<p><i>Background - </i>The assessment of quality of care is an integral part of modern medicine. The referral represents the handing over of care from the general practitioner to the specialist. This study aimed to assess whether an improved referral could lead to improved quality of care. <p><i>Methods - </i> A cluster randomized trial with the general practitioner surgery as the clustering unit ...

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) is one of the six working groups established under the Arctic Council. AMAP is tasked with monitoring the levels of contaminants present in the Arctic environment and people as well as assessing their effects on a continuous basis, and reporting these results regularly. Most of the presented data have been collected over the last 20 years and are ...

Background: Norwegian government white papers have stated that the Sami population is reluctant to seek help from healthcare services and has traditions of self-help and the use of local networks. <br>Objective: In this article we explore healthcare professionals’ discursive constructions of Sami persons with dementia and their families’ reluctance to seek and accept help from healthcare services. ...

The present contribution explores aspects of good governance on the global dimension with participation as one of the key elements of a well-governed system, focusing on the Arctic Council’s (AC) commitment to enhance indigenous peoples’ participation in the environmental decision-making process. <br> The paper starts with a reflection on the revolutionary impact that new technologies have had ...

This study explores the interpretation of null and overt object pronouns by Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) bidialectal bilinguals. Object pronouns are a particularly good domain to examine, given that, particularly with respect to null objects, the underlying syntax as well as the semantic and discourse constraints that regulate their distributions in the two varieties are ...

The psychrophilic and mesophilic endonucleases A (EndA) from Aliivibrio salmonicida (VsEndA) and Vibrio cholera (VcEndA) have been studied experimentally in terms of the biophysical properties related to thermal adaptation. The analyses of their static X-ray structures was no sufficient to rationalize the determinants of their adaptive traits at the molecular level. Thus, we used Molecular Dynamics ...

With great interest, we have been following the developing variety and popularity of commercially available wearable sensor technologies, as well as the discussion concerning their usefulness for improving fitness and health (Duking et al., 2016; Halson et al., 2016; Sperlich and Holmberg,2016). Although many of these devices may not necessarily fulfill scientific criteria for quality (Sperlich and ...

Intrasexual competition is an important element of natural selection in which the most attractive conspecific has a considerable reproductive advantage over the others. The conspecifics that are approached first often become the preferred mate partners, and could thus from a biological perspective have a reproductive advantage. This underlines the importance of the initial approach and raises the ...

We present a high-resolution record of calcium carbonate preservation alongside the distribution pattern of planktic foraminifera from the Fram Strait. The record covers the marine isotope stage (MIS) 2, 28.8 to 15.4 kyr, including the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the early deglaciation in multidecadal temporal resolution. The investigation is based on the distribution patterns of planktic ...

Background:<br>Prenatal exposure to lead (Pb) has been shown to have negative and irreversible health impacts on foetal and early childhood development, affecting morbidity and mortality in adulthood. This study aimed to assess in utero Pb exposure, examine birth outcomes, and identify confounding factors in the large cohort of South African population, following the legislated removal of Pb from ...