Geographic patterns of ozone concentrations estimated by Fann et al. (2011) were similar to patterns estimated for the present study, including areas of high ozone in southern California, the industrial Midwest, and portions of the South, including St .Louis and Atlanta.
The comparison of the estimates of the present study with data from other localities is limited, because these studies used different outcomes for the simultaneous analysis of BRFCH.
Therefore, the effect estimates of the present study should be interpreted with caution, especially in cases where associations were based on small numbers of studies and/or small sample numbers.
The larger estimates of in the present study were probably influenced by the much larger interval between blood samples (about 16 months) (Lin et al. 2005).
Historically, the physician's assessment appears to be important when estimating survival [6], [23] [25], and if the subjective observations listed above are indeed represented by the surgeon's estimate, the results of the present study support this claim.
If there was indeed an effect of treatment, the duration of lesions estimated in the present study would clearly be an underestimate of the duration of a non-treated case.
These values provide some external corroboration for the UK-bases estimate in the present study where 33% of tinnitus patients were referred on by GPs.
Since the low genetic differentiation among cultivars reported up to now has been suggested to be a consequence of their complex pedigree [ 41], the higher values of FST estimated in the present study support the consistency of the intra-specific clusters detected by the hierarchical STRUCTURE approach.
Given that the reported loci in our previous GWAS explain a modest fraction of the heritability estimated from twin studies and our estimate of hSNP in the present study, we believe that other common variants which did not meet the significance threshold remain to be identified.
In any case we stress that the value of t estimated in the present study is in agreement with what found in previous studies, both at global and regional scale (Marzocchi and Lombardi, 2008; Lombardi and Marzocchi, 2009, 2010).
