甲泼尼松龙治疗重症支气管哮喘的疗效观察

目的研究甲泼尼松龙治疗重症支气管哮喘的临床效果。方法选取重症支气管哮喘患者42例,随机分为观察组和对照组,每组21例,观察组患者给予甲泼尼松龙治疗,对照组患者给予地塞米松治疗,比较两组患者重症支气管哮喘治疗效果及不良反应差异。结果观察组治疗总有效率95.2%,明显高于对照组治疗总有效率76.2%,对照组患者动脉氧分压高于观察组,观察组患者不良反应发生率低于对照组,差异有统计学意义(P<0.05)。结论甲泼尼松龙能够显著缓解重症支气管哮喘症状,不良反应少,减轻患者痛苦,提高临床治疗效果,值得推广应用。     

重症监护病房重症患者行经皮气管切开术的临床疗效

目的探讨重症监护病房(ICU)重症患者行经皮气管切开术(PDT)的临床疗效。方法收集我院进行气管切开术的64例患者资料,将患者随机分为试验组与对照组,各32例,试验组患者采用PDT,对照组患者采用常规气管切开术,对两组患者的临床疗效及手术情况进行比较分析。结果试验组总有效率为96.9%,明显高于对照组的84.4%,差异有统计学意义(P<0.05)。试验组患者的手术时间、术中和术后出血、并发症及拔管后切口愈合时间均优于对照组,差异均有统计学意义(P<0.05)。结论 ICU重症患者行经皮气管切开术在临床上获得理想的治疗效果,具有良好的应用价值。     

联合腹水超滤浓缩回输术治疗肝硬化顽固性腹水的临床效果

目的探讨常规治疗联合腹水超滤浓缩回输术在治疗肝硬化顽固性腹水中的效果。方法选取2013年4月至2014年5月收治的肝硬化顽固性腹水患者38例,随机分成试验组与对照组,各19例,对照组患者进行常规治疗,试验组患者在其基础上联合腹水超滤浓缩回输术治疗,比较两组患者的疗效及并发症。结果试验组患者总有效率为94.7%,对照组患者总有效率为63.2%,两组疗效比较差异有统计学意义(P<0.05);两组患者并发症比较差异无统计学意义(P>0.05)。结论常规治疗联合腹水超滤浓缩回输术的治疗用于肝硬化顽固性腹水患者,可明显改善患者存在的电解质紊乱,有效缓解肝硬化顽固性腹水。     

氨氯地平联合依那普利治疗老年高血压的疗效

目的研究氨氯地平联合依那普利治疗老年高血压的疗效,为治疗此病提供参考依据。方法我院于2010年3月至6月收治了68例老年高血压患者,将其随机分为两组,对照组给予氨氯地平治疗,试验组在其基础上服用依那普利治疗。结果试验组总有效率为91.2%,对照组总有效率为79.4%,两组比较差异有统计学意义(P<0.05)。结论氨氯地平联合依那普利治疗老年高血压有较好的降压效果。     

硝苯地平联合卡托普利治疗糖尿病合并高血压疗效观察

目的探讨硝苯地平联合卡托普利治疗糖尿病合并高血压的疗效。方法选取我院72例2型糖尿病合并高血压患者,将其随机分为试验组和对照组,均给予糖尿病基础治疗,其中试验组给予硝苯地平和卡托普利联合治疗,对照组仅给予卡托普利治疗,比较两组治疗效果。结果试验组患者总有效率91.7%,对照组患者总有效率为58.3%,治疗效果差异有统计学意义(P<0.05)。两组患者均未出现严重不良反应。结论采用卡托普利和硝苯地平联合用药治疗糖尿病合并高血压患者疗效良好,且不良反应发生少。     

低分子肝素结合内科综合治疗急性胰腺炎效果观察

目的观察低分子肝素结合内科综合治疗急性胰腺炎患者的效果。方法选择我院2012年9月~2013年9月20例急性胰腺炎患者采用隐藏数字随机法分为两组,对照组采用内科综合治疗,研究组在其基础上给予低分子肝素,比较两组患者临床主要指标,对疗效进行评价,同时记录不良反应。结果研究组总有效率为90.00%;对照组总有效率为70.00%;研究组病情重症化率、手术率、再手术率及死亡率均低于对照组,研究组治疗效果明显好于对照组,两组比较差异具有显著性(P<0.05)。研究组共出现并发症3例,并发症发生率为30.00%;对照组共出现并发症6例,并发症发生率为60.00%;研究组并发症发生率明显低于对照组(P<0.05)。结论急性胰腺炎患者在内科综合治疗基础上给予低分子肝素可提高治疗效果,降低死亡率,并且不增加消化道出血等不良反应。     

