Insulin autoantibodies as determined by competitive radiobinding assay are positively correlated with impaired beta-cell function — The Ulm-Frankfurt population study

Out of a random population of 4208 non-diabetic pupils without a family history of Type I diabetes 44 (1.05%) individuals had islet cell antibody (ICA) levels greater or equal to 5 Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDF) units. 39 of these ICA-positives could be repeatedly tested for circulating insulin autoantibodies (CIAA) using a competitive radiobinding assay. The results were compared with the insulin responses in the intravenous glucose tolerance tests (IVGTT) and with HLA types. Six pupils were positive for CIAA. All of them had complement-fixing ICA, and 5 of them were HLA-DR4 positive. Three of the 6 showed a first-phase insulin response below the first percentile of normal controls. Our data indicate that in population-based studies CIAA can be considered as a high risk marker for impaired beta-cell function in non-diabetic ICA-positive individuals

Perfectly matched layers for the convected Helmholtz equation

In this paper, we propose and analyze perfectly matched absorbing layers for a problem of time-harmonic acoustic waves propagating in a duct in the presence of a uniform flow. The absorbing layers are designed for the pressure field, satisfying the convected scalar Helmholtz equation. A difficulty, compared to the Helmholtz equation, comes from the presence of so-called inverse upstream modes which become unstable, instead of evanescent, with the classical Bérenger’s perfectly matched layers (PMLs). We investigate here a PML model, recently introduced for timedependent problems, which makes all outgoing waves evanescent. We then analyze the error due to the truncation of the domain and prove that the convergence is exponential with respect to the size of the layers for both the classical and the new PML models. Numerical validations are finally presented