Simultaneous Determination of Human Plasma Levels of Citalopram, Paroxetine, Sertraline, and Their Metabolites by Gas Chromatography—Mass Spectrometry

A gas chromatography—mass spectrometry method is presented which allows the simultaneous determination of the plasma concentrations of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors citalopram, paroxetine, sertraline, and their pharmacologically active N-demethylated metabolites (desmethylcitalopram, didesmethylcitalopram, and desmethylsertraline) after derivatization with the reagent N-methyl-bis(trifluoroacetamide). No interferences from endogenous compounds are observed following the extraction of plasma samples from six different human subjects. The standard curves are linear over a working range of 10-500 ng/mL for citalopram, 10-300 ng/mL for desmethylcitalopram, 5-60 ng/mL for didesmethylcitalopram, 20-400 ng/mL for sertraline and desmethylsertraline, and 10-200 ng/mL for paroxetine. Recoveries measured at three concentrations range from 81 to 118% for the tertiary amines (citalopram and the internal standard methylmaprotiline), 73 to 95% for the secondary amines (desmethylcitalopram, paroxetine and sertraline), and 39 to 66% for the primary amines (didesmethylcitalopram and desmethylsertraline). Intra- and interday coefficients of variation determined at three concentrations range from 3 to 11 % for citalopram and its metabolites, 4 to 15% for paroxetine, and 5 to 13% for sertraline and desmethylsertraline. The limits of quantitation of the method are 2 ng/mL for citalopram and paroxetine, 1 ng/mL for sertraline, and 0.5 ng/mL for desmethylcitalopram, didesmethylcitalopram, and desmethylsertraline. No interferences are noted from 20 other psychotropic drugs. This sensitive and specific method can be used for single-dose pharmacokinetics. It is also useful for therapeutic drug monitoring of these three drugs and could possibly be adapted for the quantitation of the two other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors on the market, namely fluoxetine and fluvoxamin

PARSEME Survey on MWE Resources

International audienceThis paper summarizes the first results of an ongoing survey on multiword resources carried out within the IC1207 Cost ActionPARSEME (PARSing and Multi-word Expressions). Despite the availability of language resource catalogues and the inventory ofmultiword data-sets available at the SIGLEX-MWE website, multiword resources are scattered and prove to be difficult to be found.In many cases, language resources such as corpora, treebanks or lexical databases include multiwords as part of their data or take theminto consideration in their annotations. However, it is needed to centralize these resources so that other researches may subsequentlyuse them. The final aim of this survey is thus to create a portal where researchers may find multiword resources or multiword-awarelanguage resources for their research. We report on how the survey was designed and analyze the data gathered so far. We also discussthe problems we have detected upon examination of the data and possible ways of enhancing the survey

Electrical Integrity Tests during Production of the LHC Dipoles

For the LHC dipoles, mandatory electrical integrity tests are performed to qualify the cold mass (CM) at four production stages: individual pole, collared coil, CM before end cover welding and final CM. A description of the measurement equipment and its recent development are presented. After passing the demands set out in the specification, the results of the tests are transmitted to CERN where they are further analyzed. The paper presents the most important results of these measurements. We also report a review of the electrical non-conformities encountered e.g. interturn shorts and quench heater failure, their diagnostic and the cures

Design, Manufacturing Aspects and Performance of Recent 10 m Long Model Dipole Superconducting Magnets for the LHC Project

A number of twin aperture, 10 m long, model dipole magnets for the LHC Project have been built and tested. With regard to the models of the first generation, the inner coil diameter and the intra-beam distance were increased from 50 to 56 mm and from 180 to about 194 mm, respectively. Also with regard to the previous models, a 5-block (instead of a 6-block) coil cross-section was chosen and the wid th of the Rutherford cable was reduced from 17 mm to 15 mm. The coils were manufactured and collared in Industry, the assembly of their magnetic circuit and cold mass were carried out at CERN. The ind ividual design and manufacturing features of each of these magnets are described and the results of their warm and cold magnetic measurement are presented and discussed

