COPD and cardiovascular disease

COPD is one of the major public health problems in people aged 40 years or above. It is currently the 4th leading cause of death in the world and projected to be the 3rd leading cause of death by 2020. COPD and cardiac comorbidities are frequently associated. They share common risk factors, pathophysiological processes, signs and symptoms, and act synergistically as negative prognostic factors. Cardiac disease includes a broad spectrum of entities with distinct pathophysiology, treatment and prognosis. From an epidemiological point of view, patients with COPD are particularly vulnerable to cardiac disease. Indeed, mortality due to cardiac disease in patients with moderate COPD is higher than mortality related to respiratory failure. Guidelines reinforce that the control of comorbidities in COPD has a clear benefit over the potential risk associated with the majority of the drugs utilized. On the other hand, the true survival benefits of aggressive treatment of cardiac disease and COPD in patients with both conditions have still not been clarified. Given their relevance in terms of prevalence and prognosis, we will focus in this paper on the management of COPD patients with ischemic coronary disease, heart failure and dysrhythmia.Novartis Portugal Novartisinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Empathy, morality and psychopathic traits in women

Empathic and moral processing correlates of psychopathic personality have seldom been studied in women. In this study, we experimentally tested associations between psychopathic personality traits and empathic and moral processing in a female sample, and further directly compared them to results from a male sample. We found that high levels of affective-interpersonal traits were associated with diminished affective response to sad and fearful emotions in others; lower propensity to feel moral emotions; higher endorsement of utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas involving direct harm; and less self-reported difficulty when performing moral decision making. Overall, our findings strengthen the view that the two dimensions of psychopathy make distinct contributions to emotional and moral processing; and demonstrate that, in women, psychopathic personality traits are associated with a similar pattern of empathic and moral processing biases as the one that has been previously reported in men

Spacetime diffeomorphisms and the geodesic approximation

We present a spacetime diffeomorphism invariant formulation of the geodesic approximation to soliton dynamics

Nernst branes from special geometry

We construct new black brane solutions in $U(1)$ gauged ${\cal N}=2$ supergravity with a general cubic prepotential, which have entropy density $s\sim T^{1/3}$ as $T \rightarrow 0$ and thus satisfy the Nernst Law. By using the real formulation of special geometry, we are able to obtain analytical solutions in closed form as functions of two parameters, the temperature $T$ and the chemical potential $\mu$. Our solutions interpolate between hyperscaling violating Lifshitz geometries with $(z,\theta)=(0,2)$ at the horizon and $(z,\theta)=(1,-1)$ at infinity. In the zero temperature limit, where the entropy density goes to zero, we recover the extremal Nernst branes of Barisch et al, and the parameters of the near horizon geometry change to $(z,\theta)=(3,1)$.Comment: 37 pages. v2: numerical pre-factors of scalar fields q_A corrected in Section 3. No changes to conclusions. References adde

Moduli Stabilisation in Heterotic Models with Standard Embedding

In this note we analyse the issue of moduli stabilisation in 4d models obtained from heterotic string compactifications on manifolds with SU(3) structure with standard embedding. In order to deal with tractable models we first integrate out the massive fields. We argue that one can not only integrate out the moduli fields, but along the way one has to truncate also the corresponding matter fields. We show that the effective models obtained in this way do not have satisfactory solutions. We also look for stabilised vacua which take into account the presence of the matter fields. We argue that this also fails due to a no-go theorem for Minkowski vacua in the moduli sector which we prove in the end. The main ingredient for this no-go theorem is the constraint on the fluxes which comes from the Bianchi identity.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX; references adde

The perception of injury risk and prevention among football players: A systematic review

Football is associated with a certain risk of injury, leading to short- and long-term health consequences. However, the perception of football players about injury risk and prevention strategies is poorly documented. The present article reviewed the literature about perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and knowledge toward injury risk and prevention strategies in football players. An electronic search was performed in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and APA PsychINFO until July 2022. Studies were eligible if they included the perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge about injury risk and prevention in football players from any competitive level. The risk of bias was assessed in included studies using the Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal checklist. A total of 14 studies were included. Most football players agreed that their risk of injury is high and prevention strategies are important, however they do not intend to use some of these strategies. The most frequent perceived injury risk factors were low muscle strength, lack of physical fitness, fatigue, excessive training and type and condition of surfaces. The most frequent perceived injury prevention factors were warm-up, workload monitoring and strength and conditioning training. It is essential to acknowledge perceived injury risk factors, as well as a better understanding of how coaching and medical departments' perceptions match with players' perceptions, and a modification in the perceptions of the several stakeholders at different levels of action. 2022 Cardoso-Marinho, Barbosa, Bolling, Marques, Figueiredo and Brito

BPS black holes in N=2 D=4 gauged supergravities

We construct and analyze BPS black hole solutions in gauged N=2, D=4 supergravity with charged hypermultiplets. A class of solutions can be found through spontaneous symmetry breaking in vacua that preserve maximal supersymmetry. The resulting black holes do not carry any hair for the scalars. We demonstrate this with explicit examples of both asymptotically flat and anti-de Sitter black holes. Next, we analyze the BPS conditions for asymptotically flat black holes with scalar hair and spherical or axial symmetry. We find solutions only in cases when the metric contains ripples and the vector multiplet scalars become ghost-like. We give explicit examples that can be analyzed numerically. Finally, we comment on a way to circumvent the ghost-problem by introducing also fermionic hair.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures; v2 references added; v3 minor changes, published versio

Osteotomia de Maquet III: O que ficou após as Complicações Iniciais: Resultados a longo prazo

A complexidade de forças geradas a nível da articulação patelo-femoral foi ilustrada por Maquet (1963). Este propôs uma cirurgia (avanço da tuberosidade anterior da tíbia) em que diminuía a força resultante a nível patelo-femoral e femoro-tibial. Mal amada pelas complicações (2 a 59%), acabou por ser abandonada. Este trabalho pretende avaliar os resultados funcionais e radiológicos a longo prazo de modo a determinar se a cirurgia cumpriu ou não os objectivos a que se propunha. Dos 25 casos de Maquet avaliados, um foi excluído por ter sido submetido a Artroplastia Total do Joelho (20 anos após Maquet). A queixa predominante pré-operatória foi de dor anterior do joelho com crepitação dolorosa e sensação de instabilidade patelar (52,1%). Como complicações, 2 (8,7%) casos de deiscência da sutura, 1 (4,3%) de tromboflebite e 1 (4,3%) de infecção. A amplitude articular foi retomada após 4,8 ±3,5 meses. Dez doentes (40%) não têm dor na actualidade. Dos restantes o período médio de ausência de dor foi de 20,5 ±5,7 anos. A EVA em repouso foi de 1,7 ±0,7, em actividade de 4,4 ±3,0 e o KPFSS de 61,9 ±22,3 pontos. Radiológicamente, o ABP foi de 6,3±3,9º e o ICD de 0,9 ±0,1. 42% apresentavam um grau II de Kellgren e Lawrence a nível femoro-patelar e 45,8% a nível femoro-tibial, à data actual. Apesar de retrospectivo o trabalho permite determinar, com um tempo médio de follow-up pós-operatório de 27 anos, uma ausência douradora das queixas álgicas acompanhada por uma lenta evolução artrósica ao nível do joelho, cumprindo-se assim os objectivos a que se propunha