Practice Issues for Evaluation and Management of the Suicidal Left Ventricular Assist Device Patient

There is a high prevalence of depression among left ventricular assist device patients, who present with an increased risk of suicidality given access to means via the device either with nonadherence or disconnection. Suicidality via device nonadherence/disconnection is an underresearched clinical issue, as paradoxically this life-saving procedure can also provide a method of lethal means to patients with significant mental health concerns. A case study is used to highlight the course of an attempted suicide by ventricular assistive device nonadherence. Clinical implications and recommendations for practice include a thorough psychological evaluation presurgery, monitoring quality of life and coping styles before and after placement, psychological testing, outlining specific suicide protocols, psychiatric care considerations for patients with highly specialized medical devices, and related ethical concerns

Dyons of One Half Monopole Charge

We would like to present some exact SU(2) Yang-Mills-Higgs dyon solutions of one half monopole charge. These static dyon solutions satisfy the first order Bogomol'nyi equations and are characterized by a parameter, $m$. They are axially symmetric. The gauge potentials and the electromagnetic fields possess a string singularity along the negative z-axis and hence they possess infinite energy density along the line singularity. However the net electric charges of these dyons which varies with the parameter $m$ are finite.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Static Monopoles and Their Anti-Configurations

Recently, we have reported on the existence of some monopoles, multimonopole, and antimonopoles configurations. In this paper we would like to present more monopoles, multimonopole, and antimonopoles configurations of the magnetic ansatz of Ref.\cite{kn:9} when the parameters $p$ and $b$ of the solutions takes different serial values. These exact solutions are a different kind of BPS solution. They satisfy the first order Bogomol'nyi equation but possess infinite energy. They can have radial, axial, or rotational symmetry about the z-axis. We classified these serial solutions as (i) the multimonopole at the origin; (ii) the finitely separated 1-monopoles; (iii) the screening solutions of multimonopole and (iv) the axially symmetric monopole solutions. We also give a construction of their anti-configurations with all the magnetic charges of poles in the configurations reversed. Half-integer topological magnetic charge multimonopole also exist in some of these series of solutions.Comment: 20 pages with 4 figure

Identification of Shigella flexneri IcsA residues affecting interaction with N-WASP, and evidence for IcsA-IcsA co-operative interaction

The Shigella flexneri IcsA (VirG) protein is a polarly distributed outer membrane protein that is a fundamental virulence factor which interacts with neural Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome protein (N-WASP). The activated N-WASP then activates the Arp2/3 complex which initiates de novo actin nucleation and polymerisation to form F-actin comet tails and allows bacterial cell-to-cell spreading. In a previous study, IcsA was found to have three N-WASP interacting regions (IRs): IR I (aa 185–312), IR II (aa 330–382) and IR III (aa 508–730). The aim of this study was to more clearly define N-WASP interacting regions II and III by site-directed mutagenesis of specific amino acids. Mutant IcsA proteins were expressed in both smooth lipopolysaccharide (S-LPS) and rough LPS (R-LPS) S. flexneri strains and characterised for IcsA production level, N-WASP recruitment and F-actin comet tail formation. We have successfully identified new amino acids involved in N-WASP recruitment within different N-WASP interacting regions, and report for the first time using co-expression of mutant IcsA proteins, that N-WASP activation involves interactions with different regions on different IcsA molecules as shown by Arp3 recruitment. In addition, our findings suggest that autochaperone (AC) mutant protein production was not rescued by another AC region provided in trans, differing to that reported for two other autotransporters, PrtS and BrkA autotransporters