1,660 research outputs found
Clinical presentation, echocardiographic findings, treatment strategies, and prognosis of dogs with myxomatous mitral valve disease presented with pericardial effusion due to suspected left atrial tear: a retrospective case-control study
Introduction/objectives: Left atrial tear (LAT) is a life-threatening complication in dogs with myxomatous mitral valve disease (MMVD). The study objective was to describe clinical presentation, echocardiographic findings, treatment strategies, and survival in dogs with LAT compared to a control group of dogs with a similar stage of MMVD but no LAT. ANIMALS AND MATERIALS AND METHODS: two-center retrospective case-controlled study including 15 dogs with and 15 dogs without LAT was conducted. Clinical and echocardiographic data were reviewed, and survival information were collected. Results: Nine dogs in each group were in stage C of MMVD, while the remaining were in stage B2. No differences between groups were found regarding age, body weight, sex, kidney values, and echocardiography-derived cardiac dimensions. Most reported clinical signs associated with LAT included weakness, respiratory signs, and syncope. Treatment varied and was mainly focused on the management of congestive heart failure. Three dogs with LAT received a pericardiocentesis. All 15 dogs with LAT had died of cardiac causes, 5 dogs during the first 7 days after admission. The median survival time for all 15 dogs with LAT was 52 days compared to 336 days in the control group (P=0.103). When excluding 5 dogs with LAT that died during the first 7 days, the median survival increased to 407 days, not different compared to the control group (P=0.549). Conclusions: Dogs with MMVD and LAT have a high short-term mortality; however, when surviving the acute phase, the long-term prognosis may not differ from dogs with a similarly advanced degree of MMVD but without LAT
Can we detect Hot or Cold spots in the CMB with Minkowski Functionals?
In this paper, we investigate the utility of Minkowski Functionals as a probe
of cold/hot disk-like structures in the CMB. In order to construct an accurate
estimator, we resolve a long-standing issue with the use of Minkowski
Functionals as probes of the CMB sky -- namely that of systematic differences
("residuals") when numerical and analytical MF are compared. We show that such
residuals are in fact by-products of binning, and not caused by pixelation or
masking as originally thought. We then derive a map-independent estimator that
encodes the effects of binning, applicable to beyond our present work. Using
this residual-free estimator, we show that small disk-like effects (as claimed
by Vielva et al.) can be detected only when a large sample of such maps are
averaged over. In other words, our estimator is noise-dominated for small disk
sizes at WMAP resolution. To confirm our suspicion, we apply our estimator to
the WMAP7 data to obtain a null result.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figure
Coronary disease is not associated with robust alterations in inflammatory gene expression in human epicardial fat
Epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) is the visceral fat depot of the heart. Inflammation of EAT is thought to contribute to coronary artery disease (CAD). Therefore, we hypothesized that the EAT of patients with CAD would have increased inflammatory gene expression compared with controls without CAD. Cardiac surgery patients with (n = 13) or without CAD (n = 13) were consented, and samples of EAT and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) were obtained. Transcriptomic analysis was performed using Affymetrix Human Gene 1.0 ST arrays. Differential expression was defined as a 1.5-fold change (ANOVA P \u3c 0.05). Six hundred ninety-three genes were differentially expressed between SAT and EAT in controls and 805 in cases. Expression of 326 genes was different between EAT of cases and controls; expression of 14 genes was increased in cases, while 312 were increased in controls. Quantitative reverse transcription PCR confirmed that there was no difference in expression of CCL2, CCR2, TNF-alpha, IL-6, IL-8, and PAI1 between groups. Immunohistochemistry showed more macrophages in EAT than SAT, but there was no difference in their number or activation state between groups. In contrast to prior studies, we did not find increased inflammatory gene expression in the EAT of patients with CAD. We conclude that the specific adipose tissue depot, rather than CAD status, is responsible for the majority of differential gene expression
Entanglement Entropy for Singular Surfaces
We study entanglement entropy for regions with a singular boundary in higher