呼吸系统重症患者的针对性护理干预

目的探讨呼吸系统重症患者采用针对性护理干预的效果。方法选取2011年1月至2013年1月在我院接受治疗的呼吸系统重症患者34例,将患者随机均分为两组,对照组患者采用常规护理,观察组患者采用针对性护理干预,比较两组患者的护理效果。结果观察组患者总有效率为94.1%,对照组患者总有效率为58.8%,观察组疗效明显优于对照组,差异有统计学意义（P〈0.05）。结论针对性护理干预能够有效缓解患者在治疗期间的不良症状,同时,患者在治疗时不会出现较严重并发症,且痊愈率较高。     

支气管哮喘药物治疗临床研究

目的对利用舒利迭药物吸入治疗支取管哮喘的临床效果进行探讨。方法选择我院支气管哮喘患者86例,随机将86例患者平均分为治疗组与对照组。两组患者均确诊为支气管哮喘,对照组采用支气管扩张剂的基础治疗法,在此基础上,治疗组加用舒利迭药物吸入治疗,治疗后对两组患者的临床治疗情况等相关评价指标进行比较分析。结果治疗组的总有效率为95.35%(41/43),治疗后肺功能明显改善,患者第一秒用力呼气容积(FEV1)和用力呼气峰流速(PEF)值占估计值的百分比均显著提高,差别均具有统计学意义(P<0.05)。而对照组的总有效率为74.42%(32/43),两组比较治疗组效果更优。结论采用舒利迭药物吸入治疗支气管哮喘,有较好的临床疗效,值得在临床上推广应用。     

苏黄止咳胶囊联合孟鲁司特治疗咳嗽变异性哮喘临床观察

目的观察苏黄止咳胶囊联合孟鲁司特治疗咳嗽变异性哮喘的临床疗效。方法将32例患者随机分为两组,治疗组予苏黄止咳胶囊联合孟鲁司特口服,对照组予孟鲁司特口服。疗程均为14天,比较两组咳嗽缓解情况。结果咳嗽总疗效比较,治疗组总有效率为83.3%,对照组为71.4%,两组比较差异有显著性意义(P<0.05)。结论苏黄止咳胶囊联合孟鲁司特治疗咳嗽变异性哮喘有显著疗效。     

曲美他嗪治疗冠心病合并心力衰竭的临床疗效

目的：探讨曲美他嗪治疗冠心病合并心力衰竭患者的临床疗效。方法将40例冠心病合并心力衰竭患者随机分为两组，20例控制组患者给予常规治疗，20例试验组患者加用曲美他嗪治疗。比较两组患者的临床疗效。结果试验组患者临床治疗总有效率为95.0%，控制组患者总有效率为75.0%，试验组明显优于控制组，比较差异有统计学意义（P＜0.05）。结论曲美他嗪治疗冠心病合并心衰患者疗效确切。     

Pleasure and belief in Hume's Decision Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way – we lay emphasis less on continuity than on the specific kind of hedonism encountered in Hume's writings (chiefly the Treatise, the second Enquiry, the Dissertation, or some of his Essays). Such hedonism clearly contrasts to its standard modern inheritance, expressed by the relation between preferences and utility.

The reason for such a difference with the usual approach lies in the mental process that Hume puts to the fore in order to explain the way pleasure determines desires and volition. Whereas pleasure is primarily, in Hume's words, an impression of sensation, it takes place in the birth of passions as reflecting an idea of pleasure, whose “force and vivacity” is precisely a “belief”, transferred to the direct passions of desire or volition that come immediately before action. As a result, from a Humean point of view, “belief” deals with decision under risk or uncertainty, as well as with intertemporal decision and indiscrimination problems.

The latter are explored within a formal framework, and it is shown that the relation of pleasure is transformed by belief into a non-empty class of relations of desire, among which at least one is a preorder.     

Globalization,Neoliberalism and the attack on social security

Neoliberal political movements advocate privatization of public pension systems. Globalization imposes pressure on nations to conform to neoliberal policy views with respect to the design and structure of social insurance, including public pension systems. The paper begins with an investigation of the economic, ethical and ideological dimensions of the privatization debates in the U.S.; it argues that privatization advocates may be largely moved by ideology, since the other reasons advanced appear weak or unfounded. The second part discusses the history of Social Security, the purposes for its creation, and some of its economic effects. Differences between public and private pension systems are considered. A brief international comparison of some aspects of public pension system finance and benefit structures is presented. The final section considers the ethical, macroeconomic and distributional implications of privatization, prefunding and payroll tax funding, and argues for a pay as you go system financed with income taxes. In order to promote equity, economic security, community, and social cohesion, public pension systems should be universal in coverage. In order to reduce the inequality, income insecurity, and aged poverty generated by market economies, public pension systems ought to be progressive: benefit/contribution ratios should be inversely proportional to income, and progressive income taxes should finance the system. To promote economic growth, the systems should be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, and should not be prefunded except for an emergency reserve. The fiscal policy recommendations partially depend upon the theory developed by Abba Lerner in the 1940s, and recently advanced by Wynne Godley and Randy Wray: Lerner's “principle of functional finance.”     

