3,483 research outputs found
Point-of-care measurement of blood lactate in children admitted with febrile illness to an African District Hospital.
BACKGROUND: Lactic acidosis is a consistent predictor of mortality owing to severe infectious disease, but its detection in low-income settings is limited to the clinical sign of "deep breathing" because of the lack of accessible technology for its measurement. We evaluated the use of a point-of-care (POC) diagnostic device for blood lactate measurement to assess the severity of illness in children admitted to a district hospital in Tanzania. METHODS: Children between the ages of 2 months and 13 years with a history of fever were enrolled in the study during a period of 1 year. A full clinical history and examination were undertaken, and blood was collected for culture, microscopy, complete blood cell count, and POC measurement of blood lactate and glucose. RESULTS: The study included 3248 children, of whom 164 (5.0%) died; 45 (27.4%) of these had raised levels of blood lactate (>5 mmol/L) but no deep breathing. Compared with mortality in children with lactate levels of ≤ 3 mmol/L, the unadjusted odds of dying were 1.6 (95% confidence interval [CI].8-3.0), 3.4 (95% CI, 1.5-7.5), and 8.9 (95% CI, 4.7-16.8) in children with blood lactate levels of 3.1-5.0, 5.1-8.0, or >8.0 mmol/L, respectively. The prevalence of raised lactate levels (>5 mmol/L) was greater in children with malaria than in children with nonmalarial febrile illness (P < .001) although the associated mortality was greater in slide-negative children. CONCLUSIONS: POC lactate measurement can contribute to the assessment of children admitted to hospital with febrile illness and can also create an opportunity for more hospitals in resource-poor settings to participate in clinical trials of interventions to reduce mortality associated with hyperlactatemia
Polarization dependent photoionization cross-sections and radiative lifetimes of atomic states in Ba
The photoionization cross-sections of two even-parity excited states, and , of atomic Ba at the ionization-laser wavelength of
556.6 nm were measured. We found that the total cross-section depends on the
relative polarization of the atoms and the ionization-laser light. With
density-matrix algebra, we show that, in general, there are at most three
parameters in the photoionization cross-section. Some of these parameters are
determined in this work. We also present the measurement of the radiative
lifetime of five even-parity excited states of barium.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
Hyperfine-interaction- and magnetic-field-induced Bose-Einstein-statistics suppressed two-photon transitions
Two-photon transitions between atomic states of total electronic angular
momentum and are forbidden when the photons are of the same
energy. This selection rule is analogous to the Landau-Yang theorem in particle
physics that forbids decays of vector particle into two photons. It arises
because it is impossible to construct a total angular momentum
quantum-mechanical state of two photons that is permutation symmetric, as
required by Bose-Einstein statistics. In atoms with non-zero nuclear spin, the
selection rule can be violated due to hyperfine interactions. Two distinct
mechanisms responsible for the hyperfine-induced two-photon transitions are
identified, and the hyperfine structure of the induced transitions is
evaluated. The selection rule is also relaxed, even for zero-nuclear-spin
atoms, by application of an external magnetic field. Once again, there are two
similar mechanisms at play: Zeeman splitting of the intermediate-state
sublevels, and off-diagonal mixing of states with different total electronic
angular momentum in the final state. The present theoretical treatment is
relevant to the ongoing experimental search for a possible
Bose-Einstein-statistics violation using two-photon transitions in barium,
where the hyperfine-induced transitions have been recently observed, and the
magnetic-field-induced transitions are being considered both as a possible
systematic effect, and as a way to calibrate the measurement
Multibreather and vortex breather stability in Klein--Gordon lattices: Equivalence between two different approaches
In this work, we revisit the question of stability of multibreather
configurations, i.e., discrete breathers with multiple excited sites at the
anti-continuum limit of uncoupled oscillators. We present two methods that
yield quantitative predictions about the Floquet multipliers of the linear
stability analysis around such exponentially localized in space, time-periodic
orbits, based on the Aubry band method and the MacKay effective Hamiltonian
method and prove that their conclusions are equivalent. Subsequently, we
showcase the usefulness of the methods by a series of case examples including
one-dimensional multi-breathers, and two-dimensional vortex breathers in the
case of a lattice of linearly coupled oscillators with the Morse potential and
in that of the discrete model
Business Communication Students Appraisal Of Selected Communication Competencies
The purpose of this study was to determine business communication students perception of selected business communication competencies. Students enrolled in business communication classes at Texas A&M University-Commerce from the summer of 2006 until the spring 2007 were survey. Students were asked to evaluate each of the listed 44 competencies. The two competencies that ranked the highest were Spells Correctly, and Understands the Importance of Business Relationships
Unusually large polarizabilities and "new" atomic states in Ba
Electric polarizabilities of four low-J even-parity states and three low-J
odd-parity states of atomic barium in the range to $36,000\
^{-1}6s8p
^3P_{0,2}$ is suggested.Comment: 29 pages, 12 figure
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