dimensions using the AdS/CFT correspondence and find that various singularities
make new universal contributions. When the boundary CFT has an even spacetime
dimension, we find that the entanglement entropy of a conical surface contains
a term quadratic in the logarithm of the UV cut-off. In four dimensions, the
coefficient of this contribution is proportional to the central charge 'c'. A
conical singularity in an odd number of spacetime dimensions contributes a term
proportional to the logarithm of the UV cut-off. We also study the entanglement
entropy for various boundary surfaces with extended singularities. In these
cases, similar universal terms may appear depending on the dimension and
curvature of the singular locus.Comment: 66 pages,4 figures. Some typos are removed and a reference is adde
MAP4K4 impairs energy metabolism in endothelial cells and promotes insulin resistance in obesity
The blood vasculature responds to insulin, influencing hemodynamic changes in the periphery, which promotes tissue nutrient and oxygen delivery and thus metabolic function. The lymphatic vasculature regulates fluid and lipid homeostasis, and impaired lymphatic function can contribute to atherosclerosis and obesity. Recent studies have suggested a role for endothelial cell (EC) Mitogen activated protein kinase kinase kinase kinase 4 (Map4k4) in developmental angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis as well as atherosclerosis. Here, we show that inducible EC Map4k4 deletion in adult mice ameliorates metabolic dysfunction in obesity despite the development of chylous ascites and a concomitant striking increase in adipose tissue lymphocyte content. Despite these defects, animals lacking endothelial Map4k4 were protected from skeletal muscle microvascular rarefaction in obesity, and primary ECs lacking Map4k4 displayed reduced senescence and increased metabolic capacity. Thus, endothelial Map4k4 has complex and opposing functions in the blood and lymphatic endothelium post-development. Whereas blood endothelial Map4k4 promotes vascular dysfunction and impairs glucose homeostasis in adult animals, lymphatic endothelial Map4k4 is required to maintain lymphatic vascular integrity and regulate immune cell trafficking in obesity
EPA-ng: Massively Parallel Evolutionary Placement of Genetic Sequences
Next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have led to a ubiquity of molecular sequence data. This data avalanche is particularly challenging in metagenetics, which focuses on taxonomic identification of sequences obtained from diverse microbial environments. Phylogenetic placement methods determine how these sequences fit into an evolutionary context. Previous implementations of phylogenetic placement algorithms, such as the evolutionary placement algorithm (EPA) included in RAxML, or PPLACER, are being increasingly used for this purpose. However, due to the steady progress in NGS technologies, the current implementations face substantial scalability limitations. Herein, we present EPA-NG, a complete reimplementation of the EPA that is substantially faster, offers a distributed memory parallelization, and integrates concepts from both, RAxML-EPA and PPLACER. EPA-NG can be executed on standard shared memory, as well as on distributed memory systems (e.g., computing clusters). To demonstrate the scalability of EPA-NG, we placed 1 billion metagenetic reads from the Tara Oceans Project onto a reference tree with 3748 taxa in just under 7 h, using 2048 cores. Our performance assessment shows that EPA-NG outperforms RAxML-EPA and PPLACER by up to a factor of 30 in sequential execution mode, while attaining comparable parallel efficiency on shared memory systems. We further show that the distributed memory parallelization of EPA-NG scales well up to 2048 cores. EPA-NG is available under the AGPLv3 license
Tracing a phase transition with fluctuations of the largest fragment size: Statistical multifragmentation models and the ALADIN S254 data
A phase transition signature associated with cumulants of the largest
fragment size distribution has been identified in statistical
multifragmentation models and examined in analysis of the ALADIN S254 data on
fragmentation of neutron-poor and neutron-rich projectiles. Characteristics of
the transition point indicated by this signature are weakly dependent on the
A/Z ratio of the fragmenting spectator source. In particular, chemical
freeze-out temperatures are estimated within the range 5.9 to 6.5 MeV. The
experimental results are well reproduced by the SMM model.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of the International Workshop on
Multifragmentation and Related Topics (IWM2009), Catania, Italy, November
2009
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