Vascular complications of sickle cell disease

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a monogenetic disorder caused by a mutation in the [H9252]-globin gene HBB leading to polymerization of red blood cells causing damage to cell membranes, increasing its rigidity and intravascular hemolysis. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that SCD can be viewed as pan-vasculopathy associated with multiple mechanisms but driven by hemoglobin S polymerization. Here we review the pathophysiology, clinical manifestations and management strategies for cerebrovascular disease, pulmonary hypertension and renal disease associated with SCD. These “vascular phenotypes” reflect the systemic nature of the complications of SCD and are a major threat to the well-being of patients with the disorder

Patients' perspectives and preferences in the choice of inhalers: the case for Respimat® or HandiHaler®

Poor inhaler technique hampers the efficacy of drug therapy in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Not only does this affect individual patient care, but it also impacts on the wider health care economics associated with these conditions. Treatment guidelines recommend a systematic approach to drug class selection; however, standardization of inhaler selection is currently difficult owing to the complexity of the interaction between the inhaler device and the patient. Specifically, individual patient preference can influence how successful a treatment is overall. This article reviews inhaler devices from the patient perspective, with a particular focus on the dry powder inhaler HandiHaler® and Respimat® Soft Mist™ Inhaler. It discusses factors that influence device preference and treatment compliance and reviews tools that can aid health care professionals to better match inhaler devices to individual patients’ needs

Charged gravastars admitting conformal motion

We propose a new model of a {\it gravastar} admitting conformal motion. While retaining the framework of the Mazur-Mottola model, the gravastar is assumed to be internally charged, with an exterior defined by a Reissner-Nordstr{\"o}m rather than a Schwarzschild line element. The solutions obtained involve (i) the interior region, (ii) the shell, and (iii) the exterior region of the sphere. Of these three cases the first case is of primary interest since the total gravitational mass vanishes for vanishing charge and turns the total gravitational mass into an {\it electromagnetic mass} under certain conditions. This suggests that the interior de Sitter vacuum of a charged gravastar is essentially an electromagnetic mass model that must generate the gravitational mass. We have also analyzed various other aspects such as the stress energy tensor in the thin shell and the entropy of the system.Comment: Minor addition, Accepted in Phys. Lett.

Solving the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation with absorbing boundary conditions and source terms in Mathematica 6.0

In recent decades a lot of research has been done on the numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. On the one hand, some of the proposed numerical methods do not need any kind of matrix inversion, but source terms cannot be easily implemented into this schemes; on the other, some methods involving matrix inversion can implement source terms in a natural way, but are not easy to implement into some computational software programs widely used by non-experts in programming (e.g. Mathematica). We present a simple method to solve the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation by using a standard Crank-Nicholson method together with a Cayley's form for the finite-difference representation of evolution operator. Here, such standard numerical scheme has been simplified by inverting analytically the matrix of the evolution operator in position representation. The analytical inversion of the N x N matrix let us easily and fully implement the numerical method, with or without source terms, into Mathematica or even into any numerical computing language or computational software used for scientific computing.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure