249 research outputs found
Do High Thirst Distress Scores in Heart Failure and Patients with Fluid Restrictions Correlate to a Weight Gain Over a Four Week Period? A Single Cohort Study
Heart Failure (HF), a debilitating disease, affects 5.7 million people in the United States and there are an additional 600,000 cases each year (Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 2016). Evidence based practice suggests that keeping these patients on a strict fluid restriction can help lessen the symptoms associated with Heart Failure (Albert, 2012). Along with having a fluid restriction often comes an increase in the thirst reported by the patients. In the literature reviewed, there has been very little research on whether a thirst scale has been made or used for patients in heart failure. Research proves that the Thirst Distress Scale (TDS), by Welch, accurately measures thirst distress in hemodialysis patients, who like heart failure patients, are also on fluid restrictions (Welch, 2002). The purpose of this study is to utilize the TDS as a clinical measure in the treatment of Heart Failure patients. By tracking patients scores on the TDS and measuring their body weight in kilograms over a four-week period, the researchers will attempt to determine if there is a correlation between elevated thirst distress scores and weight gain in heart failure patients. This research, in conjunction with the use of the TDS scale, would assist patients and medical staff in identifying, treating and managing thirst distress in heart failure patients
Alternative Crops for Ethanol Fuel Production: Agronomic, Processing, and Economic Considerations
This report is a result of the fuel alcohol research team\u27s broadened focus during 1983. A comprehensive literature review was carried out to explore alternative starch and sugar crop alternatives for ethanol fuel production. Although the literature search was quite inclusive with respect to geographic regions, special emphasis was given to the agronomic and economic potential of various fuel alcohol crops in the Northern Plains region of the U.S., of which South Dakota is a part, and in LDCs of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Our intent was to thereby determine possible energy crops deserving of more fuel alcohol research attention in the Northern Plains and also provide a document of use to ourselves and others considering various crops for fuel alcohol production in LDCs. Development assistance agencies, and universities such as SDSU which work with them, must be able to assess the energy producing potential of agricultural economies, along with food and fiber producing potentials. One kind of energy production that may be technically and economically feasible in some LDCs is fuel alcohol production from starch and sugar crops. (In this report, the terms alcohol and ethanol are used interchangeably.
Extended Tailing of Bacteria Following Breakthrough at the Narrow Channel Focus Area, Oyster, Virginia
Extended tailing of low bacterial concentrations following breakthrough at the Narrow Channel focus area was observed for 4 months. Bacterial attachment and detachment kinetics associated with breakthrough and extended tailing were determined by fitting a one-dimensional transport model to the field breakthrough-tailing data. Spatial variations in attachment rate coefficient (k(f)) were observed under forced gradient conditions (i.e., k(f) decreased as travel, distance increased), possibly because of decreased bacterial adhesion with increased transport distance. When pore water velocity decreased by an order of magnitude at 9 days following injection, apparent bacterial attachment rate coefficients did not decrease with velocity as expected from filtration theory, but, instead, increased greatly for most of the wells. The coincidence of the increase in apparent attachment rate coefficient with the occurrence of protist blooms suggested-that the loss of bacteria from the aqueous phase during the protist blooms was not governed by filtration but rather was governed by predation. Simulations were performed to examine the transport distances achieved with and without detachment, using attachment and detachment rate coefficients similar to those obtained in this field study. Simulations that included detachment showed that transport distances of bacteria may significantly increase because of detachment under the conditions examined
Oral antiplatelet therapy in diabetes mellitus and the role of prasugrel: an overview
Diabetics have a prothrombotic state that includes increased platelet reactivity. This contributes to the less favorable clinical outcomes observed in diabetics experiencing acute coronary syndromes as well as stable coronary artery disease. Many diabetics are relatively resistant to or have insufficient response to several antithrombotic agents. In the setting of percutaneous coronary intervention, hyporesponsiveness to clopidogrel is particularly common among diabetics. Several strategies have been examined to further enhance the benefits of oral antiplatelet therapy in diabetics. These include increasing the dose of clopidogrel, triple antiplatelet therapy with cilostazol, and new agents such as prasugrel. The large TRITON TIMI 38 randomized trial compared clopidogrel to prasugrel in the setting of percutaneous coronary intervention for acute coronary syndromes. The diabetic subgroup (n = 3146) experienced considerable incremental benefit with a 4.8% reduction in cardiovascular death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, and nonfatal stroke at 15-month follow-up with prasugrel treatment. Among diabetics on insulin this combined endpoint was reduced by 7.9% at 15 months. Major bleeding was not increased in the diabetic subgroup. This confirms the general hypothesis that more potent oral antiplatelet therapy can partially overcome the prothrombotic milieu and safely improve important clinical outcomes in diabetics
Conceptual Design of Beryllium Target for the KLF Project
The Kaon Production Target (KPT) is an important component of the proposed
K-Long facility which will be operated in JLab Hall~D, targeting strange baryon
and meson spectroscopy. In this note we present a conceptual design for the
Be-target assembly for the planned K-Long beam line, which will be used along
with the GlueX spectrometer in its standard configuration for the proposed
experiments. The high quality 12-GeV CEBAF electron beam enables production of
a K flux at the GlueX target on the order of , which
exceeds the K flux previously attained at SLAC by three orders of
magnitude. An intense K beam would open a new window of opportunity not
only to locate "missing resonances" in the strange hadron spectrum, but also to
establish their properties by studying different decay channels systematically.
