1,361 research outputs found
Successful Non-Invasive treatment of stricturing fibrosing colonopathy in an adult patient
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objective</p> <p>Fibrosing colonopathy (FC) is a rare entity associated with cystic fibrosis (CF). Until now, patients with stricturing FC have usually been treated surgically. In this instance, we aimed at avoiding surgery by applying a new conservative approach.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Case report on an adult with CF who developed persistent abdominal pain due to a non-passable stricture in the right transverse colon. Histology confirmed fibrosing colonopathy.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Initially we treated the patient with prednisolone pulse therapy and additive antibiotic therapy. For maintenance therapy we administered budesonide. The patient underwent clinical, laboratory and endoscopic follow-up over a three-year period. The stricture healed and was easy to pass. A relapse in the cecum at the ileocecal valve again improved under steroid and antibiotic therapy.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We present a novel therapeutic approach for advanced stricturing FC in an adult patient which successfully avoided surgery (right hemicolectomy) over a three year follow up.</p
Phonon Assisted Multimagnon Optical Absorption and Long Lived Two-Magnon States in Undoped Lamellar Copper Oxides
We calculate the effective charge for multimagnon infrared (IR) absorption
assisted by phonons in the parent insulating compounds of cuprate
superconductors and the spectra for two-magnon absorption using interacting
spin-wave theory. Recent measured bands in the mid IR [Perkins et al. Phys.
Rev. Lett. {\bf 71} 1621 (1993)] are interpreted as involving one phonon plus a
two-magnon virtual bound state, and one phonon plus higher multimagnon
absorption processes. The virtual bound state consists of a narrow resonance
occurring when the magnon pair has total momentum close to .Comment: 4 page
Role of Van Hove Singularities and Momentum Space Structure in High-Temperature Superconductivity
There is a great deal of interest in attributing the high critical
temperatures of the cuprates to either the proximity of the Fermi level to a
van Hove singularity or to structure of the superconducting pairing potential
in momentum space far from the Fermi surface. We examine these ideas by
calculating the critical temperature Tc for model Einstein-phonon- and
spin-fluctuation-mediated superconductors within both the standard,
Fermi-surface-restricted Eliashberg theory and the exact mean field theory,
which accounts for the full momentum structure of the pairing potential and the
energy dependence of the density of states. By using two models of
spin-fluctuation-mediated pairing in the cuprates, we demonstrate that our
results are independent of the details of the dynamical susceptibility, which
is taken to be the pairing potential. We also compare these two models against
available neutron scattering data, since these data provide the most direct
constraints on the susceptibility. We conclude that the van Hove singularity
does not drastically alter Tc from its value when the density of states is
constant and that the effect of momentum structure is significant but secondary
in importance to that of the energy dependence in the density of states.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures upon request, revtex version 2, vHs-
The Electron-Phonon Interaction in the Presence of Strong Correlations
We investigate the effect of strong electron-electron repulsion on the
electron-phonon interaction from a Fermi-liquid point of view: the strong
interaction is responsible for vertex corrections, which are strongly dependent
on the ratio. These corrections generically lead to a strong
suppression of the effective coupling between quasiparticles mediated by a
single phonon exchange in the limit. However, such effect
is not present when . Analyzing the Landau stability
criterion, we show that a sizable electron-phonon interaction can push the
system towards a phase-separation instability. A detailed analysis is then
carried out using a slave-boson approach for the infinite-U three-band Hubbard
model. In the presence of a coupling between the local hole density and a
dispersionless optical phonon, we explicitly confirm the strong dependence of
the hole-phonon coupling on the transferred momentum versus frequency ratio. We
also find that the exchange of phonons leads to an unstable phase with negative
compressibility already at small values of the bare hole-phonon coupling. Close
to the unstable region, we detect Cooper instabilities both in s- and d-wave
channels supporting a possible connection between phase separation and
superconductivity in strongly correlated systems.Comment: LateX 3.14, 04.11.1994 Preprint no.101
Segment-Wise Genome-Wide Association Analysis Identifies a Candidate Region Associated with Schizophrenia in Three Independent Samples
Recent studies suggest that variation in complex disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) is explained by a large number of genetic variants with small effect size (Odds Ratio∼1.05–1.1). The statistical power to detect these genetic variants in Genome Wide Association (GWA) studies with large numbers of cases and controls (∼15,000) is still low. As it will be difficult to further increase sample size, we decided to explore an alternative method for analyzing GWA data in a study of schizophrenia, dramatically reducing the number of statistical tests. The underlying hypothesis was that at least some of the genetic variants related to a common outcome are collocated in segments of chromosomes at a wider scale than single genes. Our approach was therefore to study the association between relatively large segments of DNA and disease status. An association test was performed for each SNP and the number of nominally significant tests in a segment was counted. We then performed a permutation-based binomial test to determine whether this region contained significantly more nominally significant SNPs than expected under the null hypothesis of no association, taking linkage into account. Genome Wide Association data of three independent schizophrenia case/control cohorts with European ancestry (Dutch, German, and US) using segments of DNA with variable length (2 to 32 Mbp) was analyzed. Using this approach we identified a region at chromosome 5q23.3-q31.3 (128–160 Mbp) that was significantly enriched with nominally associated SNPs in three independent case-control samples. We conclude that considering relatively wide segments of chromosomes may reveal reliable relationships between the genome and schizophrenia, suggesting novel methodological possibilities as well as raising theoretical questions
Polarons and bipolarons in strongly interacting electron-phonon systems
The Holstein Hubbard and Holstein t--J models are studied for a wide range of
phonon frequencies, electron--electron and electron--phonon interaction
strengths on finite lattices with up to ten sites by means of direct Lanczos
diagonalization. Previously the necessary truncation of the phononic Hilbert
space caused serious limitations to either very small systems (four or even two
sites) or to weak electron--phonon coupling, in particular in the adiabatic
regime. Using parallel computers we were able to investigate the transition
from `large' to `small' polarons in detail. By resolving the low--lying
eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and by calculating the spectral function we can
identify a polaron band in the strong--coupling case, whose dispersion deviates
from the free--particle dispersion at low and intermediate phonon frequencies.
