Progression of PROM1-Associated Retinal Degeneration as Determined by Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography Over a 24-Month Period

PURPOSE: To evaluate the progression of atrophy as determined by spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) in patients with molecularly confirmed PROM1-associated retinal degeneration (RD) over a 24-month period.// DESIGN: International, multicenter, prospective case series.// METHODS: A total of 13 eyes (13 patients) affected with PROM1-associated RD were enrolled at 5 sites and SD-OCT images were obtained at baseline and after 24 months. Loss of mean thickness (MT) and intact area were estimated after semi-automated segmentation for the following individual retinal layers in the central subfield (CS), inner ring, and outer ring of the ETDRS grid: retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), outer segments (OS), inner segments (IS), outer nuclear layer (ONL), inner retina (IR), and total retina (TR).// RESULTS: Statistically significant losses of thickness of RPE and TR were detected in the CS and inner ring and of ONL and IS in the outer ring (all P < .05); a statistically significant decrease in the intact area of RPE and IS was observed in the inner ring, and of ONL in the outer ring (all P < .05); the change in MT and the intact area of the other layers showed a trend of decline over an observational period of 24 months.// CONCLUSIONS: Significant thickness losses could be detected in outer retinal layers by SD-OCT over a 24-month period in patients with PROM1-associated retinal degeneration. Loss of thickness and/or intact area of such layers may serve as potential endpoints for clinical trials that aim to slow down the disease progression of PROM1-associated retinal degeneration

Tax Perception - An Empirical Survey

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Recently, Kleidon suggested to analyze Gaia as a non-equilibrium thermodynamic system that continuously moves away from equilibrium, driven by maximum entropy production which materializes in hierarchically coupled mechanisms of energetic flows via dissipation and physical work. I relate this view with Kauffman's 'Fourth Law of Thermodynamics', which I interprete as a proposition about the accumulation of information in evolutionary processes. The concept of physical work is expanded to including work directed at the capacity to work: I offer a twofold specification of Kauffman's concept of an 'autonomous agent', one as a 'self-referential heat engine', and the other in terms of physiosemeiosis, which is a naturalized application of Peirce's theory of signs. The conjunction of these three theoretical sources, Maximum Entropy, Kauffman's Fourth Law, and physiosemeiosis, shows that the Kleidon restatement of the Gaia hypothesis is equivalent to the proposition that the biosphere is generating, processing and storing information, thus directly treating information as a physical phenomenon. There is a fundamental ontological continuity between the biological processes and the human economy, as both are seen as information processing and entropy producing systems. Knowledge and energy are not substitutes, with energy and information being two aspects of the same underlying physical process

Behavioral Economics and the Public Sector

This thesis consists of four essays dealing with topics that are relevant for the public sector. The essays cover diverse issues of economics partly overlapping with political science. The topics reach from the taxation of labor over monetary policy to preferences over voting institutions. Throughout this thesis it is, in contrast to classical economics, not assumed that humans are necessarily fully rational. Once full rationality is no longer assumed, experiments become an important tool to learn about human behavior. Consequently, most of the work in this thesis makes use of economic experiments

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Biologie der Erkenntnis

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