8,493 research outputs found
Is type 2 diabetes really resolved after laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy? Glucose variability studied by continuous glucose monitoring
The study was carried out on type 2 diabetic obese patients who underwent laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG). Patients underwent regular glycemic controls throughout 3 years and all patients were defined cured from diabetes according to conventional criteria defined as normalization of fasting glucose levels and glycated hemoglobin in absence of antidiabetic therapy. After 3 years of follow-up, Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) was performed in each patient to better clarify the remission of diabetes. In this study, we found that the diabetes resolution after LSG occurred in 40% of patients; in the other 60%, even if they showed a normal fasting glycemia and A1c, patients spent a lot of time in hyperglycemia. During the oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), we found that 2 h postload glucose determinations revealed overt diabetes only in a small group of patients and might be insufficient to exclude the diagnosis of diabetes in the other patients who spent a lot of time in hyperglycemia, even if they showed a normal glycemia (<140 mg/dL) at 120 minutes OGTT. These interesting data could help clinicians to better individualize patients in which diabetes is not resolved and who could need more attention in order to prevent chronic complications of diabetes
Scaling Functions in the Odd Charge Sector of Sine-Gordon/Massive Thirring Theory
A non-linear integral equation (NLIE) governing the finite size effects of
excited states of even topological charge in the sine-Gordon (sG) / massive
Thirring (mTh) field theory, deducible from a light-cone lattice formulation of
the model, has been known for some time. In this letter we conjecture an
extension of this NLIE to states with odd topological charge, thus completing
the spectrum of the theory. The scaling functions obtained as solutions to our
conjectured NLIE are compared successfully with Truncated Conformal Space data
and the construction is shown to be compatible with all other facts known about
the local Hilbert spaces of sG and mTh models. With the present results we have
achieved a full control over the finite size behaviour of energy levels of
sG/mTh theory.Comment: LaTeX2e, 12 pp., 3 eps figs. Remarks on locality adde
New Optimization Methods for Converging Perturbative Series with a Field Cutoff
We take advantage of the fact that in lambda phi ^4 problems a large field
cutoff phi_max makes perturbative series converge toward values exponentially
close to the exact values, to make optimal choices of phi_max. For perturbative
series terminated at even order, it is in principle possible to adjust phi_max
in order to obtain the exact result. For perturbative series terminated at odd
order, the error can only be minimized. It is however possible to introduce a
mass shift in order to obtain the exact result. We discuss weak and strong
coupling methods to determine the unknown parameters. The numerical
calculations in this article have been performed with a simple integral with
one variable. We give arguments indicating that the qualitative features
observed should extend to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. We found
that optimization at even order is more efficient that at odd order. We compare
our methods with the linear delta-expansion (LDE) (combined with the principle
of minimal sensitivity) which provides an upper envelope of for the accuracy
curves of various Pade and Pade-Borel approximants. Our optimization method
performs better than the LDE at strong and intermediate coupling, but not at
weak coupling where it appears less robust and subject to further improvements.
We also show that it is possible to fix the arbitrary parameter appearing in
the LDE using the strong coupling expansion, in order to get accuracies
comparable to ours.Comment: 10 pages, 16 figures, uses revtex; minor typos corrected, refs. adde
Grading evolution of an artificial granular material from medium to high stress under one-dimensional compression
This contribution presents the results of an experimental investigation of the mechanical behaviour of granular materials with crushable grains under one-dimensional compression at medium to high stress. The material used for the experimental work is a Light Expanded Clay Aggregate (LECA) whose grains break at relatively low stress. Reconstituted samples were prepared with different initial grain size distributions and their evolution observed under one-dimensional compression. The grain size distributions before and after testing were used to calibrate a bimodal model obtained from the superposition of two Weibull functions. The observed evolution of the micro and macro diameters on loading are linked to the characteristics of the one-dimensional compressibility curve obtained under displacement controlled conditions, such as its shape and two characteristic stress values, namely the pre-consolidation stress and the stress corresponding to the point of inflection
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