This article reviews a population pharmacokinetics studies conducted during the past few years in Serbia. Studies have included three the most frequently used antiepileptic drugs (valproate, carbamazepine and lamotrigine) and different populations of epileptic patients: children, adults and heterogeneous population composed of both children and adults. The review compares obtained values of population pharmacokinetic models of clearance of these drugs, and factors that are significantly determined, making brief comments on the results of other authors on the same topic. Individualization of drug dosage is the basis of rational therapy, and factors of variability will always be subject of scientific research.

To determine the association between involvement in school bullying and trauma symptoms and to find whether children with presence of trauma symptoms participate in school bullying more as victims, as bullies or as bully/victims. The study included 1055, 6th to 8th grade (12-14 years of age) elementary school pupils from the western part of Mostar, The pupils were self-interviewed using a Questionnaire on School Violence developed in 2003 and validated in Croatia, and Trauma Symptoms Check List for Children (TSCC). The pupils involved in the school violence, either as victims, bullies, bully/victims had significantly more trauma symptoms than the not involved. Involvement in school bullying as a bully/ victim was a strong indicator of trauma symptoms, particularly anxiety, anger, posttraumatic stress, dissociation, obvious dissociation, and dissociation fantasy symptoms, while the victims of school violence had the highest odds ratio for the development of depressive symptoms. There is strong association between bullying and trauma symptoms in young adolescents. From our results, emphasis should be placed at the regularly screening on bullying in praxis of family physicians and regularly conduction of preventive measures and early intervention in every primary school.

Heat flow in nanomaterials is an important area of study, with both fundamental and technological implications. However, little is known about heat flow in two-dimensional devices or interconnects with dimensions comparable to the phonon mean free path. Here we find that short, quarter-micron graphene samples reach ~35% of the ballistic thermal conductance limit up to room temperature, enabled by the relatively large phonon mean free path (~100 nm) in substrate-supported graphene. In contrast, patterning similar samples into nanoribbons leads to a diffusive heat-flow regime that is controlled by ribbon width and edge disorder. In the edge-controlled regime, the graphene nanoribbon thermal conductivity scales with width approximately as ~W1.80.3, being about 100 W m−1 K−1 in 65-nm-wide graphene nanoribbons, at room temperature. These results show how manipulation oftwo-dimensional device dimensions and edges can be used to achieve full control of their heat-carrying properties, approaching fundamentally limited upper or lower bounds. Understanding heat flow in two-dimensional nanomaterials has wide-ranging implications. Here, the authors show that the thermal conductance of quarter-micron graphene samples is quasi-ballistic, but patterning the graphene into nanoribbons leads to diffusive heat flow strongly limited by edge scattering.

The goal of this study was to evaluate associations between the meteorological conditions and the number of emergency cases for five distinctive causes of dispatch groups reported to SOS dispatch centre in Uppsala, Sweden. Center's responsibility include alerting to 17 ambulances in whole Uppsala County, area of 8,209 km2 with around 320,000 inhabitants representing the target patient group. Source of the medical data for this study is the database of dispatch data for the year of 2009, while the metrological data have been provided from Uppsala University Department of Earth Sciences yearly weather report. Medical and meteorological data were summoned into the unified data space where each point represents a day with its weather parameters and dispatch cause group cardinality. DBSCAN data mining algorithm was implemented to five distinctive groups of dispatch causes after the data spaces have gone through the variance adjustment and the principal component analyses. As the result, several point clusters were discovered in each of the examined data spaces indicating the distinctive conditions regarding the weather and daily cardinality of the dispatch cause, as well as the associations between these two. Most interesting finding is that specific type of winter weather formed a cluster only around the days with the high count of breathing difficulties, while one of the summer weather clusters made similar association with the days with low number of cases. Findings were confirmed by confidence level estimation based on signal to noise ratio for the observed data points.

Information about the regional distribution of health-related physical fitness status is necessary in order to tailor public health interventions, and due to a number of behavioral health risks caused by the increasing sedentary lifestyle. This study aimed to find differences between Croatian children's health-related physical fitness profiles in urban and rural areas. The sample for this study consisted of 2431 fifth-grade students (1248 boys and 1183 girls) from urban and rural areas of Croatia. The mean age of participants was 11.3 +/- 6.1 years. The differences between the health-related physical fitness of school children from urban and rural areas was computed using series of univariant analysis of variance and canonical discriminant analysis. The reliability of the tests was determined by Cronbach's alpha coefficients. Urban boys and girls significantly differ in body height from rural boys and girls. Body mass index and body fat percentage are slightly higher in the urban boys and girls but they do not differ significantly. Urban children perform significantly better in the 20 m dash, standing long jump and timed sit-ups. Urban and rural boys and girls do not differ significantly in the flexibility. This study determined if selected levels of urbanization affected the physical fitness status of children in Croatia. The results suggest that the differences in children's health-related physical fitness profiles are due to the level of urbanization.

Progress in therapeutics for rare disorders like prion disease is impeded by the lack of validated outcome measures and a paucity of natural history data derived from prospective observational studies. The first analysis of the U.K. National Prion Monitoring Cohort involved 1337 scheduled clinical assessments and 479 telephone assessments in 437 participants over 373 patient-years of follow-up. Scale development has included semi-quantitative and qualitative carer interviews, item response modelling (Rasch analysis), inter-rater reliability testing, construct analysis and correlation with several existing scales. The proposed 20-point Medical Research Council prion disease rating scale assesses domains of cognitive function, speech, mobility, personal care/feeding and continence, according to their relative importance documented by carer interviews. It is quick and simple to administer, and has been validated for use by doctors and nurses and for use over the telephone, allowing for frequent assessments that capture the rapid change typical of these diseases. The Medical Research Council Scale correlates highly with widely used cognitive and single item scales, but has substantial advantages over these including minimal floor effects. Three clear patterns of decline were observed using the scale: fast linear decline, slow linear decline (usually inherited prion disease) and in some patients, decline followed by a prolonged preterminal plateau at very low functional levels. Rates of decline and progress through milestones measured using the scale vary between sporadic, acquired and inherited prion diseases following clinical expectations. We have developed and validated a new functionally-oriented outcome measure and propose that future clinical trials in prion disease should collect data compatible with this scale, to allow for combined and comparative analyses. Such approaches may be advantageous in orphan conditions, where single studies of feasible duration will often struggle to achieve statistical power.

A series of plastic bonded explosives (PBXs) based on Viton A and Fluorel binders were prepared using four nitramines, namely RDX (1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazinane), β-HMX (β-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocane), BCHMX (cis-1,3,4,6-tetranitro-octahydroimidazo-[4,5-d]imidazole), and e-HNIW (e-2,4,6,8,10,12-hexanitro-2,4,6,8,10,12-hexaazaisowurtzitane). The detonation velocities, D, were determined. Detonation parameters were also calculated by means of modified Kamlet & Jacobs method, CHEETAH and EXPLO5 codes. In accordance with our expectations BCHMX based PBXs performed better than RDX based ones. The Urizar coefficient for Fuorel binder was also calculated.