Exclusion of extreme values lowered mean perioperative cost of OR by 10%, while cost of EVAR was unaffected. Inferential testing of cost differences by means of four statistical methods showed that P values MDV3100 in vitro were highly dependent on test methodology.

Conclusions: Conclusions of health economic reports can be highly dependent on how the data are presented and the statistical methods that are used. We recommend that cost data be presented as mean values with distributions. Exclusion of outliers and focus on P values should be avoided. (J Vasc Surg 2010;51:148-54.)”
“Expression profiling

of post-mortem human brain tissue has been widely used to study molecular changes associated with neuropsychiatric diseases as well as normal processes such as aging. Changes in expression associated with factors such as age, gender or postmortem interval are often more pronounced than changes associated with disease. Therefore in addition to being of interest in their own right, careful consideration

of these effects are important in the interpretation of disease studies. We performed a large meta-analysis of genome-wide expression studies of normal human cortex to more fully catalogue the effects of age, gender, postmortem interval and Danusertib in vivo brain pH, yielding a “”meta-signature”" of gene expression changes for each factor. We validated our results by showing a significant overlap with independent gene lists extracted from the literature. Importantly, meta-analysis identifies genes which are not significant in any individual study. Finally, we show that many schizophrenia candidate genes appear in the meta-signatures, reinforcing the idea that studies must be carefully controlled for interactions between these factors and disease. In addition to the inherent value of the meta-signatures, our results provide critical information for future studies of disease effects in the human brain. (C) 2010 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Objective: There is an increasing need for vascular grafts in the field ALOX15 of surgical revascularization. However, smaller vascular

grafts made front synthetic biomaterials, particularly those <5 mm in diameter, are associated with a high incidence of thrombosis. Fibroin is a biodegradable protein derived from silk. Silk fibroin from Bombyx mori provides an antithrombotic surface and serves as a scaffold for various cell types in tissue engineering. We evaluated the potential of fibroin to generate a vascular prosthesis for small arteries.

Methods. A small vessel with three layers was woven from silk fibroin thread. These fibroin-based grafts (1.5 turn diameter, 10 mm length) were implanted into the abdominal aorta of 10- to 14-week-old male Sprague-Dawley rats by end-to-end anastomosis. Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)-based grafts were used as the control.