses have demonstrated clear benefits of blood pressure (BP) reduction in patients aged <80 years with regard to the reduction in stroke and cardiovascular events. However, a variety of studies have suggested that the positive relationship between BP and cardiovascular mortality is weakened or indeed reversed in the very elderly. Most intervention trials to date have either excluded or not recruited sufficient patients aged > or =80 years to determine whether there is a significant benefit from treatment in this age group.

The preparation of a new "safety catch" ester linker for solid-phase synthesis.

A new "safety catch" linker for esters has been synthesized on polystyrene resin. This 2-tert-butoxyphenol resin 10 may be acylated to give a relatively stable ester that will allow nucleophilic chemistry without reaction at the linking ester group. Removal of the tert-butyl group with acid unmasks a highly reactive 2-hydroxyphenyl ester that reacts readily with nucleophiles to cause release of the product from the resin.

Risks of untreated and treated isolated systolic hypertension in the elderly: meta-analysis of outcome trials.

Background: Previous meta-analysis of outcome trials in hypertension have not specifically focused on isolated systolic hypertension or they have explained treatment benefit mainly in function of the achieved diastolic blood pressure reduction. We therefore undertook a quantitative overview of the trials to further evaluate the risks associated with systolic blood pressure in treated and untreated older patients with isolated systolic hypertension

Methods: Patients were 60 years old or more. Systolic blood pressure was 160 mm Hg or greater and diastolic blood pressure was less than 95 mm Hg.