Probing photoinduced two-body loss of ultracold non-reactive bosonic 23Na87Rb and 23Na39K molecules, Physical Review Letters

We probe photo-induced loss for chemically stable bosonic 23Na87Rb and 23Na39K molecules in chopped optical dipole traps where the molecules spend a significant time in the dark. We expect the effective two-body decay to be largely suppressed in chopped traps due to the small expected complex lifetimes of about 13μs and 6μs for 23Na87Rb and 23Na39K respectively. However, instead we do observe near-universal loss even at the lowest chopping frequencies we can probe. Our data thus either suggest a so far unknown loss mechanism or a drastic underestimation of the complex lifetime by at least one to two orders of magnitude

Sex differences of troponin test performance in chest pain patients

Background: Current guidelines recommend troponin as the preferred biomarker to diagnose acute myocardial infarction (AMI) irrespective of the patient's sex. Recent reports have shown that sex-specific cut-offs should be considered but studies investigating sex-differences in the diagnostic accuracy of cardiac troponins are sparse.\ud \ud Objective: To evaluate whether the diagnostic performance of cardiac troponin at admission (cTn) under routine conditions is influenced by patient's sex.\ud \ud Methods: Between 15th of February 2009 and 15th of February 2010, women (n = 1648) and men (n = 2305) who presented to the emergency department with chest pain (n = 3954) were enrolled. The diagnostic performance of the routine, contemporary sensitive cTn assays (TnI; Stratus® CS, Siemens and TnT; Roche Diagnostics) at baseline for the diagnosis of non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) was analyzed.\ud \ud Results: NSTEMI was diagnosed in 7.3% (n = 287) of all patients. Men were more likely to be diagnosed with NSTEMI (8.8%; n = 202) as compared to women (5.2%; n = 85; p < 0.001). Sensitivity was 56.1% (95% CI: 44.7–67.0%) in women and 70.1% (95% CI: 63.1–76.4%) in men. Specificity was 96.8% (95% CI: 95.6–97.7%) in women and 94.5% (95% CI: 93.3–95.6%) in men. This resulted in a lower positive predictive value (PPV) for women (53.5%; 95% CI: 42.4–64.3) as compared to men (60.8%; 95% CI: 54.1–67.2) and a slightly higher negative predictive value (NPV) for women: 97.1% (95% CI: 96.0–97.9) vs. 96.3% (95% CI: 95.2–97.2) in men.\ud \ud Conclusions: The findings of this study underline that the performance of cTn for the diagnosis of NSTEMI depends on a patient's sex, with a lower sensitivity and NPV in women. The definition and implementation of sex-specific cut-off values for cTn into clinical routine seems to be highly recommendable