46 research outputs found
The safety of paediatric surgery between COVID-19 surges:an observational study
Despite the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, elective paediatric surgery must continue safely through the first, second and subsequent waves of disease. This study presents outcome data from a children's hospital in north-west England, the region with the highest prevalence of COVID-19 in England. Children and young people undergoing elective surgery isolated within their household for 14 days, then presented for real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus disease-2 (SARS-CoV-2) within 72 h of their procedure (or rapid testing within 24 h in high-risk cases), and completed a screening questionnaire on admission. Planned surgery resumed on 26 May 2020; in the four subsequent weeks, there were 197 patients for emergency and 501 for elective procedures. A total of 488 out of 501 (97.4%) elective admissions proceeded, representing a 2.6% COVID-19-related cancellation rate. There was no difference in the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 among children and young people who had or had not isolated for 14 days (p > 0.99). One out of 685 (0.1%) children who had surgery re-presented to the hospital with symptoms potentially consistent with SARS-CoV-2 within 14 days of surgery. Outcomes were similar to those in the same time period in 2019 for length of stay (p = 1.0); unplanned critical care admissions (p = 0.59); and 14-day hospital re-admission (p = 0.17). However, the current cohort were younger (p = 0.037); of increased complexity (
D-branes in Nongeometric Backgrounds
"T-fold" backgrounds are generically-nongeometric compactifications of string
theory, described by T^n fibrations over a base N with transition functions in
the perturbative T-duality group. We review Hull's doubled torus formalism,
which geometrizes these backgrounds, and use the formalism to constrain the
D-brane spectrum (to leading order in g_s and alpha') on T^n fibrations over
S^1 with O(n,n;Z) monodromy. We also discuss the (approximate) moduli space of
such branes and argue that it is always geometric. For a D-brane located at a
point on the base N, the classical ``D-geometry'' is a T^n fibration over a
multiple cover of N.Comment: 29 pages; uses harvmac.tex; v2: substantial revision throughou
On the Application of the Non Linear Sigma Model to Spin Chains and Spin Ladders
We review the non linear sigma model approach (NLSM) to spin chains and spin
ladders, presenting new results. The generalization of the Haldane's map to
ladders in the Hamiltonian approach, give rise to different values of the
parameter depending on the spin S, the number of legs and
the choice of blocks needed to built up the NLSM fields. For rectangular blocks
we obtain or depending on wether , is even or
odd, while for diagonal blocks we obtain . Both
results agree modulo , and yield the same prediction, namely that even (
resp. odd) ladders are gapped (resp. gapless). For even legged ladders we show
that the spin gap collapses exponentially with and we propose a
finite size correction to the gap formula recently derived by Chakravarty using
the 2+1 NSLM, which gives a good fit of numerical results. We show the
existence of a Haldane phase in the two legged ladder using diagonal blocks and
finally we consider the phase diagram of dimerized ladders.Comment: 25 pages, Latex, 7 figures in postscript files, Proc. of the 1996 El
Escorial Summer School on "Strongly Correlated Magnetic and Superconducting
Systems". Some more references are adde
Magnetization and dimerization profiles of the cut two-leg spin ladder and spin-1 chain
The physical properties of the edge states of the cut two-leg spin ladder are
investigated by means of the bosonization approach. By carefully treating
boundary conditions, we derive the existence of spin-1/2 edge states in the
spin ladder with a ferromagnetic rung exchange and for the open spin-1
Heisenberg chain. In contrast, such states are absent in the antiferromagnetic
rung coupling case. The approach, based on a mapping onto decoupled
semi-infinite off-critical Ising models, allows us to compute several physical
quantities of interest. In particular, we determine the magnetization and
dimerization profiles of the cut two-leg spin ladder and of the open
biquadratic spin-1 chain in the vicinity of the SU(2) WZNW critical point.Comment: RevTeX 4, no figure, 26 page
Identification of common genetic risk variants for autism spectrum disorder
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly heritable and heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental phenotypes diagnosed in more than 1% of children. Common genetic variants contribute substantially to ASD susceptibility, but to date no individual variants have been robustly associated with ASD. With a marked sample-size increase from a unique Danish population resource, we report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 18,381 individuals with ASD and 27,969 controls that identified five genome-wide-significant loci. Leveraging GWAS results from three phenotypes with significantly overlapping genetic architectures (schizophrenia, major depression, and educational attainment), we identified seven additional loci shared with other traits at equally strict significance levels. Dissecting the polygenic architecture, we found both quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes. These results highlight biological insights, particularly relating to neuronal function and corticogenesis, and establish that GWAS performed at scale will be much more productive in the near term in ASD.Peer reviewe
Splenic B cell lymphoma with lymphocyte clusters in peripheral blood smears
EDTA induced clumping of lymphoid cells, both benign and malignant, in peripheral blood samples has been reported only rarely. Such clustering presents the laboratory and pathologist with unique difficulties in the accurate diagnosis of these disorders. A case of low grade B cell splenic lymphoma is presented with lymphocyte clumping in smears made from EDTA anticoagulated peripheral blood, the fourth case described in which neoplastic lymphoid cells form clusters in vitro in peripheral blood. The association with splenic lymphomas (three of the four cases) is intriguing but its significance remains uncertain. Key Words: EDTA • leucoagglutination • lymphocytes • lymphom