Validation of A&D UA-778 blood pressure monitor in children.

OBJECTIVE: To validate the oscillometric blood pressure monitor UA-778 in children aged 4-15 years according to the British Hypertension Society protocol. METHOD: In 85 children (38 boys, 47 girls), nine sequential readings were taken simultaneously by two trained observers alternating between the mercury sphygmomanometer and the test device. The last seven readings were analyzed according to the British Hypertension Society protocol. The American Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation criterion (mean difference +/- SD < 5 +/- 8 mmHg) was also applied. RESULTS: The difference between UA-778 and mercury sphygmomanometer readings was 4.9 +/- 6.3 mmHg for systolic pressure and 2.4 +/- 5.9 mmHg for diastolic pressure. The proportions of device-observer blood pressure differences within 5, 10, and 15 mmHg were 50, 83, and 95% for systolic blood pressure and 70, 90, and 96% for diastolic pressure (B/A grade according to the British Hypertension Society protocol). CONCLUSION: The oscillometric blood pressure monitor UA-778 seems to be an accurate device for blood pressure measurement in children and adolescents.

Cancer chronomics II. Origins of timing cancer treatment.

This paper is a memorial to Mikhail Victorovich Berezkin (MVB) (10 April 1940 - 16 January 2005), an enthusiastic advocate of chrono-oncology. It illustrates his early dose- and circadian time-response curves, limited as yet by a 4-timepoint approach, provides a list of his publications, and offers a succinct overview of individualized marker rhythm-guided oncotherapy.

Transdisciplinary unifying implications of circadian findings in the 1950s.

Afew puzzles relating to a small fraction of my endeavors in the 1950s are summarized herein, with answers to a few questions of the Editor-in-Chief, to suggest that the rules of variability in time complement the rules of genetics as a biological variability in space. I advocate to replace truisms such as a relative constancy or homeostasis, that have served bioscience very well for very long. They were never intended, however, to lower a curtain of ignorance over everyday physiology. In raising these curtains, we unveil a range of dynamics, resolvable in the data collection and as-one-goes analysis by computers built into smaller and smaller devices, for a continued self-surveillance of the normal and for an individualized detection of the abnormal. The current medical art based on spotchecks interpreted by reference to a time-unqualified normal range can become a science of time series with tests relating to the individual in inferential statistical terms. This is already doable for the case of blood pressure, but eventually should become possible for many other variables interpreted today only based on the quicksand of clinical trials on groups. These ignore individual differences and hence the individual's needs. Chronomics (mapping time structures) with the major aim of quantifying normalcy by dynamic reference values for detecting earliest risk elevation, also yields the dividend of allowing molecular biology to focus on the normal as well as on the grossly abnormal.

Cross-spectrally coherent ~10.5- and 21-year biological and physical cycles, magnetic storms and myocardial infarctions*

Magnetic storms trigger myocardial infarctions with mechanisms relating to heart rate variability. Solar cycle-to-solar cycle differences and solar cycle stage dependence shown herein may resolve prior controversy and serve to advocate coordinated worldwide systematically aligned biological and physical monitoring. * This paper was originally invited by the historian-geophysicist Wilfried SCHRöDER of Bremen, Germany, for his biographical "Encounters," and is to serve as an update on the project on the BIOsphere and the Cosmos (BIOCOS) and its offspring ICEHRV (Dr. Kuniaki Otsuka's International Chronome Ecologic Study of Heart Rate Variability). It is intended for distribution at a NATO conference on space weather hazards, organized by Dr. Ioannis Daglis, June 18-29, 2000.