Soviet Trade and Foreign Aid to Developing Countries

What I\u27d like to do today is talk to you about Soviet foreign aid. I think there are many things we can learn from it including something about our own aid policy

Gorbachev and Economic Reform in the Soviet Union

Two factors have rendered aggregate economic growth a weakened weapon against poverty in the modern U.S. economy. First, the increase in the national rate of divorce has increased the proportion of the population that lives in households that are headed by women, a group that has historically benefited less from aggregate economic activity as evidenced by the group's comparatively high poverty rates. Second, the relative shift in the sectoral composition of economic growth from manufacturing to private services yields jobs that are more often lower-paying, part-time, and intermittent positions, and consequently less helpful at remedying poverty.

Does the revised cardiac risk index predict cardiac complications following elective lung resection?

Background: Revised Cardiac Risk Index (RCRI) score and Thoracic Revised Cardiac Risk Index (ThRCRI) score were developed to predict the risks of postoperative major cardiac complications in generic surgical population and thoracic surgery respectively. This study aims to determine the accuracy of these scores in predicting the risk of developing cardiac complications including atrial arrhythmias after lung resection surgery in adults. Methods: We studied 703 patients undergoing lung resection surgery in a tertiary thoracic surgery centre. Observed outcome measures of postoperative cardiac morbidity and mortality were compared against those predicted by risk. Results: Postoperative major cardiac complications and supraventricular arrhythmias occurred in 4.8% of patients. Both index scores had poor discriminative ability for predicting postoperative cardiac complications with an area under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.59 (95% CI 0.51-0.67) for the RCRI score and 0.57 (95% CI 0.49-0.66) for the ThRCRI score. Conclusions: In our cohort, RCRI and ThRCRI scores failed to accurately predict the risk of cardiac complications in patients undergoing elective resection of lung cancer. The British Thoracic Society (BTS) recommendation to seek a cardiology referral for all asymptomatic pre-operative lung resection patients with > 3 RCRI risk factors is thus unlikely to be of clinical benefit