Is exercise treadmill testing useful for detecting heart disease in women?

Exercise treadmill testing has a sensitivity of 70% and specificity of 61% for the detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) in women (strength of recommendation [SOR]: A, based on a meta-analysis). It is useful for detecting CAD in symptomatic women who have an intermediate risk as determined by age and symptoms (SOR: C, based on expert opinion). Exercise treadmill testing may also have an application in determining exercise capacity and potential as a tool to predict cardiovascular death in women (SOR: A, cohort study)

What are the risks and benefits of elective induction for uncomplicated term pregnancies?

Elective induction of labor for term, singleton, uncomplicated pregnancies appears safe for both the mother and infant (strength of recommendation [SOR]: B). The benefit of elective induction for nonmedical reasons is unclear (SOR: B)

How useful are autoantibodies in diagnosing thyroid disorders?

Thyrotropin receptor antibodies (TRAb) may be mildly elevated in a variety of thyroid disorders, but a TRAb level >10 U/L increases the probability of Graves' disease by a moderate to large degree (strength of recommendation [SOR]: B, cross-sectional study). A positive or negative thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPOAb) test increases or decreases the probability of autoimmune thyroid disease by only a small to moderate degree (SOR: B, 3 cross-sectional studies)

Corticosteroids for presumed pneumocystis pneumonia in patients with HIV infection

Adjunctive corticosteroids decrease mortality in patients with HIV infection who have moderate to severe hypoxemia and suspected or confirmed pneumocystis pneumonia. Corticosteroids lead to a higher incidence of herpetic lesions, but not other opportunistic conditions. (Strength of recommendation: A, based on a systematic review of randomized controlled trials [RCTs].

Prophylactic oxytocin: Before or after placental delivery?

Timing alone doesn't influence the drug's efficacy in preventing postpartum bleeding (strength of recommendation: B, randomized controlled trial [RCT] and prospective cohort studies)

Do complementary agents lower HbA1c when used with standard type 2 diabetes therapy?

Q. Do complementary agents lower HbA1c when used with standard type 2 diabetes therapy? A. No, there is no high-quality evidence that supports using complementary or alternative agents to lower hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) in patients with noninsulin dependent type 2 diabetes. Oral chromium in widely varying doses reduces HbA1c a small amount (strength of recommendation [SOR]: C, meta-analysis of low-quality randomized, controlled trials [RCTs] of disease-oriented outcomes, with inconsistent results). Oral cinnamon 1 to 3 g/d causes a small (<0.1%) drop in HbA1c (SOR: C, meta-analysis of low-quality RCTs of disease-oriented outcomes). Fenugreek, milk thistle, safflower oil, and sweet potato extract may also reduce HbA1c (SOR: C, small, low-quality RCTs of disease-oriented outcomes)

Is it safe to vaccinate children against varicella while they're in close contact with a pregnant woman?

All healthy children without evidence of immunity to varicella who are living in a household with a susceptible pregnant woman should be vaccinated (strength of recommendation [SOR]: C, expert opinion). The risk of transmission of vaccine virus to household contacts is very low (SOR: B, observational studies). Transmission is higher, but still rare, among contacts of immunocompromised vaccinees (SOR: B, observational studies). Varicella infection has not been reported in unborn babies of women who had contact with a recently vaccinated person

Global Organization of the Lexicon

The lexicon consists of a set of word meanings and their semantic relationships. A systematic representation of the English lexicon based in psycholinguistic considerations has been put together in the database Wordnet in a long-term collaborative effort1. We present here a quantitative study of the graph structure of Wordnet in order to understand the global organization of the lexicon. We find that semantic links follow power-law, scale-invariant behaviors typical of self-organizing networks. Polysemy, the ambiguity of an individual word, can act as a link in the semantic network, relating the different meanings of a common word. Inclusion of polysemous links has a profound impact in the organization of the semantic graph, converting it into a small world, with clusters of high traffic (hubs) representing abstract concepts. Our results show that polysemy organizes the semantic graph in a compact and categorical representation, and thus may explain the ubiquity of polysemy across languages

A new search strategy for microquasar candidates using NVSS/2MASS and XMM-Newton data

Microquasars are ideal natural laboratories for understanding accretion/ejection processes, studying the physics of relativistic jets, and testing gravitational phenomena. Nevertheless, these objects are difficult to find in our Galaxy. The main goal of this work is to increase the number of known systems of this kind. We have developed an improved search strategy based on positional cross-identification with very restrictive selection criteria to find new MQs, taking advantage of more sensitive modern radio and X-ray data. We find 86 sources with positional coincidence in the NVSS/XMM catalogs at |b|<10 deg. Among them, 24 are well-known objects and the remaining 62 sources are unidentified. For the fully coincident sources, whenever possible, we analyzed color-color and hardness ratio diagrams and found that at least 3 of them display high-mass X-ray binary characteristics, making them potential microquasar candidates.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in A&