1,188 research outputs found
Illness and Treatment Perceptions of Patients with Epilepsy Attending Treatment at a Tertiary Hospital in Addis Ababa – A Qualitative Exploration
BACKGROUND: Epilepsy can be a large economic burden in countries where appropriate treatment is not taken due to religious and psychosocial beliefs. The objective of this study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of patients with epilepsy attending their treatment at Tikur Anbessa SpecializedHospital about their illness and treatment.METHODS: A qualitative exploratory design with an in-depth interview was followed. Fourteen purposively selected patients were used until saturation of key emerging themes was achieved.RESULTS: The finding showed that study participants expressed perceptions towards their illness including about its cause, timeline, severity and psychosocial consequences which at times may be considered different from the biomedical version. They also expressed concerns about their treatment, reported aboutsocial and psychological issues and in certain cases dissatisfaction with their healthcare providers. Such issues may have led to delays in treatment-seeking and non-adherence to recommended treatment regimens and as well use of traditional medicine and spiritual healing. On the other hand, reasons that were reported to positively influence their treatment experiences include necessity perceptions about their medications, family support and use of spiritual healing alongside their biomedical treatment.CONCLUSION: The healthcare provision should improve to cater to these groups of patients including instituting chronic care management and appropriate health education provision
Physics of Interpulse Emission in Radio Pulsars
The magnetized induced Compton scattering off the particles of the
ultrarelativistic electron-positron plasma of pulsar is considered. The main
attention is paid to the transverse regime of the scattering, which holds in a
moderately strong magnetic field. We specifically examine the problem on
induced transverse scattering of the radio beam into the background, which
takes place in the open field line tube of a pulsar. In this case, the
radiation is predominantly scattered backwards and the scattered component may
grow considerably. Based on this effect, we for the first time suggest a
physical explanation of the interpulse emission observed in the profiles of
some pulsars. Our model can naturally account for the peculiar spectral and
polarization properties of the interpulses. Furthermore, it implies a specific
connection of the interpulse to the main pulse, which may reveal itself in the
consistent intensity fluctuations of the components at different timescales.
Diverse observational manifestations of this connection, including the moding
behavior of PSR B1822-09, the peculiar temporal and frequency structure of the
giant interpulses in the Crab pulsar, and the intrinsic phase correspondence of
the subpulse patterns in the main pulse and the interpulse of PSR B1702-19, are
discussed in detail. It is also argued that the pulse-to-pulse fluctuations of
the scattering efficiency may lead to strong variability of the interpulse,
which is yet to be studied observationally. In particular, some pulsars may
exhibit transient interpulses, i.e. the scattered component may be detectable
only occasionally.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap
Stress Alters Rates and Types of Loss of Heterozygosity in Candida albicans
Genetic diversity is often generated during adaptation to stress, and in eukaryotes some of this diversity is thought to arise via recombination and reassortment of alleles during meiosis. Candida albicans, the most prevalent pathogen of humans, has no known meiotic cycle, and yet it is a heterozygous diploid that undergoes mitotic recombination during somatic growth. It has been shown that clinical isolates as well as strains passaged once through a mammalian host undergo increased levels of recombination. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stress conditions increase rates of mitotic recombination in C. albicans, which is measured as loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at specific loci. We show that LOH rates are elevated during in vitro exposure to oxidative stress, heat stress, and antifungal drugs. In addition, an increase in stress severity correlated well with increased LOH rates. LOH events can arise through local recombination, through homozygosis of longer tracts of chromosome arms, or by whole-chromosome homozygosis. Chromosome arm homozygosis was most prevalent in cultures grown under conventional lab conditions. Importantly, exposure to different stress conditions affected the levels of different types of LOH events, with oxidative stress causing increased recombination, while fluconazole and high temperature caused increases in events involving whole chromosomes. Thus, C. albicans generates increased amounts and different types of genetic diversity in response to a range of stress conditions, a process that we term “stress-induced LOH” that arises either by elevating rates of recombination and/or by increasing rates of chromosome missegregation
Probing the imprints of generalized interacting dark energy on the growth of perturbations
We extensively study the evolution and distinct signatures of cosmological models, in which dark energy interacts directly with dark matter. We first focus on the imprints of these coupled models on the cosmic microwave background temperature power spectrum, in which we discuss the multipole peak separation together with the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. We also address the growth of matter perturbations, and disentangle the interacting dark energy models using the expansion history together with the growth history. We find that a disformal coupling between dark matter and dark energy induces intermediate-scales and time-dependent damped oscillatory features in the matter growth rate function, a unique characteristic of this coupling. Apart from the disformal coupling, we also consider conformally coupled models, together with models which simultaneously make use of both couplings
Phaseless VLBI mapping of compact extragalactic radio sources
The problem of phaseless aperture synthesis is of current interest in
phase-unstable VLBI with a small number of elements when either the use of
closure phases is not possible (a two-element interferometer) or their quality
and number are not enough for acceptable image reconstruction by standard
adaptive calibration methods. Therefore, we discuss the problem of unique image
reconstruction only from the spectrum magnitude of a source. We suggest an
efficient method for phaseless VLBI mapping of compact extragalactic radio
sources. This method is based on the reconstruction of the spectrum magnitude
for a source on the entire UV plane from the measured visibility magnitude on a
limited set of points and the reconstruction of the sought-for image of the
source by Fienup's method from the spectrum magnitude reconstructed at the
first stage. We present the results of our mapping of the extragalactic radio
source 2200 +420 using astrometric and geodetic observations on a global VLBI
array. Particular attention is given to studying the capabilities of a
two-element interferometer in connection with the putting into operation of a
Russian-made radio interferometer based on Quasar RT-32 radio telescopes.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure
Affine Constellations Without Mutually Unbiased Counterparts
It has been conjectured that a complete set of mutually unbiased bases in a
space of dimension d exists if and only if there is an affine plane of order d.
