Trends in embryo disposition decisions: patients' responses to a 15-year mailing program

BACKGROUND: This study examined the responses of patients of a Belgian fertility center to mailed requests to make or renew an embryo disposition decision (EDD), over a period of 15 years, to investigate trends in the decisions. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was performed on a mailing program from 1992 to 2006, for patients, of the Department of Reproductive Medicine, Ghent University Hospital (Belgium), from whom embryos had been cryopreserved at least 2 years. RESULTS: In 15 years, 3840 EDD forms were prepared for 2334 couples or female patients. The number of forms increased from 21 in 1992 to 558 in 2006. Each year, around a third of the forms were not returned. In general, a quarter of patients who received more than one form never answered. Donation to others for reproduction was overall the least popular option and decreased over the years. The rising trend in decisions to discard reversed into a negative trend from the introduction of donation for science (1997). Since then, donation for science has been the most popular option and its popularity increased with time. In 15 years, 2504 embryos were donated for science. More than a quarter of the patients who chose more than one final EDD in different years did not select the same EDD the second time. CONCLUSIONS: This study showed a positive trend in donation for science and a negative trend in donation to others and discarding. A substantial number of individual patients chose different types of EDDs in consecutive mailings, which shows that advance EDD directives should be used with caution

Світоглядні основи традиційної слов’янської темпоральності

This article generalizes the results of the research on the particularities of the understanding of the time conception in traditional mythological picture of the world of the East Slavs. The semantics and typology of time in traditional agricultural communities is described by the author as well as its connections to other traditional categories like birth, life and death. Author is explaining the limited by the special categories borders of the traditional folk temporality

Mach's Principle and Model for a Broken Symmetric Theory of Gravity

We investigate spontaneous symmetry breaking in a conformally invariant gravitational model. In particular, we use a conformally invariant scalar tensor theory as the vacuum sector of a gravitational model to examine the idea that gravitational coupling may be the result of a spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this model matter is taken to be coupled with a metric which is different but conformally related to the metric appearing explicitly in the vacuum sector. We show that after the spontaneous symmetry breaking the resulting theory is consistent with Mach's principle in the sense that inertial masses of particles have variable configurations in a cosmological context. Moreover, our analysis allows to construct a mechanism in which the resulting large vacuum energy density relaxes during evolution of the universe.Comment: 9 pages, no figure