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Although out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) are a major cause of mortality internationally, data regarding survival in Greece remains scarce and inconclusive. The aim of this study is to assess the immediate and 24-hour survival of OHCA sufferers during a 5-year period in a public hospital in Athens. A retrospective study was conducted on all cardiac arrests that were transferred to our hospital during a five-year period (2011-2015). Our primary objective was to calculate return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) and 24-hour survival ratios. Our secondary objective was to estimate 30-day survival. Demographic data was also collected. 283 OHCA were included in the study. The mean age was 67.2 years and the male: female ratio was 2. Medical history was available for 33.6% of patients. 72.1% of cases were transferred to the emergency department by ambulance and 2.8% by private means of transport. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was attempted on 57.6% of cardiac arrests, 8.6% regained ROSC and 6.1% survived for 24 hours. The 30-day survival was expected to be less than 3.5%. In our institution, ROSC, 24-hour and expected 30-day survival were lower than the European average and in accordance with the recent prospective Eureca One study. However, data from our institution cannot be generalised and multicenter studies are required in order to clarify OHCA outcomes in Greece.

This dissertation consists of an introductory chapter, four research essays and one essay that describes the collected dataset. The first essay examines how the balance of land embodied in British trade developed during the nineteenth century and provides the first all encompassing accounts on this topic. It is shown that the contribution of vertical expansion has been far larger than that of horizontal expansion. The former thereby contributed significantly more than the latter to overcoming British land constraints and fostering economic development throughout the nineteenth century. The second essay examines the contribution of colonies and colonialism in abolishing Britain’s land constraints. It is found that land embodied in trade from British colonial and former colonial territories represented the lion’s share of total land embodied in imports from overseas territories. The commodities that contributed the most to this process of territorial expansion were the European settlements in British North America and Australia. The results also provide circumstantial evidence that the institution of colonialism could have contributed to consolidating nineteenth-century industrial specialization by providing advantages additional to the terms of trade associated with factor endowments. The third essay provides a sustainability assessment of Britain’s socio-economic system during the nineteenth century, using the ecological footprint methodology. It is found that the economic development of the new industrial socio-economic system was already unsustainable during the period under study, and the socio-economic system thereby represented a system in overshoot. British society was consuming resources to an extent that other European late-industrializers would only reach approximately 100 years later. Additionally, the empirical evidence illustrates that the relationship between globalization, industrialization and sustainable development may be more dynamic and multifaceted than some previous research has assumed. The fourth essay performs a comparative analysis of agricultural productivity in Senegambia in relation to that found in the plantation complex in the Americas. The aim of the essay is to examine the region’s capacity to produce an agricultural surplus, and what implications this might have had for the transatlantic slave trade. It is found that differences in land productivity between Africa and the Americas were very large, indicating a very low agricultural productivity in Senegambia. It is argued in the essay that this low agricultural productivity also could have served as a motivation for the transatlantic slave trade.

Land availability and overseas trade have been central topics in economic history. The current paper contributes to this literature by setting the empirical foundations necessary for the calculation of the direct ecological footprints of more than eighty traded commodities throughout the 19th and early 20th century. The main focus is placed upon products which were heavily traded by and within the British Empire during this period. Various secondary sources have been reviewed and are critically discussed while the methodological steps that have been followed for the calculation of an acreage conversion factor for each product are analyzed in detail. The data presented here can be useful for researchers examining the importance of ghost acreages and ecological footprint historically but also the role of natural resources and land use in a long term perspective.

This paper aims to investigate the stress management skills of Christian Orthodox monks and nuns, as measured by Antonovsky's scale sense of coherence (SOC). A case-control study was designed to test the hypotheses whether monks and nuns have higher SOC than secular people. The study population consisted of 193 individuals, 96 monks and nuns (study group) and 97 secular men and women (control group). SOC score was higher in monks and nuns as compared to the secular population (p = 0.002), men as compared to women (p = 0.012) and persons of older age (p = 0.004) as compared to younger individuals.