Process Intensification through Microreactor Application

A substantial amount of publications each year demonstrate how through the application of microprocess engineering significant benefits can be obtained concerning product yield, purity and time needed for chemical transformations, compared to the equivalent bulk reactions. Microreactors clearly hold the potential to revolutionize chemical synthesis, but scarce articles demonstrate specific suggestions for possible replacement of existent industrial processes. The focus of this review is to assess whether significant advances have been made for the implementation of microstructured devices into existent industrial processes or their complete replacement. The papers are reviewed in light of particular beneficial microreactor characteristics with potential for process intensification

Nonparametric Relative Survival Analysis with the R Package relsurv

Relative survival methods are crucial with data in which the cause of death information is either not given or inaccurate, but cause-specific information is nevertheless required. This methodology is standard in cancer registry data analysis and can also be found in other areas. The idea of relative survival is to join the observed data with the general mortality population data and thus extract the information on the disease-specific hazard. While this idea is clear and easy to understand, the practical implementation of the estimators is rather complex since the population hazard for each individual depends on demographic variables and changes in time. A considerable advance in the methodology of this field has been observed in the past decade and while some methods represent only a modification of existing estimators, others require newly programmed functions. The package relsurv covers all the steps of the analysis, from importing the general population tables to estimating and plotting the results. The syntax mimics closely that of the classical survival packages like survival and cmprsk, thus enabling the users to directly use its functions without any further familiarization. In this paper we focus on the nonparametric relative survival analysis, and in particular, on the two key estimators for net survival and crude probability of death. Both estimators were first presented in our package and are still missing in many other software packages, a fact which greatly hampers their frequency of use. The paper offers guidelines for the actual use of the software by means of a detailed nonparametric analysis of the data describing the survival of patients with colon cancer. The data have been provided by the Cancer Registry of Slovenia

Analysing population-based cancer survival - settling the controversies.

BACKGROUND: The relative survival field has seen a lot of development in the last decade, resulting in many different and even opposing suggestions on how to approach the analysis. METHODS: We carefully define and explain the differences between the various measures of survival (overall survival, crude mortality, net survival and relative survival ratio) and study their differences using colon and prostate cancer data extracted from the national population-based cancer registry of Slovenia as well as simulated data. RESULTS: The colon and prostate cancer data demonstrate clearly that when analysing population-based data, it is useful to split the overall mortality in crude probabilities of dying from cancer and from other causes. Complemented by net survival, it provides a complete picture of cancer survival in a given population. But when comparisons of different populations as defined for example by place or time are of interest, our simulated data demonstrate that net survival is the only measure to be used. CONCLUSIONS: The choice of the method should be done in two steps: first, one should determine the measure of interest and second, one should choose among the methods that estimate that measure consistently

Križna jama

During 1999 and 2001 re-excavations in Križna jama were carried out, which brought crucial results concerning the taxonomical and stratigraphical position of the fossil taphocoenosis, especially of cave bears, and on their ethology. Moreover new data on the hydrological structure of the cave as well as on its sedimentology were published. A substantial part of this volume is dedicated to the extant fauna of this cave, which is extraordinary rich in species

A cross-sectional study of health-related quality of life deficits in individuals with comorbid diabetes and cancer

BACKGROUND: Numerous studies have identified a reduced health related quality of life (HRQL) in patients that have either diabetes or cancer. We assessed the HRQL burden in patients with these comorbid conditions, postulating that they would have even greater HRQL deficits. METHODS: Data from the Public Use File of the Canadian Community Health Survey (PUF CCHS) Cycle 1.1 (September 2000–November 2001) were used for this analysis. The total sample size of the CCHS PUF is 130,880 individuals. We used the Health Utilities Index Mark 3 (HUI3) to assess HRQL in patients with: 1) comorbid diabetes and cancer, 2) diabetes alone, 3) cancer alone, and 4) no diabetes or cancer. Analysis of covariance was used to compare the mean overall HUI3 score, controlling for age, sex, marital status, body mass index (BMI), physical activity level, smoking status, education level, depression status, and other chronic conditions. RESULTS: We identified 113,587 individuals (87%) with complete data for the analysis. The comorbid diabetes and cancer group were older and a larger proportion reported being obese, inactive, having less than a secondary education and more chronic conditions when compared to the other three cohorts (p < 0.0001). However, the diabetes and cancer cohort was less likely to be depressed (p < 0.0001). Overall HUI3 scores were significantly lower for the diabetes and cancer group (unadjusted mean (SD): 0.67 (0.30)), compared to diabetes (0.78 (0.27)), cancer (0.78 (0.25)), and the reference group (0.89 (0.18)) (p < 0.0001). After adjusting for covariates, the comorbid diabetes and cancer group continued to have significantly lower overall HUI3 scores than the reference group (unstandardized mean difference: -0.11, 95% CI: -0.13 to -.0.09) (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSION: Individuals with diabetes and cancer had a clinically important and significantly lower HRQL than those with either condition alone. A better understanding of the relationship between diabetes and cancer, and their associated comorbidities, complications, and HRQL deficits may have important implications for prevention and management strategies