Remark on a Browder's fixed point theorem

Abstract

Bibliography

Abstract

NEW SCREENING TESTS IN EARLY PREGANCY: DIAGNOSIS AND PREVENTION

Distinction between fetal growth restriction and small for gestational age newborn weight enhances the prognostic value of low PAPP-A in the first trimester. Conserva V, Signaroldi M, Mastroianni C, Stampalija T, Ghisoni L, Ferrazzi E. Prenat Diagn. 2010 Oct;30(10):1007-9 Objective Low levels of PAPP-A in maternal blood may become an early marker of obstetrical complications. The aim of this article was to sort out those outcomes consistently related to an abnormal placental vascular function and to evaluate their association with low levels of maternal serum PAPP-A in early pregnancy Methods We analyzed retrospectively a database of the first trimester combined screening of an Italian biotech company and investigated the correlation between PAPP-A value < 5th percentile, 0.40 multiples of the median (MoM), and infants with birthweight below the 10th percentile for gestational age (small for gestational age SGA), preterm delivery, GH and PE not associated with intra-uterine growth restriction (IUGR), IUGR isolated with an abnormal umbilical PI or associated with maternal GH-PE, placental abruption and intra-uterine fetal demise (IUFD) after 22 weeks of gestation. Results 1687 patients were analyzed. Overall pregnancy complications were observed in 31.4% of women with low PAPP-A and in 21.1% women with a PAPP-A value >0.4 MoM (P < 0.0001). Severe and early fetal growth restriction (<34 weeks) with abnormal umbilical PI or maternal PE, was significantly associated with low levels of PAPP-A (OR= 10, 95% CI 1.0\u201397, P = 0.02). No relationship was observed between SGA newborns and low PAPP-A. Weak association was observed in with GH and PE not associated with fetal growth restriction (OR = 1.9, 95% CI 1.1\u20133, P = 0.01). We also observed a correlation between low PAPP-A and preterm delivery (OR = 1.8, 95% CI 1.1\u20132,9, P = 0.01). Because of the small number of cases, the OR for placental abruption and IUFD were not calculated Conclusions. Low values of PAPP-A are associated with abnormal obstetrical outcome. Evaluating separately growth-restricted fetuses and small for gestational age fetuses we observe that only growth-restricted fetuses are significantly associated with low values of PAPP-A, whereas SGA newborns, simply defined by their percentile rank, are not predicted by this test in the first trimester of pregnancy. \u2003 Recurrence and severity of abnormal pregnancy outcome in patients treated by low-molecular-weight-heparin: a prospective pilot study. Conserva V, Muggiasca M, Arrigoni L, Mantegazza V, Edoardo Rossi E, Ferrazzi E J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med. 2011 Nov 29 Objective This prospective pilot study assesses the recurrence rate and severity of abnormal pregnancy outcome (APO), excluding early pregnancy complications, in pregnant patients, without acquired thrombophilia, treated by prophylactic doses of LMWH, independently from their congenital thrombophilic condition. Methods We recruited a cohort of 128 pregnant patients with previous APO; 100 of whom with APO and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR), and 28 with maternal APO only. LMWH treatment was started at recruitment. Composite cross over recurrence rate IUGR, gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, HELLP, abruptio was analyzed. The main outcome measure was severe APOs with iatrogenic delivery 64 32 weeks of gestation. Results Median gestational age at LMWH treatment was 20 weeks. Severe APO decreased in treated pregnancies from 45% to 4% (R.R.=0.3, CI .95=0.2-0.8). This value was not significantly different in thrombophilic and non thrombophilic patients. When severe and minor complications were analyzed altogether the recurrence rate was 28%. In patients with APO and FGR in the index pregnancy, newborn weights were significantly better in the treated pregnancy: 1090g (1035-1145) vs. 850g (535-1200), P<0,01) Conclusions. Prophylactic regimen of LMWH significantly reduced the recurrence rate of severe composite APO in pregnancies affected in the index pregnancy by APO and fetal growth restriction or SGA newborns. This result was independent from the patients\u2019 inherited thrombophilic conditions.\u200

A novel mutation in calcium-sensing receptor gene associated to hypercalcemia and hypercalciuria.

Background: Familial Hyperparathyroidism (HPT) and Familial benign Hypocalciuric Hypercalcemia (FHH) are the most common causes of hereditary hypercalcemia. FHH has been demonstrated to be caused by inactivating mutations of calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) gene, involved in PTH regulation as well as in renal calcium excretion.Case presentation: In two individuals, father and son, we found a novel heterozygous mutation in CaSR gene. The hypercalcemia was present only in father, which, by contrast to the classic form of FHH showed hypercalciuria (from 300 to 600 mg/24 h in different evaluations) and a Calcium/Creatinine ratio of 0.031, instead of low or normal calciuria (<0.01 typical finding in FHH). His son showed the same mutation in CaSR gene, but no clinical signs or hypercalcemia although serum ionized calcium levels were close to the upper limit of normal values (1.30 mmol/L: normal range: 1.12-1.31 mmol/L). Sequence analysis revealed a point mutation at codon 972 of CaSR gene (chromosome 3q), located within cytoplasmic domain of the CaSR, that changes Threonine with Methionine. The father was treated with Cinacalcet 90 mg/day, with a decrease of total serum calcemia from an average value of 12.2 mg/dl to 10.9 mg/dl.Conclusion: This is a case of a novel inactivating point mutation of CaSR gene that determines an atypical clinical presentation of FHH, characterized by hypercalcemia, hypercalciuria and inadequate normal PTH levels. Functional assay demonstrated that the 972 M variant influenced the maturation of the protein, in terms of the post-translational glycosylation. The impairment of the receptor activity is in keeping with the specific localization of the 972 residue in the C-terminal tail, assigned to the intracellular signalling, that on the basis of the our findings appears to be differently modulated in parathyroid gland and in kidne

