2,943 research outputs found
Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques for chronic pain
Copyright © 2014 The Cochrane Collaboration.Various devices are available that can electrically stimulate the brain without the need for surgery or any invasive treatment in order to manage chronic pain. There are four main treatment types: repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in which the brain is stimulated by a coil applied to the scalp, cranial electrotherapy stimulation (CES) in which electrodes are clipped to the ears or applied to the scalp, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and reduced impedance non-invasive cortical electrostimulation (RINCE) in which electrodes are applied to the scalp. These have been used to try to reduce pain by aiming to alter the activity of the brain, but the efficacy of these treatments is uncertain.
This review update included 56 studies: 30 of rTMS, 11 of CES, 14 of tDCS and one of RINCE. We judged only three studies as having a low risk of bias. Low or very low-quality evidence suggests that low-frequency rTMS and rTMS applied to pre-frontal areas of the brain are not effective but that a single dose of high-frequency stimulation of the motor cortex area of the brain provides short-term pain relief. This effect appears to be small and may be exaggerated by a number of sources of bias. Studies that gave a course of multiple treatments of rTMS produced conflicting results with no overall effect seen when we pooled the results of these studies. Most studies of rTMS are small and there is substantial variation between studies in terms of the treatment methods used. Low-quality evidence does not suggest that CES or tDCS are effective treatments for chronic pain. A single small study of RINCE provided very low-quality evidence of a short-term effect on pain. For all forms of stimulation the evidence is not conclusive and uncertainty remains.
The reporting of side effects varied across the studies. Of the studies that clearly reported side effects, short-lived and minor side effects such as headache, nausea and skin irritation were usually reported both after real and sham stimulation. There were two reports of seizure following real rTMS.
While the broad conclusions for rTMS and CES have not changed substantially, the addition of this new evidence and the application of the GRADE system has modified some of our interpretation. Previous readers should re-read this update.
More studies of rigorous design and adequate size are required to evaluate accurately all forms of non-invasive brain stimulation for the treatment of chronic pain
Rethinking clinical trials of transcranial direct current stimulation: Participant and assessor blinding is inadequate at intensities of 2mA
Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and 85 reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The article was made available through the Brunel University Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Many double-blind clinical trials of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) use stimulus intensities of 2 mA despite the fact that blinding has not been formally validated under these conditions. The aim of this study was to test the assumption that sham 2 mA tDCS achieves effective blinding. Methods:
A randomised double blind crossover trial. 100 tDCS-naïve healthy volunteers were incorrectly advised that they there were taking part in a trial of tDCS on word memory. Participants attended for two separate sessions. In each session, they completed a word memory task, then received active or sham tDCS (order randomised) at 2 mA stimulation intensity for 20 minutes and then repeated the word memory task. They then judged whether they believed they had received active stimulation and rated their confidence in that judgement. The blinded assessor noted when red marks were observed at the electrode sites post-stimulation. Results: tDCS at 2 mA was not effectively blinded. That is, participants correctly judged the stimulation condition greater than would be expected to by chance at both the first session (kappa level of agreement (κ) 0.28, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.09 to 0.47 p = 0.005) and the second session (κ = 0.77, 95%CI 0.64 to 0.90), p = <0.001) indicating inadequate participant blinding. Redness at the reference electrode site was noticeable following active stimulation more than sham stimulation (session one, κ = 0.512, 95%CI 0.363 to 0.66, p<0.001; session two, κ = 0.677, 95%CI 0.534 to 0.82) indicating inadequate assessor blinding. Conclusions: Our results suggest that blinding in studies using tDCS at intensities of 2 mA is inadequate. Positive results from such studies should be interpreted with caution.GLM is supported by the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia ID 571090
