16,975 research outputs found
Family support for stroke: one year follow up of a randomised controlled trial
Background: There is evidence that family support can benefit carers of stroke patients, but not the patients themselves.
Objective: To extend the follow up of a single blind randomised controlled trial of family support for stroke patients and carers to one year to ascertain whether there were any late effects of the intervention.
Methods: The study was a randomised controlled trial. Patients admitted to hospital with acute stroke who had a close carer were assigned to receive family support or normal care. Families were visited at home by a researcher 12 months after the stroke, and a series of questionnaires was administered to patient and carer.
Results: The benefits to carers mostly persisted, though they were no longer statistically significant because some patients were lost to follow up. There was no evidence of any effects on patients.
Conclusion: Family support is effective for carers, but different approaches need to be considered to alleviate the psychosocial problems of stroke patients.
Abbreviations: FSO, family support organiser; SF-36, short form 36 item health assessment questionnaire
Keywords: caregiver; family support; stroke
In recognition of the impact that stroke has on carers as well as patients,1 services such as Stroke Association family support have been developed in the United Kingdom which provide information, emotional support, and liaison with other services. The service maintains contact through a combination of home and hospital visits and telephone calls. In the Oxford family support trial, we found that this service was associated with significantly improved quality of life of carers at follow up six months after the stroke, but had no effects on patients.2 Other randomised controlled trials of the service in other areas have also found no evidence of benefit to patients with follow up varying from four to nine months after recruitment.3,4 The lack of benefit to patients may be attributable to the short duration of follow up in these trials. The service usually maintains contact with a family for a year, and some patients spend a significant proportion of the first six months in hospital, during which time family support might be anticipated to have less impact. We carried out a second follow up of participants in the Oxford trial to investigate the effects of family support on patients and carers one year after the stroke
A Method for Measuring the Spectral Normal Emittance in Air of A Variety of Materials Having Stable Emittance Characteristics
A method and apparatus is described for the measurement of spectral normal emittance in air of a variety of materials. The system permits measurements to be performed over a wavelength region of 1.0 through 15.0 microns and over a temperature range of 600F to 1,8000F with an accuracy of 5.0 percent. The advantages of this system are described. Results obtained by this system are compared with results reported by another observer using a different technique
Black hole quasinormal modes using the asymptotic iteration method
In this article we show that the asymptotic iteration method (AIM) allows one
to numerically find the quasinormal modes of Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild de
Sitter (SdS) black holes. An added benefit of the method is that it can also be
used to calculate the Schwarzschild anti-de Sitter (SAdS) quasinormal modes for
the case of spin zero perturbations. We also discuss an improved version of the
AIM, more suitable for numerical implementation.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX; references added; substantially expanded versio
Graviton emission from simply rotating Kerr-de Sitter black holes: Transverse traceless tensor graviton modes
In this article we present results for tensor graviton modes (in seven
dimensions and greater, ) for greybody factors of Kerr-dS black holes
and for Hawking radiation from simply rotating (n+4)-dimensional Kerr black
holes. Although there is some subtlety with defining the Hawking temperature of
a Kerr-dS black hole, we present some preliminary results for emissions
assuming the standard Hawking normalization and a Bousso-Hawking-like
normalization.Comment: 12 pages, 18 figure
Angular Eigenvalues of Higher-Dimensional Kerr-(A)dS Black Holes with Two Rotations
In this paper, following the work of Chen, L\"u and Pope, we present the
general metric for Kerr-(A)dS black holes with two rotations. The corresponding
Klein-Gordon equation is separated explicitly, from which we develop
perturbative expansions for the angular eigenvalues in powers of the rotation
parameters with .Comment: 10 pages, no figures. To appear in the proceedings of 2011 Shanghai
Asia-Pacific School and Workshop on Gravitatio
Bulk dominated fermion emission on a Schwarzschild background
Using the WKBJ approximation, and the Unruh method, we obtain semi-analytic
expressions for the absorption probability (in all energy regimes) for Dirac
fermions on a higher dimensional Schwarzschild background. We present an
analytic expression relating the absorption probability to the absorption
cross-section, and then use these results to plot the emission rates to third
order in the WKBJ approximation. The set-up we use is sufficiently general such
that it could also easily be applied to any spherically symmetric background in
-dimensions. Our results lead to the interesting conclusion that for
bulk fermion emission dominates brane localised emission. This is an example
contrary to the conjecture that black holes radiate mainly on the brane.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure
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