ReverCSP: Time-Travelling in CSP Computations

[EN] This paper presents reverCSP, a tool to animate both forward and backward CSP computations. This ability to reverse computations can be done step by step or backtracking to a given desired state of interest. reverCSP allows us to reverse computations exactly in the same order in which they happened, or also in a causally-consistent way. Therefore, reverCSP is a tool that can be especially useful to comprehend, analyze, and debug computations. reverCSP is an open-source project publicly available for the community. We describe the tool and its functionality, and we provide implementation details so that it can be reimplemented for other languages.This work has been partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish MCI/AEI under grants TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R and PID2019- 104735RB-C41, and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2019/098 (DeepTrust).Galindo-Jiménez, CS.; Nishida, N.; Silva, J.; Tamarit, S. (2020). ReverCSP: Time-Travelling in CSP Computations. Springer. 239-245. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52482-1_14S239245Bernadet, A., Lanese, I.: A modular formalization of reversibility for concurrent models and languages. In: Proceedings of ICE 2016, EPTCS (2016)Brown, G., Sabry, A.: Reversible communicating processes. Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci. 203, 45–59 (2016)Conserva Filhoa, M., Oliveira, M., Sampaio, A., Cavalcanti, A.: Compositional and local livelock analysis for CSP. Inf. Process. Lett 133, 21–25 (2018)Danos, V., Krivine, J.: Reversible communicating systems. In: Gardner, P., Yoshida, N. (eds.) CONCUR 2004. LNCS, vol. 3170, pp. 292–307. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28644-8_19Elnozahy, E.N.M., Alvisi, L., Wang, Y.-M., Johnson, D.B.: A survey of rollback- recovery protocols in message-passing systems. ACM Comput. Surv. 34(3), 375–408 (2002)Fang, Y., Zhu, H., Zeyda, F., Fei, Y.: Modeling and analysis of the disruptor framework in csp. In: Proceedings of CCWC 2018. IEEE Computer Society (2018)Ladkin, P.B., Simons, B.B.: Static deadlock analysis for CSP-type communications. In: Fussell, D.S., Malek, M. (eds.) Responsive Computer Systems: Steps Toward Fault-Tolerant Real-Time Systems. The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol. 297, pp. 89–102. Springer, Boston (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2271-3_5Landauer, R.: Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process. IBM J. Res. Dev. 5, 183–191 (1961)Lanese, I., Antares Mezzina, C., Tiezzi, F.: Causal-consistent reversibility. Bull. EATCS 114, 17 (2014)Lanese, I., Nishida, N., Palacios, A., Vidal, G.: CauDEr: a causal-consistent reversible debugger for erlang. In: Gallagher, J.P., Sulzmann, M. (eds.) FLOPS 2018. LNCS, vol. 10818, pp. 247–263. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_16Lanese, I., Palacios, A., Vidal, G.: Causal-consistent replay debugging for message passing programs. In: Pérez, J.A., Yoshida, N. (eds.) FORTE 2019. LNCS, vol. 11535, pp. 167–184. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21759-4_10Llorens, M., Oliver, J., Silva, J., Tamarit, S.: Dynamic slicing of concurrent specification languages. Parallel Comput. 53, 1–22 (2016)Llorens, M., Oliver, J., Silva, J., Tamarit, S.: Tracking CSP computations. J. Log. Algebr. Meth. Program. 102, 138–175 (2019)Perera, R., Garg, D., Cheney, J.: Causally consistent dynamic slicing. In Proceedings of CONCUR 2016, LIPIcs, vol. 59, pp. 18:1–18:15 (2016)Phillips, I., Ulidowski, I., Yuen, S.: A reversible process calculus and the modelling of the ERK signalling pathway. In: Glück, R., Yokoyama, T. (eds.) RC 2012. LNCS, vol. 7581, pp. 218–232. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36315-3_18Roscoe, A.W.: The Theory and Practice of Concurrency. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River (1997)Zhao, H., Zhu, H., Yucheng, F., Xiao, L.: Modeling and verifying storm using CSP. In: Proceedings of HASE 2019. IEEE Computer Society (2019

Measurement of the angular correlation between the two gamma rays emitted in the radioactive decays of a 60^{60}Co source with two NaI(Tl) scintillator

We implemented a didactic experiment to study the angular correlation between the two gamma rays emitted in typical $^{60}$Co radioactive decays. We used two NaI(Tl) scintillators, already available in our laboratory, and a low-activity $^{60}$Co source. The detectors were mounted on two rails, with the source at their center. The first rail was fixed, while the second could be rotated around the source. We performed several measurements by changing the angle between the two scintillators in the range from $90^\circ$ to $180^\circ$. Dedicated background runs were also performed, removing the source from the experimental setup. We found that the signal rate increases with the angular separation between the two scintillators, with small discrepancies from the theoretical expectations.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure

Remark on a Browder's fixed point theorem

Abstract

Introduzione

EnIn a recent paper, F.E. Browder discussed continuous self-mappings of contractive type in a complete metric space. Browder showed that such mappings have a fixed point and the seguence of iterates of any point,in an invariant subset,converges to the fixed point.In the present paper,the result of Browder is obtained for mappings which are not necessarily continuous

Introduzione

EnIn a recent paper, F.E. Browder discussed continuous self-mappings of contractive type in a complete metric space. Browder showed that such mappings have a fixed point and the seguence of iterates of any point,in an invariant subset,converges to the fixed point.In the present paper,the result of Browder is obtained for mappings which are not necessarily continuous