Linear and nonlinear parameters of heart rate variability in ischemic stroke patients

Introduction Cardiovascular system presents cortical modulation. Post-stroke outcome can be highly influenced by autonomic nervous system disruption. Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis is a simple non-invasive method to assess sympatho-vagal balance. Objectives The purpose of this study was to investigate cardiac autonomic activity in ischemic stroke patients and to asses HRV nonlinear parameters beside linear ones. Methods We analyzed HRV parameters in 15 right and 15 left middle cerebral artery ischemic stroke patients, in rest condition and during challenge (standing and deep breathing). Data were compared with 15 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Results There was an asymmetric response after autonomic stimulation tests depending on the cortical lateralization in ischemic stroke patients. In resting state, left hemisphere stroke patients presented enhanced parasympathetic control of the heart rate (higher values for RMSSD, pNN50 and HF in normalized units). Right hemisphere ischemic stroke patients displayed a reduced cardiac parasympathetic modulation during deep breathing test. Beside time and frequency domain, using short-term ECG monitoring, cardiac parasympathetic modulation can also be assessed by nonlinear parameter SD1, that presented strong positive correlation with time and frequency domain parameters RMSSD, pNN50, HFnu, while DFA α1 index presented negative correlation with the same indices and positive correlation with the LFnu and LF/HF ratio, indicating a positive association with the sympatho-vagal balance. Conclusions Cardiac monitoring in clinical routine using HRV analysis in order to identify autonomic imbalance may highlight cardiac dysfunctions, thus helping preventing potential cardiovascular complications, especially in right hemisphere ischemic stroke patients with sympathetic hyperactivation

Boolean Lifting Properties for Bounded Distributive Lattices

In this paper, we introduce the lifting properties for the Boolean elements of bounded distributive lattices with respect to the congruences, filters and ideals, we establish how they relate to each other and to significant algebraic properties, and we determine important classes of bounded distributive lattices which satisfy these lifting properties

Câteva observaţii asupra rezistenţei la îngheţ şi a procesului de organogeneză florală a patru populaţii locale de prun din judeţul Buzău

Four local populations of Prunus domestica from Buzau -Pătârlagele city were analysed to evaluate the resistance to frost as well as the organogenesis process. To evaluate the frost resistance of the flower buds two moments were chosen -late February and first decade of April. In the first determination, more than 50% of the analysed buds showed different kinds of damage on flower components, while at the second determination most of the buds remaining on the branch were viable.Theevaluation of the flower organogenesis process carried out at the end of February revealed differences inthe stage of carpel development, while the rest of the floral organs were formed in all four populations

The strange physics of low frequency mirror mode turbulence in the high temperature plasma of the magnetosheath

International audienceMirror mode turbulence is the lowest frequency perpendicular magnetic excitation in magnetized plasma proposed already about half a century ago by Rudakov and Sagdeev (1958) and Chandrasekhar et al. (1958) from fluid theory. Its experimental verification required a relatively long time. It was early recognized that mirror modes for being excited require a transverse pressure (or temperature) anisotropy. In principle mirror modes are some version of slow mode waves. Fluid theory, however, does not give a correct physical picture of the mirror mode. The linear infinitesimally small amplitude physics is described correctly only by including the full kinetic theory and is modified by existing spatial gradients of the plasma parameters which attribute a small finite frequency to the mode. In addition, the mode is propagating only very slowly in plasma such that convective transport is the main cause of flow in it. As the lowest frequency mode it can be expected that mirror modes serve as one of the dominant energy inputs into plasma. This is however true only when the mode grows to large amplitude leaving the linear stage. At such low frequencies, on the other hand, quasilinear theory does not apply as a valid saturation mechanism. Probably the dominant processes are related to the generation of gradients in the plasma which serve as the cause of drift modes thus transferring energy to shorter wavelength propagating waves of higher nonzero frequency. This kind of theory has not yet been developed as it has not yet been understood why mirror modes in spite of their slow growth rate usually are of very large amplitudes indeed of the order of |B/B0|2~O(1). It is thus highly reasonable to assume that mirror modes are instrumental for the development of stationary turbulence in high temperature plasma. Moreover, since the magnetic field in mirror turbulence forms extended though slightly oblique magnetic bottles, low parallel energy particles can be trapped in mirror modes and redistribute energy (cf. for instance, Chisham et al. 1998). Such trapped electrons excite banded whistler wave emission known under the name of lion roars and indicating that the mirror modes contain a trapped particle component while leading to the splitting of particle distributions (see Baumjohann et al., 1999) into trapped and passing particles. The most amazing fact about mirror modes is, however, that they evolve in the practically fully collisionless regime of high temperature plasma where it is on thermodynamic reasons entirely impossible to expel any magnetic field from the plasma. The fact that magnetic fields are indeed locally extracted makes mirror modes similar to "superconducting" structures in matter as known only at extremely low temperatures. Of course, microscopic quantum effects do not play a role in mirror modes. However, it seems that all mirror structures have typical scales of the order of the ion inertial length which implies that mirrors evolve in a regime where the transverse ion and electron motions decouple. In this case the Hall kinetics comes into play. We estimate that in the marginally stationary nonlinear state of the evolution of mirror modes the modes become stretched along the magnetic field with k||=0 and that a small number the order of a few percent of the particle density is responsible only for the screening of the field from the interior of the mirror bubbles