Efficiency of the traditional practice of traps to stimulate black truffle production, and its ecological mechanisms

The black truffle Tuber melanosporum was disseminated all over the world, propelled by the development of a wide variety of empirical practices. A widespread practice, called ‘truffle trap’, consists of placing pieces of truffles into excavations dug under host trees, and of collecting truffle in these traps in the next years. This research aims at (1) evaluating the effect of this practice on fruitbody production based on the analysis of 9924 truffle traps installed in 11 orchards across T. melanosporum native area in France and (2) exploring the mechanisms involved in fruitbody emergence using traps where the genotypes of introduced truffles were compared with those of fruitbodies collected in the same traps. We confirmed that truffle traps provide a major and highly variable part of truffle ground production, representing up to 89% of the collected fruitbodies. We evidenced a genetic link between introduced spores and collected fruitbodies, and then demonstrated that truffle growers provide paternal partners for mating with local maternal mycelia. We also highlighted that soil disturbance stimulate the vegetative development of established maternal mycelia. This research supports that a widely used traditional practice enhances fruitbody production by shaping favorable conditions and providing sexual partners required for fruiting.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Fifty years of spellchecking

A short history of spellchecking from the late 1950s to the present day, describing its development through dictionary lookup, affix stripping, correction, confusion sets, and edit distance to the use of gigantic databases

Evaluation of mixing and shear stresses in High Rate Algae Ponds for different paddlewheel designs

Achieving appropriate hydrodynamic mixing in the design and operation of large-scale High Rate Algae Pond (HRAP) ponds can be a delicate task which depends on a number of sometimes competing factors. Dealing with living cells require knowledge of their sensitivity to external conditions (shear stress, light, CO2, etc.). For example, vertical mixing is used to control the amount of light reaching the micro-organisms but must account for the organism sensitivity to excessive light exposure. The design and operation of mixing systems must also consider potential damage due to excessive strain induced by hydrodynamic shear stresses. Too much mixing can generate cell damage due to the sensitivity of certain strains to shear stress. From an operational efficiency point of view, it is also important to minimize the energy required by the mixing system. In standard HRAP, mixing is often provided by horizontal axis paddlewheels whose primary role is to drive the pond circulation. This project aims to study the full mixing process in a conventional HRAP design with a view to determining the flow conditions needed improve the productivity of the systems. A pilot experiment was built in Arava demo-site to study the fish wastewater treatment with spirulina. Numerical simulations of the fluid flow in a small (3.5m x 1.5m x 0.2 m) and a long (16.5 m x 1.5 m x 0.2 m) HRAP taking into account the paddle wheel using the immersed boundary method implemented by Specklin et al. [1]. A Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model have been used to model turbulence, a multiphase-particle-in-cell (MPPIC) method was included to capture the interaction of flow and moving boundaries with inert particles used to simulate the micro-algae. The results highlight that mixing occurs mostly in the bends and the neighbourhood of the paddlewheel. There is little mixing in the middle of the long pond. The quality of mixing with different paddlewheel geometries is also studied. The effect of the geometry (aligned and non-aligned blades) has previously been investigated by Hreiz et al. [2]. They show that by using the aligned-blades configuration the mixing is enhanced. In this study, we focussed on two different paddlewheel geometries with aligned-blades. A methodology to evaluate the vertical mixing has been developed by computing the average absolute velocity in several transversal sections all along the pond. Also, the particle light/dark cycles have been characterised by following the particle trajectories. Particles are injected in the fluid flow to determine the amount of particles that receive enough light and those that stay in the dark zones. The shear stress in all the pond has also been computed. The results show that maximum shear stress occurs in the bends, the walls and in the neighbourhood of the paddlewheel. The different configurations of paddlewheels are evaluated in terms of their ability to provide a suitable vertical mixing with a proper amount of energy and with minimum shear stress. This study was financed by the European project SaltGae [3] whose goal is to develop a viable solution to treat saline wastewater. [1] M. Specklin, R. Connolly, B. Breen and Y. Delauré, A versatile immersed boundary method for pump design, 3rd international Rotating Equipment Conference (Dusseldorf), Germany (sept. 2016). [2] R. Hreiz, B. Sialve, J. Morchain, R. Escudié, J.-P. Steyer and P. Guiraud, Experimental and numerical investigation of hydrodynamics in raceway reactors used for algaculture, Chemical Engineering Journal, 250 (2014) 230-239. [3] SaltGae, Algae to treat saline wastewater, saltage.e