The most important and radiation damaging background in K production is due
to neutrons. The Monte Carlo simulations for the proposed conceptual design of
KPT show that the resulting neutron and gamma flux lead to a prompt radiation
dose rate for the KLF experiment that is below the JLab Radiation Control
Department radiation dose rate limits in the experimental hall and at the site
boundary, and will not substantially affect the performance of the
spectrometer.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
Retrieval of the Complete Coding Sequence of the UK-Endemic Tatenale Orthohantavirus Reveals Extensive Strain Variation and Supports Its Classification as a Novel Species
©2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Orthohantaviruses are globally distributed viruses, associated with rodents and other small mammals. However, data on the circulation of orthohantaviruses within the UK, particularly the UK-endemic Tatenale virus, is sparse. In this study, 531 animals from five rodent species were collected from two locations in northern and central England and screened using a degenerate, pan- orthohantavirus RT-PCR assay. Tatenale virus was detected in a single field vole (Microtus agrestis) from central England and twelve field voles from northern England. Unbiased high-throughput sequencing of the central English strain resulted in the recovery of the complete coding sequence of a novel strain of Tatenale virus, whilst PCR-primer walking of the northern English strain recovered almost complete coding sequence of a previously identified strain. These findings represented the detection of a third lineage of Tatenale virus in the United Kingdom and extended the known geographic distribution of these viruses from northern to central England. Furthermore, the recovery of the complete coding sequence revealed that Tatenale virus was sufficiently related to the recently identified Traemersee virus, to meet the accepted criteria for classification as a single species of orthohantavirus
Software systems for operation, control, and monitoring of the EBEX instrument
We present the hardware and software systems implementing autonomous
operation, distributed real-time monitoring, and control for the EBEX
instrument. EBEX is a NASA-funded balloon-borne microwave polarimeter designed
for a 14 day Antarctic flight that circumnavigates the pole. To meet its
science goals the EBEX instrument autonomously executes several tasks in
parallel: it collects attitude data and maintains pointing control in order to
adhere to an observing schedule; tunes and operates up to 1920 TES bolometers
and 120 SQUID amplifiers controlled by as many as 30 embedded computers;
coordinates and dispatches jobs across an onboard computer network to manage
this detector readout system; logs over 3~GiB/hour of science and housekeeping
data to an onboard disk storage array; responds to a variety of commands and
exogenous events; and downlinks multiple heterogeneous data streams
representing a selected subset of the total logged data. Most of the systems
implementing these functions have been tested during a recent engineering
flight of the payload, and have proven to meet the target requirements. The
EBEX ground segment couples uplink and downlink hardware to a client-server
software stack, enabling real-time monitoring and command responsibility to be
distributed across the public internet or other standard computer networks.
Using the emerging dirfile standard as a uniform intermediate data format, a
variety of front end programs provide access to different components and views
of the downlinked data products. This distributed architecture was demonstrated
operating across multiple widely dispersed sites prior to and during the EBEX
engineering flight.Comment: 11 pages, to appear in Proceedings of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes
and Instrumentation 2010; adjusted metadata for arXiv submissio
Tensor classification of structure in smoothed particle hydrodynamics density fields
DF, IB and WL gratefully acknowledge support from the ‘ECOGAL’ ERC advanced grant. KR gratefully acknowledges support from STFC grant ST/M001229/1.As hydrodynamic simulations increase in scale and resolution, identifying structures with non-trivial geometries or regions of general interest becomes increasingly challenging. There is a growing need for algorithms that identify a variety of different features in a simulation without requiring a ‘by eye’ search. We present tensor classification as such a technique for smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). These methods have already been used to great effect in N-Body cosmological simulations, which require smoothing defined as an input free parameter. We show that tensor classification successfully identifies a wide range of structures in SPH density fields using its native smoothing, removing a free parameter from the analysis and preventing the need for tessellation of the density field, as required by some classification algorithms. As examples, we show that tensor classification using the tidal tensor and the velocity shear tensor successfully identifies filaments, shells and sheet structures in giant molecular cloud simulations, as well as spiral arms in discs. The relationship between structures identified using different tensors illustrates how different forces compete and co-operate to produce the observed density field. We therefore advocate the use of multiple tensors to classify structure in SPH simulations, to shed light on the interplay of multiple physical processes.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
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