Ginsparg-Wilson Pions Scattering in a Sea of Staggered Quarks
We calculate isospin 2 pion-pion scattering in chiral perturbation theory for
a partially quenched, mixed action theory with Ginsparg-Wilson valence quarks
and staggered sea quarks. We point out that for some scattering channels, the
power-law volume dependence of two pion states in nonunitary theories such as
partially quenched or mixed action QCD is identical to that of QCD. Thus one
can extract infinite volume scattering parameters from mixed action
simulations. We then determine the scattering length for both 2 and 2+1 sea
quarks in the isospin limit. The scattering length, when expressed in terms of
the pion mass and the decay constant measured on the lattice, has no
contributions from mixed valence-sea mesons, thus it does not depend upon the
parameter, C_Mix, that appears in the chiral Lagrangian of the mixed theory. In
addition, the contributions which nominally arise from operators appearing in
the mixed action O(a^2 m_q) Lagrangian exactly cancel when the scattering
length is written in this form. This is in contrast to the scattering length
expressed in terms of the bare parameters of the chiral Lagrangian, which
explicitly exhibits all the sicknesses and lattice spacing dependence allowed
by a partially quenched mixed action theory. These results hold for both 2 and
2+1 flavors of sea quarks.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures. Mistakes corrected in Eqs. (37), (42). Improved
discussion in section 4 and related results in Eqs. (33), (37), (40) and
(42). Added references. Version to be published in PR
Pósteres científicos. I semana científica URL “Universidad, Ciencia y Transformación Social”
La I Semana Científica URL, «Universidad, ciencia y transformación social», fue el momento que la Vicerrectoría de Investigación y Proyección (VRIP) propició al interno de la Universidad Rafael Landívar (URL) para fomentar y fortalecer la cultura académico-científica de divulgación, discusión y presentación de trabajos de investigación científico-críticos, así como experiencias de proyección generadas por los institutos de investigación y proyección, los institutos de investigación en estudios superiores de la VRIP, las nueve facultades de la Vicerrectoría Académica y otras unidades del Sistema Universitario. La Semana Científica en su primera edición se desarrolló del 19 al 22 de septiembre de 2016. Cada día constó de dos jornadas académicas en las que tuvieron lugar conferencias magistrales, debates, mesas de diálogo, cinefórums, exposición de pósteres científicos y visitas guiadas, entre otras actividades
Pósteres científicos II Semana Científica URL «Universidad, Ciencia y Transformación Social: Una mirada desde la globalización»
La II Semana Científica (II SC) «Universidad, Ciencia y Transformación Social: Una mirada desde la globalización» es un evento de la Universidad Rafael Landívar (URL) que fortalece la cultura académica-científica de divulgación, discusión y presentación de investigaciones científicas y críticas, así como experiencias de proyección generadas en los institutos de investigación y proyección, los institutos de investigación y estudios superiores, las nueve facultades y otras unidades del sistema universitario
Supernova Remnants in the Fossil Starburst in M82
We report the discovery of ten compact H-alpha-bright sources in the
post-starburst region northeast of the center of M82, ``M82 B.'' These objects
have H alpha luminosities and sizes consistent with Type II supernova remnants
(SNRs). They fall on the same H alpha surface brightness-diameter (Sigma-D)
relation defined by SNRs in other nearby star-forming galaxies, with the M82
candidates lying preferentially at the small diameter end. These are the first
candidates for optically-visible SNRs in M82 outside the heavily obscured
central starburst within ~250 pc from the galactic center. If these sources are
SNRs, they set an upper limit to the end of the starburst in region ``B2,''
about 500 pc from the galaxy's core, of ~50 Myr. Region ``B1,'' about 1000 pc
from the core, lacks good SNR candidates and is evidently somewhat older. This
suggests star formation in the galaxy has propagated inward toward the
present-day intense starburst core.Comment: Re-submitted to AJ, referee's comments taken into account, 15 pages
LaTeX preprint style, 4 postscript figures; full-resolution figures available
from http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rd7a/snrs/ Changes: minor textual changes
and orientation/axes of Fig.
