4,837 research outputs found
Nivolumab-induced fulminant diabetic ketoacidosis followed by thyroiditis
Five days following the 3rd cycle of nivolumab, a monoclonal antibody, which acts as immune checkpoint inhibitor against the programmed cell death protein-1, for metastatic lung adenocarcinoma, a 56-year-old woman presented at the hospital critically ill. On admission, she had severe diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), as evidenced by venous glucose of 47 mmol/L, blood ketones of 7.5 mmol/L, pH of 6.95 and bicarbonate of 6.6 mmol/L. She has had no personal or family history of diabetes mellitus (DM), while random venous glucose, measured 1 week prior to hospitalisation, was 6.1 mmol/L. On admission, her HbA1c was 8.2% and anti-GAD antibodies were 12 kIU/L (0â5 kU/L), while islet cell antibodies and serum C-peptide were undetectable. Nivolumab was recommenced without the development of other immune-mediated phenomena until 6 months later, when she developed hypothyroidism with TSH 18 U/L and low free T4. She remains insulin dependent and has required levothyroxine replacement, while she has maintained good radiological and clinical response to immunotherapy. This case is notable for the rapidity of onset and profound nature of DKA at presentation, which occurred two months following commencement of immunotherapy. Despite the association of nivolumab with immune-mediated endocrinopathies, only a very small number of patients developing type 1 DM has been reported to date. Patients should be closely monitored for hyperglycaemia and thyroid dysfunction prior to and periodically during immunotherapy
Does Every Quasar Harbor A Blazar?
Assuming there is a blazar type continuum in every radio-loud quasar, we find
that the free-free heating due to the beamed infrared continuum can greatly
enhance collisionally excited lines, and thus explain the stronger CIV
1549 line emission observed in radio loud quasars. We further predict
that the CIV line should show variability {\it not} associated with observed
continuum or Ly variability.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; to appear in Astrophys. J. Let
Investigating the ferric ion binding site of magnetite biomineralisation protein Mms6
The biomineralization protein Mms6 has been shown to be a major player in the formation of magnetic nanoparticles both within the magnetosomes of magnetotactic bacteria and as an additive in synthetic magnetite precipitation assays. Previous studies have highlighted the ferric iron binding capability of the protein and this activity is thought to be crucial to its mineralizing properties. To understand how this protein binds ferric ions we have prepared a series of single amino acid substitutions within the C-terminal binding region of Mms6 and have used a ferric binding assay to probe the binding site at the level of individual residues which has pinpointed the key residues of E44, E50 and R55 involved in Mms6 ferric binding. No aspartic residues bound ferric ions. A nanoplasmonic sensing experiment was used to investigate the unstable EER44, 50,55AAA triple mutant in comparison to native Mms6. This suggests a difference in interaction with iron ions between the two and potential changes to the surface precipitation of iron oxide when the pH is increased. All-atom simulations suggest that disruptive mutations do not fundamentally alter the conformational preferences of the ferric binding region. Instead, disruption of these residues appears to impede a sequence-specific motif in the C-terminus critical to ferric ion binding
Signals in motion: Determining how signal transduction is mechanically coupled through type-I cytokine receptors
Disentangling a dynamical Higgs
The pattern of deviations from Standard Model predictions and couplings is
different for theories of new physics based on a non-linear realization of the
gauge symmetry breaking and those assuming a linear
realization. We clarify this issue in a model-independent way via its effective
Lagrangian formulation in the presence of a light Higgs particle, up to first
order in the expansions: dimension-six operators for the linear expansion and
four derivatives for the non-linear one. Complete sets of pure gauge and
gauge-Higgs operators are considered, implementing the renormalization
procedure and deriving the Feynman rules for the non-linear expansion. We
establish the theoretical relation and the differences in physics impact
between the two expansions. Promising discriminating signals include the
decorrelation in the non-linear case of signals correlated in the linear one:
some pure gauge versus gauge-Higgs couplings and also between couplings with
the same number of Higgs legs. Furthermore, anomalous signals expected at first
order in the non-linear realization may appear only at higher orders of the
linear one, and vice versa. We analyze in detail the impact of both type of
discriminating signals on LHC physics.Comment: Version published in JHE
The Effects of Poetry in Elderly Populations with Memory Impairment
Introduction. A small body of research on therapeutic use of poetry in individuals with memory impairment demonstrates benefits similar to that of more widely studied music interventions. This project aims to assess the effects of participation in a poetry group on the residents of a memory care floor within the Converse Home, an assisted living facility in Burlington, Vermont.
Methods.. We evaluated the effects of twelve group poetry sessions on residents\u27 well-being in several domains. Each session included a reading and writing portion, which were evaluated separately to assess differences in measures of communication, interest, and enjoyment. These measures, along with negative responses, were recorded on Likert scales. T-tests, ANOVA, and post-hoc comparisons were used to compare behavioral and affective observations in the reading versus writing sessions.
Results.. Positive responses were significantly higher in reading sessions (p
Conclusion.. Although the limitations of this project preclude us from drawing individual conclusions regarding the therapeutic efficacy of poetry in individuals with memory impairment, we demonstrate that poetry sessions have a positive impact on global quality of life outcomes and introduction of poetry sessions in this population has a beneficial effect.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1242/thumbnail.jp
Minimal Informationally Complete Measurements for Pure States
We consider measurements, described by a positive-operator-valued measure
(POVM), whose outcome probabilities determine an arbitrary pure state of a
D-dimensional quantum system. We call such a measurement a pure-state
informationally complete (PSI-complete) POVM. We show that a measurement with
2D-1 outcomes cannot be PSI-complete, and then we construct a POVM with 2D
outcomes that suffices, thus showing that a minimal PSI-complete POVM has 2D
outcomes. We also consider PSI-complete POVMs that have only rank-one POVM
elements and construct an example with 3D-2 outcomes, which is a generalization
of the tetrahedral measurement for a qubit. The question of the minimal number
of elements in a rank-one PSI-complete POVM is left open.Comment: 2 figures, submitted for the Asher Peres festschrif
TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications
In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture âstandardâ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision
- âŠ