For two electrons (holes) we establish the existence of bipolaronic states and
discuss the formation of a bipolaron band. For the 2D Holstein t--J model we
demonstrate that the formation of hole--polarons is favoured by strong Coulomb
correlations. Analyzing the hole--hole correlation functions we find that hole
binding is enhanced as a dynamical effect of the electron--phonon interaction.Comment: 23 pages (Revtex) with 13 figures (ps, uuencoded
Whole genome linkage scan of recurrent depressive disorder from the depression network study
Genome-wide linkage analysis was carried out in a sample of 497 sib pairs concordant for recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD). There was suggestive evidence for linkage on chromosome 1p36 where the LOD score for female-female pairs exceeded 3 (but reduced to 2.73 when corrected for multiple testing). The region includes a gene, MTHFR, that in previous studies has been associated with depressive symptoms. Two other regions, on chromosomes 12q23.3-q24.11 and 13q31.1-q31.3, showed evidence for linkage with a nominal P<0.01. The 12q peak overlaps with a region previously implicated by linkage studies of unipolar and bipolar disorders and contains a gene, DAO, that has been associated with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The 13q peak lies within a region previously linked strongly to panic disorder. A fourth modest peak with an LOD of greater than 1 on chromosome 15q lies within a region that showed genome-wide significant evidence of a recurrent depression locus in a previous sib-pair study. Both the 12q and the 15q findings remained significant at genome-wide level when the data from the present study and the previous reports were combine
Genetic risk prediction and neurobiological understanding of alcoholism
We have used a translational Convergent Functional Genomics (CFG) approach to discover genes involved in alcoholism, by gene-level integration of genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from a German alcohol dependence cohort with other genetic and gene expression data, from human and animal model studies, similar to our previous work in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. A panel of all the nominally significant P-value single-nucleotide length polymorphisms (SNPs) in the top candidate genes discovered by CFG (n = 135 genes, 713 SNPs) was used to generate a genetic risk prediction score (GRPS), which showed a trend towards significance (P = 0.053) in separating alcohol dependent individuals from controls in an independent German test cohort. We then validated and prioritized our top findings from this discovery work, and subsequently tested them in three independent cohorts, from two continents. In order to validate and prioritize the key genes that drive behavior without some of the pleiotropic environmental confounds present in humans, we used a stress-reactive animal model of alcoholism developed by our group, the D-box binding protein (DBP) knockout mouse, consistent with the surfeit of stress theory of addiction proposed by Koob and colleagues. A much smaller panel (n = 11 genes, 66 SNPs) of the top CFG-discovered genes for alcoholism, cross-validated and prioritized by this stress-reactive animal model showed better predictive ability in the independent German test cohort (P = 0.041). The top CFG scoring gene for alcoholism from the initial discovery step, synuclein alpha (SNCA) remained the top gene after the stress-reactive animal model cross-validation. We also tested this small panel of genes in two other independent test cohorts from the United States, one with alcohol dependence (P = 0.00012) and one with alcohol abuse (a less severe form of alcoholism; P = 0.0094). SNCA by itself was able to separate alcoholics from controls in the alcohol-dependent cohort (P = 0.000013) and the alcohol abuse cohort (P = 0.023). So did eight other genes from the panel of 11 genes taken individually, albeit to a lesser extent and/or less broadly across cohorts. SNCA, GRM3 and MBP survived strict Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. Taken together, these results suggest that our stress-reactive DBP animal model helped to validate and prioritize from the CFG-discovered genes some of the key behaviorally relevant genes for alcoholism. These genes fall into a series of biological pathways involved in signal transduction, transmission of nerve impulse (including myelination) and cocaine addiction. Overall, our work provides leads towards a better understanding of illness, diagnostics and therapeutics, including treatment with omega-3 fatty acids. We also examined the overlap between the top candidate genes for alcoholism from this work and the top candidate genes for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety from previous CFG analyses conducted by us, as well as cross-tested genetic risk predictions. This revealed the significant genetic overlap with other major psychiatric disorder domains, providing a basis for comorbidity and dual diagnosis, and placing alcohol use in the broader context of modulating the mental landscape
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