Approach to ground state and time-independent photon bound for massless spin-boson models

It is widely believed that an atom interacting with the electromagnetic field (with total initial energy well-below the ionization threshold) relaxes to its ground state while its excess energy is emitted as radiation. Hence, for large times, the state of the atom+field system should consist of the atom in its ground state, and a few free photons that travel off to spatial infinity. Mathematically, this picture is captured by the notion of asymptotic completeness. Despite some recent progress on the spectral theory of such systems, a proof of relaxation to the ground state and asymptotic completeness was/is still missing, except in some special cases (massive photons, small perturbations of harmonic potentials). In this paper, we partially fill this gap by proving relaxation to an invariant state in the case where the atom is modelled by a finite-level system. If the coupling to the field is sufficiently infrared-regular so that the coupled system admits a ground state, then this invariant state necessarily corresponds to the ground state. Assuming slightly more infrared regularity, we show that the number of emitted photons remains bounded in time. We hope that these results bring a proof of asymptotic completeness within reach.Comment: 45 pages, published in Annales Henri Poincare. This archived version differs from the journal version because we corrected an inconsequential mistake in Section 3.5.1: to do this, a new paragraph was added after Lemma 3.

The strange physics of low frequency mirror mode turbulence in the high temperature plasma of the magnetosheath

Mirror mode turbulence is the lowest frequency perpendicular magnetic excitation in magnetized plasma proposed already about half a century ago by Rudakov and Sagdeev (1958) and Chandrasekhar et al. (1958) from fluid theory. Its experimental verification required a relatively long time. It was early recognized that mirror modes for being excited require a transverse pressure (or temperature) anisotropy. In principle mirror modes are some version of slow mode waves. Fluid theory, however, does not give a correct physical picture of the mirror mode. The linear infinitesimally small amplitude physics is described correctly only by including the full kinetic theory and is modified by existing spatial gradients of the plasma parameters which attribute a small finite frequency to the mode. In addition, the mode is propagating only very slowly in plasma such that convective transport is the main cause of flow in it. As the lowest frequency mode it can be expected that mirror modes serve as one of the dominant energy inputs into plasma. This is however true only when the mode grows to large amplitude leaving the linear stage. At such low frequencies, on the other hand, quasilinear theory does not apply as a valid saturation mechanism. Probably the dominant processes are related to the generation of gradients in the plasma which serve as the cause of drift modes thus transferring energy to shorter wavelength propagating waves of higher nonzero frequency. This kind of theory has not yet been developed as it has not yet been understood why mirror modes in spite of their slow growth rate usually are of very large amplitudes indeed of the order of |B/B₀|²~O(1). It is thus highly reasonable to assume that mirror modes are instrumental for the development of stationary turbulence in high temperature plasma. Moreover, since the magnetic field in mirror turbulence forms extended though slightly oblique magnetic bottles, low parallel energy particles can be trapped in mirror modes and redistribute energy (cf. for instance, Chisham et al. 1998). Such trapped electrons excite banded whistler wave emission known under the name of lion roars and indicating that the mirror modes contain a trapped particle component while leading to the splitting of particle distributions (see Baumjohann et al., 1999) into trapped and passing particles. The most amazing fact about mirror modes is, however, that they evolve in the practically fully collisionless regime of high temperature plasma where it is on thermodynamic reasons entirely impossible to expel any magnetic field from the plasma. The fact that magnetic fields are indeed locally extracted makes mirror modes similar to 'superconducting' structures in matter as known only at extremely low temperatures. Of course, microscopic quantum effects do not play a role in mirror modes. However, it seems that all mirror structures have typical scales of the order of the ion inertial length which implies that mirrors evolve in a regime where the transverse ion and electron motions decouple. In this case the Hall kinetics comes into play. We estimate that in the marginally stationary nonlinear state of the evolution of mirror modes the modes become stretched along the magnetic field with k_||=0 and that a small number the order of a few percent of the particle density is responsible only for the screening of the field from the interior of the mirror bubbles

Structure of interleukin 16 resembles a PDZ domain with an occluded peptide binding site.

The structure of a folded core of IL-16 is similar to that of intracellular protein modules called PDZ domains. IL-16 is thus the first extracellular protein found to have a PDZ-like fold. However, it does not exhibit normal peptide binding properties of PDZ domains. This is due to alterations of the structure at the 'PDZ-like binding site' of IL-16 (the GLGF cleft): the GLGF cleft of IL-16 is much smaller than those of PDZ-domains and is additionally blocked with a tryptophan side chain at its center. Our experiments indicate also that IL-16 nonspecifically aggregates in solution; but formation of a homo-tetrameric protein is not required, in contrast to previous suggestions, for its chemo-attractant activity