Self-Efficacy: The Key to Smoking Abstinence?

Objectives: The aim of this project was to determine if strategies designed to increase self-efficacy would improve smoking cessation rates in an adult outpatient population when compared to traditional smoking cessation practices. Background: There are many challenges when individuals try to quit. Inability to quit and relapse are common. Identifying the most effective strategies to address both the physical and behavioral aspects of nicotine dependence is necessary to support smoking abstinence. In the literature, a causal relationship exists between high levels of self-efficacy and improved smoking cessation rates. Methods: A feasibility study, using a pre- post-test design was used to explore whether strategies designed to increase self-efficacy increased the ability of individuals to quit smoking. The researcher designed strategies to increase self-efficacy modeled after two theoretical frameworks: Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory and James Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model of Change. Ten patients enrolled in this study. There was no random assignment and participants did not have the same chance of being in the control or experimental group. The first five patients received standard treatment and the next five patients received enhanced self-efficacy treatment. The goal was to identify increased quit rates in the five patients receiving the treatment. Results: Participants did not complete scheduled follow-up appointments so data obtained from the initial assessment could not be compared with subsequent assessments. Conclusions: Individuals quitting tobacco have many challenges and are best addressed by the combination of medication and behavioral modification to support smoking cessation. An improvement in smoking cessation outcomes may be influenced by the addition of methods designed to increase a person’s level of self-efficacy or belief they can truly quit smoking. Creating more rigorous measures for patient accountability and follow-up are suggested to encourage patient compliance in future studies

Spatially Varying Steady State Longitudinal Magnetization in Distant Dipolar Field-based Sequences

Sequences based on the Distant Dipolar Field (DDF) have shown great promise for novel spectroscopy and imaging. Unless spatial variation in the longitudinal magnetization, M_{z}(s), is eliminated by relaxation, diffusion, or spoiling techniques by the end of a single repetition, unexpected results can be obtained due to spatial harmonics in the steady state M_{z}^{SS}(s) profile. This is true even in a homogeneous single-component sample. We have developed an analytical expression for the M_{z}^{SS}(s) profile that occurs in DDF sequences when smearing by diffusion is negligible in the TR period. The expression has been verified by directly imaging the M_{z}^{SS}(s) profile after establishing the steady state. more keywords: magnetic resonance, intermolecular multiple quantum coherence, mesoscale structure, iMQC, DDFComment: 7 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Journal of Magnetic Resonanc

Diamond degradation in hadron fields

The energy dependence of the concentration of primary displacements induced by protons and pions in diamond has been calculated in the energy range 50 MeV - 50 GeV, in the frame of the Lindhard theory. The concentrations of primary displacements induced by protons and pions have completely different energy dependencies: the proton degradation is very important at low energies, and is higher than the pion one in the whole energy range investigated, with the exception of the delta33 resonance region. Diamond has been found, theoretically, to be one order of magnitude more resistant to proton and pion irradiation in respect to silicon.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Medium Effects in Coherent Pion Photo- and Electroproduction on 4He and 12C

Coherent pi0 photo- and electroproduction on 4He and 12C nuclei is investigated in the framework of a distorted wave impulse approximation in momentum space. The elementary process is described by the recently developed unitary isobar model. Medium effects are considered by introducing a phenomenological Delta self-energy. The recent experimental data for 4He and 12C can be well described over a wide range of energies and emission angles by the assumption that the Delta-nuclear interaction saturates.Comment: 18 pages LaTeX including 7 postscript figure

Relative space-time asymmetries in pion and nucleon production in non-central nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies

We propose to use the ratio of the pion-proton correlation functions evaluated under different conditions to study the relative space-time asymmetries in pion and proton emission (pion and nucleon source relative shifts) in high energy heavy ion collision. We address the question of the non-central collisions, where the sources can be shifted spatially both in the longitudinal and in the transverse directions in the reaction plane. We use the RQMD event generator to illustrate the effect and the technique.Comment: RevTex, 4 pages, 3 figures included as eps file

Chiral unitary approach to the K^- deuteron scattering length

Starting from a recent model where the Kbar N amplitudes are evaluated from the chiral Lagrangians using a coupled channel unitary method, we evaluate here the scattering length for K^- deuteron scattering. We find that the double scattering contribution is very large compared to the impulse approximation and that the charge exchange contribution of this rescattering is as large as the sequential K^- scattering on the two nucleons. Higher order rescattering corrections are evaluated using coupled channels with K^- and Kbar^0 within the integral form of the fixed centre approximation to the Faddeev equations. The higher order corrections involving intermediate pions and hyperons are found negligible.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, revised version to appear in Nucl. Phys.

Coherent two pion photoproduction on 12C

We develop the formalism for coherent two pion photoproduction in nuclei and perform actual calculations of cross sections for $\pi^-\pi^+$ and $\pi^0\pi^0$ photoproduction on $^{12}C$. We find that due to the isospin symmetry the cross section for $\pi^0\pi^0$ production is very small and has a maximum when the pions propagate together. However, the kinematical region where the energies and polar angles of the two $\pi^0$ mesons are equal and their relative azimuthal angle $\phi=180^0$ is forbidden. Conversely in the $\pi^-\pi^+$ production the pions prefer to have a relative azimuthal angle 180$^0$ and the production of the pions propagating together is suppressed. The dominant one-body mechanism in both channels is related to the excitation of the $\Delta$ isobar. Hence the reaction can serve as a source of information about $\Delta$'s properties in nucleus. We have found that the reaction is sensitive to effects of the pion and $\Delta$ renormalization in the nuclear medium, similar to those found in the coherent $(\gamma,\pi^0)$ reaction, but magnified because of the presence of the two pions.Comment: 17 pages LATEX and 11 postscript figure

Dual modality fluorescence confocal and spectral-domain optical coherence tomography microendoscope

Optical biopsy facilitates in vivo disease diagnoses by providing a real-time in situ view of tissue in a clinical setting. Fluorescence confocal microendoscopy and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are two methods that have demonstrated significant potential in this context. These techniques provide complementary viewpoints. The high resolution and contrast associated with confocal systems allow en face visualization of sub-cellular details and cellular organization within a thin layer of biological tissue. OCT provides cross-sectional images showing the tissue micro-architecture to a depth beyond the reach of confocal systems. We present a novel design for a bench-top imaging system that incorporates both confocal and OCT modalities in the same optical train allowing the potential for rapid switching between the two imaging techniques. Preliminary results using simple phantoms show that it is possible to realize both confocal microendoscopy and OCT through a fiber bundle based imaging system

Microscopic Calculation of Total Ordinary Muon Capture Rates for Medium - Weight and Heavy Nuclei

Total Ordinary Muon Capture (OMC) rates are calculated on the basis of the Quasiparticle Random Phase Approximation for several spherical nuclei from 90^Zr to 208^Pb. It is shown that total OMC rates calculated with the free value of the axial-vector coupling constant g_A agree well with the experimental data for medium-size nuclei and exceed considerably the experimental rates for heavy nuclei. The sensitivity of theoretical OMC rates to the nuclear residual interactions is discussed.Comment: 27 pages and 3 figure