Interest on reserves and inflation

The payment of interest on reserves has been a common practice in inflationary economies. This policy may seem paradoxical since it involves returning part of the seigniorage, generated by the inflation process, with the intention to finance the fiscal deficit. This paper argues that the motivation for this policy can be captured by the discretionary regime, where the policymaker pays interest on reserves because he is concerned with the erosion of real liquidity by inflation, which is in part beyond his control. However, this policy is an unlikely outcome in the commitment regime, where the policymaker is in full control of inflation.     

Neurally reconstructing expected utility

While the concept of “expected utility” informs many theories of decision making, little is known about whether and how the human brain might compute this quantity. This article reviews a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments designed to localize brain regions that respond in anticipation of increasing amounts of monetary incentives. These studies collectively suggest that anticipation of increasing monetary gains activates a subcortical region of the ventral striatum in a magnitude-proportional manner. This ventral striatal activation is not evident during anticipation of losses. Actual gain outcomes instead activate a region of the mesial prefrontal cortex. During anticipation of gain, ventral striatal activation is accompanied by feelings characterized by increasing arousal and positive valence. These findings affirm the role of emotion in the anticipation of incentives, and may provide an initial step towards a neural reconstruction of expected utility.     

Duplication, Growth and ‘Total Return Economics’

Maintenance consumption is an expense recovered in product prices, yet also a source of taste satisfaction which must be exhausted, rather than reinvested, from the capital affording it. This riddle is solved in the duplication rules: the cost of maintenance consumption is recovered in pay and prices, but an equal flow is exhausted from the human capital of the worker earning the pay. The rules impact tradition in several ways. If output is defined in principle as value added, then it cannot also be described as consumption plus net investment without double-counting the maintenance consumption recovered in prices. Also rate of return in the stationary state is not zero, but is the rate sufficient to offset the exhaustion of individual human capital. The rules lead to new insights into economic return, and support an argument that all growth at the scale of closure is due to productivity gain rather than to thrift.     

John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution

Although he was much influenced by David Ricardo when he wrote the classical part of his Principles , John Stuart Mill was not a Ricardian when he penned his theories of wealth and distribution. They are based on a triple foundation. First, a belief that economics is a moral discipline. Second a theory of custom-driven human behavior. Third, an empirically formed conviction that the institutions of state, education and business cooperate to structure the distribution of income. On the basis of these presuppositions, Mill formulated 1) an institutional theory of the formation of human and non-human wealth and 2) an even more institutional theory of distribution demonstrating how the aforementioned institutions malignantly skew the distribution of income to the advantage of the propertied classes and to the extreme disadvantage of the working class. As a social economist, Mill recommended institutional reforms designed to eradicate the poverty of the working class.     

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases.     

Simulating the Effect of Regulatory Systems in a Fishery, An Application to the French Driftnet Albacore Fleet

With a thin economic component, most bio-economic models of fisheries failto assess the effects of the regulation systems on firms. In order to analysethe short term consequences of different management schemes, a simulationmodel is applied to the French driftnet albacore fleet: licence allocation withdriftnet regulation, individual quotas, and individual transferable quotaswithout any input control. Vessel technology is estimated by using the datacollected, and groups of vessels are distinguished according to criteria ofperformance. We present the adjustment within firms and between groupsunder different scenarios (limited entry with and without driftnetregulation, individual quotas and individual transferable quotas allocation),and we compare their results in terms of quasi-rent value and otherindicators such as hake harvests or dolphin by-catches.     

Knowledge as a Path-Dependence Process

By following a new approach proposed by Cognitive and Neuroeconomics, this paper presents and extends that part of Hayek's theory concerning knowledge in path-dependent terms, and shows that this is a fertile theory, opening new lines of inquiry for contemporary economics. In his theory of knowledge Hayek shows that the dynamics of economic change is path-dependent, in a different and more profound way than in the rest of the path-dependent literature. This literature deals with an important controversy, which will be also discussed and its specific and original meaning will be highlighted. As it will emerge, knowledge as a path-dependent process is consistent with cognitive theories of perception and learning and it plays a more important role than is traditionally assumed. Path-dependence is in fact always present in the cognitive dimension of perception and in individual decision-making processes, as well as in the processes of organizational innovation, and even in the macro-dimension of institutional change. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.