We introduce affine constellations and compare their existence properties with
those of mutually unbiased constellations, mostly in dimension six. The
observed discrepancies make a deeper relation between the two existence
problems unlikely.Comment: 8 page
The Initial Mass Function of the Stellar Association NGC 602 in the Small Magellanic Cloud with Hubble Space Telescope ACS Observations
We present our photometric study of the stellar association NGC 602 in the
wing of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The data were taken in the filters
F555W and F814W using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on-board the Hubble
Space Telescope (HST). Photometry was performed using the ACS module of the
stellar photometry package DOLPHOT. We detected more than 5,500 stars with a
magnitude range of 14 \lsim m_{555} \lsim 28 mag. Three prominent stellar
concentrations are identified with star counts in the observed field, the
association NGC 602 itself, and two clusters, one of them not being currently
in any known catalog. The Color-Magnitude Diagrams (CMDs) of both clusters show
features typical for young open clusters, while that of the association reveals
bright main sequence (MS) and faint pre-main sequence (PMS) stars as the
members of the system. We construct the initial mass spectrum (IMS) of the
association by applying an age-independent method of counting the PMS stars
within evolutionary tracks, while for the bright MS stars we transform their
magnitudes to masses with the use of mass-luminosity relations. The IMS of NGC
602 is found to be well represented by a single-power law, corresponding to an
Initial Mass Function (IMF) of slope \Gamma\approx -1.2 for 1 \lsim M/M{\solar}
\lsim 45. This indicates that the shape of the IMF of a star forming system in
the SMC for stars with masses higher than 1 M{\solar} seems to be quite similar
to the field IMF in the solar neighborhood.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 13 pages, 14 figures, emulateapj.cls
LaTeX style, full resolution version available on
http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~dgoulier/Science/NGC602/ms.pd
Linear Perturbations in Brane Gas Cosmology
We consider the effect of string inhomogeneities on the time dependent
background of Brane Gas Cosmology. We derive the equations governing the linear
perturbations of the dilaton-gravity background in the presence of string
matter sources. We focus on long wavelength fluctuations and find that there
are no instabilities. Thus, the predictions of Brane Gas Cosmology are robust
against the introduction of linear perturbations. In particular, we find that
the stabilization of the extra dimensions (moduli) remains valid in the
presence of dilaton and string perturbations.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figur
Scalar perturbations from brane-world inflation
We investigate the scalar metric perturbations about a de Sitter brane
universe in a 5-dimensional anti de Sitter bulk. We compare the master-variable
formalism, describing metric perturbations in a 5-dimensional longitudinal
gauge, with results in a Gaussian normal gauge. For a vacuum brane (with
constant brane tension) there is a continuum of normalizable Kaluza-Klein
modes, with m>3H/2, which remain in the vacuum state. A light radion mode, with
m=\sqrt{2}H, satisfies the boundary conditions for two branes but is not
normalizable in the single-brane case. When matter is introduced (as a test
field) on the brane, this mode, together with the zero-mode and an infinite
ladder of discrete tachyonic modes, become normalizable. However, the boundary
condition requires the self-consistent 4-dimensional evolution of scalar field
perturbations on the brane and the dangerous growing modes are not excited.
These normalizable discrete modes introduce corrections at first-order to the
scalar field perturbations computed in a slow-roll expansion. On super-Hubble
scales, the correction is smaller than slow-roll corrections to the de Sitter
background. However on small scales the corrections can become significant.Comment: 15 page
Gauge-invariant fluctuations of scalar branes
A generalization of the Bardeen formalism to the case of warped geometries is
presented. The system determining the gauge-invariant fluctuations of the
metric induced by the scalar fluctuations of the brane is reduced to a set of
Schr\"odinger-like equations for the Bardeen potentials and for the canonical
normal modes of the scalar-tensor action. Scalar, vector and tensor modes of
the geometry are classified according to four-dimensional Lorentz
transformations. While the tensor modes of the geometry live on the brane
determining the corrections to Newton law, the scalar and and vector
fluctuations exhibit non normalizable zero modes and are, consequently, not
localized on the brane. The spectrum of the massive modes of the fluctuations
is analyzed using supersymmetric quantum mechanics.Comment: 29 pages in Latex styl
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