UV-Optical Pixel Maps of Face-On Spiral Galaxies -- Clues for Dynamics and Star Formation Histories
UV and optical images of the face-on spiral galaxies NGC 6753 and NGC 6782
reveal regions of strong on-going star formation that are associated with
structures traced by the old stellar populations. We make NUV--(NUV-I) pixel
color-magnitude diagrams (pCMDs) that reveal plumes of pixels with strongly
varying NUV surface brightness and nearly constant I surface brightness. The
plumes correspond to sharply bounded radial ranges, with (NUV-I) at a given NUV
surface brightness being bluer at larger radii. The plumes are parallel to the
reddening vector and simple model mixtures of young and old populations, thus
neither reddening nor the fraction of the young population can produce the
observed separation between the plumes. The images, radial surface-brightness,
and color plots indicate that the separate plumes are caused by sharp declines
in the surface densities of the old populations at radii corresponding to disk
resonances. The maximum surface brightness of the NUV light remains nearly
constant with radius, while the maximum I surface brightness declines sharply
with radius. An MUV image of NGC 6782 shows emission from the nuclear ring. The
distribution of points in an (MUV-NUV) vs. (NUV-I) pixel color-color diagram is
broadly consistent with the simple mixture model, but shows a residual trend
that the bluest pixels in (MUV-NUV) are the reddest pixels in (NUV-I). This may
be due to a combination of red continuum from late-type supergiants and [SIII]
emission lines associated with HII regions in active star-forming regions. We
have shown that pixel mapping is a powerful tool for studying the distribution
and strength of on-going star formation in galaxies. Deep, multi-color imaging
can extend this to studies of extinction, and the ages and metallicities of
composite stellar populations in nearby galaxies.Comment: LaTeX with AASTeX style file, 29 pages with 12 figures (some color,
some multi-part). Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa
The spatial distribution and origin of the FUV excess in early-type galaxies
We present surface photometry of a sample of 52 galaxies from the GALEX and
2MASS data archives, these include 32 normal elliptical galaxies, 10
ellipticals with weak Liner or other nuclear activity, and 10 star forming
ellipticals or early-type spirals. We examine the spatial distribution of the
Far Ultra-Violet excess in these galaxies, and its correlation with dynamical
and stellar population properties of the galaxies. From aperture photometry we
find that all galaxies except for recent major remnants and galaxies with
ongoing star formation show a positive gradient in the (FUV-NUV) colour
determined from the GALEX images. The logarithmic gradient does not correlate
with any stellar population parameter, but it does correlate with the central
velocity dispersion. The strength of the excess on the other hand, correlates
with both [alpha/Fe] and [Z/H], but more strongly with the former. We derive
models of the underlying stellar population from the 2MASS H-band images, and
the residual of the image from this model reveals a map of the centrally
concentrated FUV excess. We examine a possible hypothesis for generating the
FUV excess and the radial gradient in its strength, involving a helium
abundance gradient set up early in the formation process of the galaxies. If
this hypothesis is correct, the persistence of the gradients to the present day
places a strong limit on the importance of dry mergers in the formation of
ellipticals.Comment: 36 pages, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Appendices will appear
in online journal only. This version has reduced resolution for the figure in
Appendix B to comply with arXiv size limit
Intertwinings for general β Laguerre and Jacobi processes
We show that, for β≥1, the semigroups of β-Laguerre and β-Jacobi processes of different dimensions are intertwined in analogy to a similar result for β-Dyson Brownian motion recently obtained in Ramanan and Shkolnikov (Intertwinings of β-Dyson Brownian motions of different dimensions, 2016. arXiv:1608.01597). These intertwining relations generalize to arbitrary β≥1 the ones obtained for β=2 in Assiotis et al. (Interlacing diffusions, 2016. arXiv:1607.07182) between h-transformed Karlin–McGregor semigroups. Moreover, they form the key step toward constructing a multilevel process in a Gelfand–Tsetlin pattern leaving certain Gibbs measures invariant. Finally, as a by-product, we obtain a relation between general β-Jacobi ensembles of different dimensions
Constraints on mass loss and self-enrichment scenarios for the globular clusters of the Fornax dSph
Recently, high-dispersion spectroscopy has demonstrated conclusively that
four of the five globular clusters (GCs) in the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy
are very metal-poor with [Fe/H]<-2. The remaining cluster, Fornax 4, has
[Fe/H]=-1.4. This is in stark contrast to the field star metallicity
distribution which shows a broad peak around [Fe/H]=-1 with only a few percent
of the stars having [Fe/H]<-2. If we only consider stars and clusters with
[Fe/H]<-2 we thus find an extremely high GC specific frequency, SN=400,
implying by far the highest ratio of GCs to field stars known anywhere. We
estimate that about 1/5-1/4 of all stars in the Fornax dSph with [Fe/H]<-2
belong to the four most metal-poor GCs. These GCs could, therefore, at most
have been a factor of 4-5 more massive initially. Yet, the Fornax GCs appear to
share the same anomalous chemical abundance patterns known from Milky Way GCs,
commonly attributed to the presence of multiple stellar generations within the
clusters. The extreme ratio of metal-poor GC- versus field stars in the Fornax
dSph is difficult to reconcile with scenarios for self-enrichment and early
evolution of GCs in which a large fraction (90%-95%) of the first-generation
stars have been lost. It also suggests that the GCs may not have formed as part
of a larger population of now disrupted clusters with an initial power-law mass
distribution. The Fornax dSph may be a rosetta stone for constraining theories
of the formation, self-enrichment and early dynamical evolution of star
clusters.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, accepted for A&A Letter
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