A new physiological model for studying the effect of chest compression and ventilation during cardiopulmonary resuscitation: The Thiel cadaver

BACKGROUND: Studying ventilation and intrathoracic pressure (ITP) induced by chest compressions (CC) during Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation is challenging and important aspects such as airway closure have been mostly ignored. We hypothesized that Thiel Embalmed Cadavers could constitute an appropriate model. METHODS: We assessed respiratory mechanics and ITP during CC in 11 cadavers, and we compared it to measurements obtained in 9 out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients and to predicted values from a bench model. An oesophageal catheter was inserted to assess chest wall compliance, and ITP variation (ΔITP). Airway pressure variation (ΔPaw) at airway opening and ΔITP generated by CC were measured at decremental positive end expiratory pressure (PEEP) to test its impact on flow and ΔPaw. The patient\u27s data were derived from flow and airway pressure captured via the ventilator during resuscitation. RESULTS: Resistance and Compliance of the respiratory system were comparable to those of the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients (C 42 ± 12 vs C 37.3 ± 10.9 mL/cmHO and Res 17.5 ± 7.5 vs Res 20.2 ± 5.3 cmHO/L/sec), and remained stable over time. During CC, ΔITP varied from 32 ± 12 cmHO to 69 ± 14 cmHO with manual and automatic CC respectively. Transmission of ΔITP at the airway opening was significantly affected by PEEP, suggesting dynamic small airway closure at low lung volumes. This phenomenon was similarly observed in patients. CONCLUSION: Respiratory mechanics and dynamic pressures during CC of cadavers behave as predicted by a theoretical model and similarly to patients. The Thiel model is a suitable to assess ITP variations induced by ventilation during CC

Infant rhinitis and watery eyes predict school-age exercise-induced wheeze, emergency department visits and respiratory-related hospitalizations

Background: Rhinitis and conjunctivitis are often linked to asthma development through an allergic pathway. However, runny nose and watery eyes can result from nonallergic mechanisms. These mechanisms can also underlie exercise-induced wheeze (EIW), which has been associated with urgent medical visits for asthma, independent of other indicators of asthma severity or control. Objective: To test the hypothesis that rhinitis or watery eyes without cold symptoms (RWWC) in infancy predict development of EIW and urgent respiratory-related medical visits at school age, independent of seroatopy. Methods: Within a prospective birth cohort of low-income, urban children (n = 332), RWWC was queried during the first year of life. Relative risks (RRs) for EIW, emergency department (ED) visits, and hospitalizations for asthma and other breathing difficulties at 5 to 7 years of age were estimated with multivariable models. Seroatopy was determined at 7 years of age. Results: Infant RWWC was common (49% of children) and predicted school-age EIW (RR, 2.8; P < .001), ED visits (RR, 1.8; P = .001), and hospitalizations (RR, 9.8; P = .002). These associations were independent of infant wheeze. They were also independent of birth order, an indicator of increased risk of exposure to viruses in infancy, and infant ear infections, an indicator of sequelae of upper airway infections. The association between infant RWWC and ED visits at 5 to 7 years of age was attenuated (RR, 1.2; P = .23) when EIW at 5 to 7 years of age was included in the model, suggesting EIW mediates the association. Adjustment for seroatopy did not diminish the magnitudes of any of these associations. Conclusion: These findings suggest a nonallergic connection between infant nonwheeze symptoms and important consequences of urban respiratory health by school age through EI