Objective To investigate the association between alcohol consumption (at baseline and over lifetime) and non-fatal and fatal coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke.<p> <p>Design Multicentre case-cohort study.<p> <p>Setting A study of cardiovascular disease (CVD) determinants within the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and nutrition cohort (EPIC-CVD) from eight European ...

Seasonality and long-term environmental variability afect species diversity through their efects on the dynamics of species. To investigate such efects, we ftted a dynamic and heterogeneous species abundance model generating the lognormal species abundance distribution to an assemblage of freshwater zooplankton sampled fve times a year (June–October) during the ice-free period over 28 years ...

Spatial boundaries have become an indispensable part of regimes and tools for regulating fisheries, with examples including marine protected areas, regional fisheries management organizations and Exclusive Economic Zones. Yet, it is also widely acknowledged that boundaries are a social construct, which may be resisted by both fishers and fish ecology. The ensuing spatial and institutional mismatches ...

Zooplankton abundance and community structures were studied in three west Spitsbergen fjords at the beginning of the warm phase, which seem to have entered in 2006. Sampling was conducted in summer 2007 at stations distributed along transects in Hornsund, Isfjorden and Kongsfjorden. Variations in zooplankton standing stocks and community structures (assessing taxonomic diversity and zoogeographical ...

Background A large proportion of healthy children have wrist changes on MRI, namely carpal depressions, findings that have been described as pathological in children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis.<p> <p>Objective We performed follow-up imaging in a cohort of healthy children to evaluate carpal surface depressions over time, focusing on the presence of overlying cartilage as a potential ...

Background: Violence has important health effects. The results of exposure to physical violence include, but may not be limited to, death from suicide and homicide. The connection between the experience of assault and risk of death from causes other than homicide and suicide has rarely been examined.<p> <p>Methods: We analysed data from the first Izhevsk Family Study (IFS-1), a populationbased ...

This paper takes a critical approach to understanding the social and cultural ‘work’ of natural heritage conservation, focussing specifically on ex-situ biodiversity cryopreservation practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Frozen Ark, a UK-based ‘frozen zoo’ aiming to preserve the DNA of endangered animal species, the paper situates the development of nonhuman animal biobanks in ...

Background: Russia has the largest area of any country in the world and has one of the highest cardiovascular mortality rates. Over the past decade, the number of facilities able to perform percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) has increased substantially. We quantify the extent to which the constraints of geography make equitable access to this effective technology difficult to ...

The Global Positioning System (GPS) performance at high latitudes can be severely affected by the ionospheric scintillation due to the presence of small-scale time-varying electron density irregularities. In this paper, an improved analogous phase scintillation index derived using the wavelet-transform-based filtering technique is presented to represent the effects of scintillation regionally at ...

Background: It has been suggested to replace the diagnosis-specific graded prognostic assessment (DS-GPA, based on performance status and number of brain metastases) for patients with primary malignant melanoma with the new Melanoma-molGPA. The latter is a more complex assessment, which also includes BRAF mutation status, age and extracranial metastases. To test the performance of the Melanoma-molGPA, ...