Pregnancy outcomes in non-gynecological and non-hematological cancers: a retrospective cohort

Background: Of all the cancers in women, about 10% manifest in the reproductive age group. These can be broadly classified as gynaecological cancers and non-gynaecological cancers; Among the non-gynaecological cancers besides haematological cancer, breast, thyroid, colon, bone and CNS are seen rarely. Clinical acumen in diagnosis and management of these rare cancers that appear during pregnancy or before pregnancy are difficult due to insufficient guidelines and rarity of the conditions.Methods: A retrospective analysis of rare cancers during a period of 10 years in this hospital was performed. Data concerning the gestational age at delivery, birth weight, mode of delivery and complications and the management of the cancers during the pregnancy were collected.Results: Among the 41 women with these rare non-gynecological, non-hematological cancers, 13 pregnancies were in women with prior history of cancers and 28 pregnancies were with current history of cancer. Majority of these cases with prior history were thyroid cancers who had uneventful pregnancies and delivered normally. Among pregnancies with current history of cancer, breast, CNS, GIT, and head and neck were the cancers with 5-6 cancers in each category. About 50% of these cancers were delivered early between 31-35 weeks to facilitate optimal treatment. Cancers with guarded prognosis diagnosed before 20 weeks had a termination of pregnancy.Conclusions: Cancers during pregnancies are rare and their care must be individualized

Non-relativistic effective theory of dark matter direct detection

Dark matter direct detection searches for signals coming from dark matter scattering against nuclei at a very low recoil energy scale ~ 10 keV. In this paper, a simple non-relativistic effective theory is constructed to describe interactions between dark matter and nuclei without referring to any underlying high energy models. It contains the minimal set of operators that will be tested by direct detection. The effective theory approach highlights the set of distinguishable recoil spectra that could arise from different theoretical models. If dark matter is discovered in the near future in direct detection experiments, a measurement of the shape of the recoil spectrum will provide valuable information on the underlying dynamics. We bound the coefficients of the operators in our non-relativistic effective theory by the null results of current dark matter direct detection experiments. We also discuss the mapping between the non-relativistic effective theory and field theory models or operators, including aspects of the matching of quark and gluon operators to nuclear form factors.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures, Appendix C.3 revised, acknowledgments and references adde

Prevalence and determinants of substance use among indigenous tribes in South India: Findings from a tribal household survey

Background: Indigenous populations have higher substance use than non-indigenous populations. Current evidence on indigenous substance use is largely derived from national household surveys, while there are no specifically designed, culturally specific methodological studies available to determine the prevalence of substance abuse among the indigenous tribes. The present study examined the prevalence and predictors of alcohol use, smoking, and betel quid chewing among indigenous tribes in South India. Method: We conducted a cross-sectional population-based random survey of 2186 tribal households in the Wayanad District, Kerala. A self-prepared, pilot-tested structured interview schedule was used to collect information on sociodemographic variables and substance use. Multivariate logistic regression models were used to examine the sociodemographic predictors of substance use. Results: The overall prevalence of current alcohol use, current smoking and daily betel quid use was 17.2%, 18.8% and 47.6% respectively. Consistently, male gender (alcohol use OR = 13.55; smoking OR = 3.42; betel quid use OR = 1.65), increasing age (OR = 1.32; OR = 1.01; OR = 1.03), Paniya tribe status (OR = 2.24; OR = 1.39; OR = 5.38) and employment status being working (OR = 2.07; OR = 1.77; OR = 1.26) increased the risk of alcohol use, smoking and betel quid chewing. Furthermore, having ‘no formal education’ was associated with smoking (OR = 1.35), and betel quid chewing (OR = 3.27). Conclusion: Substance use was high among the indigenous tribes. The male gender, increasing age, Paniya tribe and working status significantly influenced alcohol use, smoking and betel quid chewing. The results underscore the need for indigenous specific de-addiction policies and programmes, alongside a consideration of the critical sociodemographic predictors

