The role of surgery in the treatment of older women with breast cancer

A significant proportion of women diagnosed with breast cancer are over the age of 70 years and there is evidence that these patients frequently do not receive standard treatments, including surgical procedures and adjuvant therapies, which would be routine practice in younger age groups. The factors underlying this may include the physiological effects of ageing, differences in the biology and stage of the tumour at presentation, patient co-morbidities and patient and clinician preferences. The interaction of all these factors needs to be considered when individualising treatment plans for patients. For some patients this will need to be undertaken in the context of an extended multidisciplinary team setting with additional input from geriatricians, in addition to surgeons and oncologists, in defining a treatment plan. Little is known about the preferences of older patients in their choice of surgical treatment for breast cancer and further research is required to increase the evidence base for the rational management of older women with breast cancer

Disposal of dead bodies in emergency conditions

This technical note provides guidance on the disposal of dead bodies in emergency situations. Where there are many fatalities, the collection and disposal of bodies becomes an urgent need, mainly due to the possible social and political impact and trauma involved. It offers guidance to emergency relief teams to be concerned with the mental health of the community and its need to carry out the cultural obligations and traditions to take care of the dead, rather than potential disease transmission. Downloading statistics of this publication were extremely high following the 2004 Asian Tsunami

Progress in evaluating the corrosion of candidate HLW container metals in irradiated air-steam mixtures

The Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project is evaluating Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nevada, as a site for a potential high-level nuclear waste repository. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is concerned with the development and performance modeling of waste packages for the potential repository. Argonne National Laboratory has performed experimental studies in support of the waste package effort. This effort is currently guided by the Waste Package Plan, which calls for a systems engineering approach to waste package development. Part of this approach involves formulating an approved set of selection criteria to choose the materials to be used in fabricating the waste packages. Technical issues related to the performance of metals in the air/water vapor environment expected in the potential Yucca Mountain repository are discussed. Preliminary experiments, focused on the atmospheric corrosion of copper-based materials, are summarized. These experiments were performed over a broad range of conditions: temperatures between 90 and 150{degrees}C; relative humidities of 0, 15, 40, and 100%; and gamma dose rates between 0.01 and 0.3 Mrad/hr. In irradiated moist air, copper-based materials form cooper oxides and nitrate phases depending on the dose rate, humidity and temperature. The rates of general corrosion increase with temperature, humidity, and dose rate. Chemical intermediates formed by radiolysis of moist air have been clearly associated with observed corrosion. No significant corrosion was observed for Alloy 825. 13 refs., 3 tabs

E´ chelle diagrams and period spacings of g modes in: Doradus stars from four years of Kepler observations

We use photometry from the Kepler Mission to study oscillations in Doradus stars. Some stars show remarkably clear sequences of g modes and we use period ´echelle diagrams to measure period spacings and identifyrotationally split multiplets with ` = 1 and ` = 2.We find small deviations from regular period spacings that arise from the gradient in the chemical composition just outside the convective core. We also find stars for which the period spacing shows a strong linear trend as a function of period, consistent with relatively rapid rotation. Overall, th

The 3D Structure of N132D in the LMC: A Late-Stage Young Supernova Remnant

We have used the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) on the 2.3m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory to map the [O III] 5007{\AA} dynamics of the young oxygen-rich supernova remnant N132D in the Large Magellanic Cloud. From the resultant data cube, we have been able to reconstruct the full 3D structure of the system of [O III] filaments. The majority of the ejecta form a ring of ~12pc in diameter inclined at an angle of 25 degrees to the line of sight. We conclude that SNR N132D is approaching the end of the reverse shock phase before entering the fully thermalized Sedov phase of evolution. We speculate that the ring of oxygen-rich material comes from ejecta in the equatorial plane of a bipolar explosion, and that the overall shape of the SNR is strongly influenced by the pre-supernova mass loss from the progenitor star. We find tantalizing evidence of a polar jet associated with a very fast oxygen-rich knot, and clear evidence that the central star has interacted with one or more dense clouds in the surrounding ISM.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Astrophysics & Space Science, 18pp, 8 figure

Large Deviations in the Superstable Weakly Imperfect Bose Gas

The superstable Weakly Imperfect Bose Gas {(WIBG)} was originally derived to solve the inconsistency of the Bogoliubov theory of superfluidity. Its grand-canonical thermodynamics was recently solved but not at {point of} the {(first order)} phase transition. This paper proposes to close this gap by using the large deviations formalism and in particular the analysis of the Kac distribution function. It turns out that, as a function of the chemical potential, the discontinuity of the Bose condensate density at the phase transition {point} disappears as a function of the particle density. Indeed, the Bose condensate continuously starts at the first critical particle density and progressively grows but the free-energy per particle stays constant until the second critical density is reached. At higher particle densities, the Bose condensate density as well as the free-energy per particle both increase {monotonously}

Probabilistic representation for solutions of an irregular porous media type equation: the degenerate case

We consider a possibly degenerate porous media type equation over all of $\R^d$ with $d = 1$, with monotone discontinuous coefficients with linear growth and prove a probabilistic representation of its solution in terms of an associated microscopic diffusion. This equation is motivated by some singular behaviour arising in complex self-organized critical systems. The main idea consists in approximating the equation by equations with monotone non-degenerate coefficients and deriving some new analytical properties of the solution

Eigenvalue estimates for non-selfadjoint Dirac operators on the real line

We show that the non-embedded eigenvalues of the Dirac operator on the real line with non-Hermitian potential $V$ lie in the disjoint union of two disks in the right and left half plane, respectively, provided that the $L^1-norm$ of $V$ is bounded from above by the speed of light times the reduced Planck constant. An analogous result for the Schr\"odinger operator, originally proved by Abramov, Aslanyan and Davies, emerges in the nonrelativistic limit. For massless Dirac operators, the condition on $V$ implies the absence of nonreal eigenvalues. Our results are further generalized to potentials with slower decay at infinity. As an application, we determine bounds on resonances and embedded eigenvalues of Dirac operators with Hermitian dilation-analytic potentials

Scattering theory for Klein-Gordon equations with non-positive energy

We study the scattering theory for charged Klein-Gordon equations: \{{array}{l} (\p_{t}- \i v(x))^{2}\phi(t,x) \epsilon^{2}(x, D_{x})\phi(t,x)=0,[2mm] \phi(0, x)= f_{0}, [2mm] \i^{-1} \p_{t}\phi(0, x)= f_{1}, {array}. where: \epsilon^{2}(x, D_{x})= \sum_{1\leq j, k\leq n}(\p_{x_{j}} \i b_{j}(x))A^{jk}(x)(\p_{x_{k}} \i b_{k}(x))+ m^{2}(x), describing a Klein-Gordon field minimally coupled to an external electromagnetic field described by the electric potential $v(x)$ and magnetic potential $\vec{b}(x)$. The flow of the Klein-Gordon equation preserves the energy: h[f, f]:= \int_{\rr^{n}}\bar{f}_{1}(x) f_{1}(x)+ \bar{f}_{0}(x)\epsilon^{2}(x, D_{x})f_{0}(x) - \bar{f}_{0}(x) v^{2}(x) f_{0}(x) \d x. We consider the situation when the energy is not positive. In this case the flow cannot be written as a unitary group on a Hilbert space, and the Klein-Gordon equation may have complex eigenfrequencies. Using the theory of definitizable operators on Krein spaces and time-dependent methods, we prove the existence and completeness of wave operators, both in the short- and long-range cases. The range of the wave operators are characterized in terms of the spectral theory of the generator, as in the usual Hilbert space case