18,146 research outputs found
‘Hearts and minds’: association, causation and implication of cognitive impairment in heart failure
The clinical syndrome of heart failure is one of the leading causes of hospitalisation and mortality in older adults. An association between cognitive impairment and heart failure is well described but our understanding of the relationship between the two conditions remains limited. In this review we provide a synthesis of available evidence, focussing on epidemiology, the potential pathogenesis, and treatment implications of cognitive decline in heart failure. Most evidence available relates to heart failure with reduced ejection fraction and the syndromes of chronic cognitive decline or dementia. These conditions are only part of a complex heart failure-cognition paradigm. Associations between cognition and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and between acute delirium and heart failure also seem evident and where data are available we will discuss these syndromes. Many questions remain unanswered regarding heart failure and cognition. Much of the observational evidence on the association is confounded by study design, comorbidity and insensitive cognitive assessment tools. If a causal link exists, there are several potential pathophysiological explanations. Plausible underlying mechanisms relating to cerebral hypoperfusion or occult cerebrovascular disease have been described and it seems likely that these may coexist and exert synergistic effects. Despite the prevalence of the two conditions, when cognitive impairment coexists with heart failure there is no specific guidance on treatment. Institution of evidence-based heart failure therapies that reduce mortality and hospitalisations seems intuitive and there is no signal that these interventions have an adverse effect on cognition. However, cognitive impairment will present a further barrier to the often complex medication self-management that is required in contemporary heart failure treatment
Fermions out of Dipolar Bosons in the lowest Landau level
In the limit of very fast rotation atomic Bose-Einstein condensates may
reside entirely in the lowest two-dimensional Landau level (LLL). For small
enough filling factor of the LLL, one may have formation of fractional quantum
Hall states. We investigate the case of bosons with dipolar interactions as may
be realized with Chromium-52 atoms. We show that at filling factor equal to
unity the ground state is a Moore-Read (a.k.a Pfaffian) paired state as is the
case of bosons with purely s-wave scattering interactions. This Pfaffian state
is destabilized when the interaction in the s-wave channel is small enough and
the ground state is a stripe phase with unidimensional density modulation. For
filling factor 1/3, we show that there is formation of a Fermi sea of
``composite fermions''. These composites are made of one boson bound with three
vortices. This phase has a wide range of stability and the effective mass of
the fermions depends essentially only of the scattering amplitude in momentum
channels larger or equal to 2. The formation of such a Fermi sea opens up a new
possible route to detection of the quantum Hall correlations.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, published versio
Triple cascade behaviour in QG and drift turbulence and generation of zonal jets
We study quasigeostrophic (QG) and plasma drift turbulence within the Charney-Hasegawa-Mima (CHM) model. We focus on the zonostrophy, an extra invariant in the CHM model, and on its role in the formation of zonal jets. We use a generalized Fjørtoft argument for the energy, enstrophy, and zonostrophy and show that they cascade anisotropically into nonintersecting sectors in k space with the energy cascading towards large zonal scales. Using direct numerical simulations of the CHM equation, we show that zonostrophy is well conserved, and the three invariants cascade as predicted by the Fjørtoft argument
Uncovering CDM halo substructure with tidal streams
Models for the formation and growth of structure in a cold dark matter
dominated universe predict that galaxy halos should contain significant
substructure. Studies of the Milky Way, however, have yet to identify the
expected few hundred sub-halos with masses greater than about 10^6 Msun. Here
we propose a test for the presence of sub-halos in the halos of galaxies. We
show that the structure of the tidal tails of ancient globular clusters is very
sensitive to heating by repeated close encounters with the massive dark
sub-halos. We discuss the detection of such an effect in the context of the
next generation of astrometric missions, and conclude that it should be easily
detectable with the GAIA dataset. The finding of a single extended cold stellar
stream from a globular cluster would support alternative theories, such as
self-interacting dark matter, that give rise to smoother halos.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, submitted to MNRA
The Role of Cold Flows in the Assembly of Galaxy Disks
We use high resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to demonstrate
that cold flow gas accretion, particularly along filaments, modifies the
standard picture of gas accretion and cooling onto galaxy disks. In the
standard picture, all gas is initially heated to the virial temperature of the
galaxy as it enters the virial radius. Low mass galaxies are instead dominated
by accretion of gas that stays well below the virial temperature, and even when
a hot halo is able to develop in more massive galaxies there exist dense
filaments that penetrate inside of the virial radius and deliver cold gas to
the central galaxy. For galaxies up to ~L*, this cold accretion gas is
responsible for the star formation in the disk at all times to the present.
Even for galaxies at higher masses, cold flows dominate the growth of the disk
at early times. Within this modified picture, galaxies are able to accrete a
large mass of cold gas, with lower initial gas temperatures leading to shorter
cooling times to reach the disk. Although star formation in the disk is
mitigated by supernovae feedback, the short cooling times allow for the growth
of stellar disks at higher redshifts than predicted by the standard model.Comment: accepted to Ap
Derivation of Delay Equation Climate Models Using the Mori-Zwanzig Formalism
Models incorporating delay have been frequently used to understand climate
variability phenomena, but often the delay is introduced through an ad-hoc
physical reasoning, such as the propagation time of waves. In this paper, the
Mori-Zwanzig formalism is introduced as a way to systematically derive delay
models from systems of partial differential equations and hence provides a
better justification for using these delay-type models. The Mori-Zwanzig
technique gives a formal rewriting of the system using a projection onto a set
of resolved variables, where the rewritten system contains a memory term. The
computation of this memory term requires solving the orthogonal dynamics
equation, which represents the unresolved dynamics. For nonlinear systems, it
is often not possible to obtain an analytical solution to the orthogonal
dynamics and an approximate solution needs to be found. Here, we demonstrate
the Mori-Zwanzig technique for a two-strip model of the El Nino Southern
Oscillation (ENSO) and explore methods to solve the orthogonal dynamics. The
resulting nonlinear delay model contains an additional term compared to
previously proposed ad-hoc conceptual models. This new term leads to a larger
ENSO period, which is closer to that seen in observations.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 25 pages, 10 figure
- …