Stealth Supersymmetry

We present a broad class of supersymmetric models that preserve R-parity but lack missing energy signatures. These models have new light particles with weak-scale supersymmetric masses that feel SUSY breaking only through couplings to the MSSM. This small SUSY breaking leads to nearly degenerate fermion/boson pairs, with small mass splittings and hence small phase space for decays carrying away invisible energy. The simplest scenario has low-scale SUSY breaking, with missing energy only from soft gravitinos. This scenario is natural, lacks artificial tunings to produce a squeezed spectrum, and is consistent with gauge coupling unification. The resulting collider signals will be jet-rich events containing false resonances that could resemble signatures of R-parity violation. We discuss several concrete examples of the general idea, and emphasize gamma + jet + jet resonances, displaced vertices, and very large numbers of b-jets as three possible discovery modes.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Importance of Appropriate Medication Administration in Patients with Nasogastric Feeding Tube

Solid dosage forms like modified release and enteric coated formulations are considered inappropriate for nasogastric feeding tube (NGFT) administration due to varying pharmacokinetics which could lead to inadequate therapeutic responses or toxicity. An analysis was conducted to assess the appropriateness of prescribed medicines for NGFT administration in hospital inpatients so that physicians can be sensitized to the importance of this. In this cross-sectional study conducted in a large tertiary care centre, prescription data of in-patients with nasogastric feeding tube (NGFT) were retrieved through electronic pharmacy transactions. Adult patients who were admitted in the hospital for more than one day and were dispensed a NGFT were included. The appropriateness of medicines administered through NGFT was assessed using standard published literature. Details of medicines that were categorized as inappropriate were collated and analysed. In case of inappropriate prescribing, availability of appropriate dosage forms was also determined. A total of 510 patients were found eligible for analyses. Majority of the patients were dispensed at least one inappropriate dosage form. Among the dispensed oral solid dosage forms, 16.38% were found to be inappropriate for NGFT administration. Of these, 21.41% were dispensed on same day as the NGFT, 34.67% were dispensed before the NGFT and were continued throughout the hospital stay and 43.92% were dispensed within or after 24 hours of NGFT dispensation. These findings will improve awareness among healthcare professionals about the need for appropriate administration of oral formulations in patients intubated with NGFT. Keywords: Inappropriate Dosage Forms, Nasogastric Feeding Tube, Appropriate Dosage Forms, Modified Release Formulation

Effective AdS/renormalized CFT

For an effective AdS theory, we present a simple prescription to compute the renormalization of its dual boundary field theory. In particular, we define anomalous dimension holographically as the dependence of the wave-function renormalization factor on the radial cutoff in the Poincare patch of AdS. With this definition, the anomalous dimensions of both single- and double- trace operators are calculated. Three different dualities are considered with the field theory being CFT, CFT with a double-trace deformation and spontaneously broken CFT. For the second dual pair, we compute scaling corrections at the UV and IR fixed points of the RG flow triggered by the double-trace deformation. For the last case, we discuss whether our prescription is sensitive to the AdS interior or equivalently, the IR physics of the dual field theory.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

2:1 for Naturalness at the LHC?

A large enhancement of a factor of 1.5 - 2 in Higgs production and decay in the diphoton channel, with little deviation in the ZZ channel, can only plausibly arise from a loop of new charged particles with large couplings to the Higgs. We show that, allowing only new fermions with marginal interactions at the weak scale, the required Yukawa couplings for a factor of 2 enhancement are so large that the Higgs quartic coupling is pushed to large negative values in the UV, triggering an unacceptable vacuum instability far beneath the 10 TeV scale. An enhancement by a factor of 1.5 can be accommodated if the charged fermions are lighter than 150 GeV, within reach of discovery in almost all cases in the 8 TeV run at the LHC, and in even the most difficult cases at 14 TeV. Thus if the diphoton enhancement survives further scrutiny, and no charged fermions beneath 150 GeV are found, there must be new bosons far beneath the 10 TeV scale. This would unambiguously rule out a large class of fine-tuned theories for physics beyond the Standard Model, including split SUSY and many of its variants, and provide strong circumstantial evidence for a natural theory of electroweak symmetry breaking at the TeV scale. Alternately, theories with only a single fine-tuned Higgs and new fermions at the weak scale, with no additional scalars or gauge bosons up to a cutoff much larger than the 10 TeV scale, unambiguously predict that the hints for a large diphoton enhancement in the current data will disappear.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures; typos corrected and references adde