Background: High prevalence of metabolic abnormalities and poor bone health in ethnic minorties may stem from differences in body composition and alterations in endocrine milieu. South Asian Indians (SAIs) are at greater risk for metabolic syndrome (MetS) and poor bone health than Caucasians. Often these differences are reported later in life and/or in a resident immigrant population compared to a Caucasian population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Healthy Eating Index (HEI) estimates the diet quality, and low HEI scores are associated with adverse bone outcomes. However, the relationship between HEI scores and bone health in individuals who are obese but otherwise healthy or obese with comorbidities remains unclear.
Objective: We aimed to evaluate the association of HEI scores with bone mineral density (BMD), bone regulating hormones and bone turnover markers in individuals with metabolically healthy obese (MHO) and metabolically unhealthy obese (MUO) phenotypes.
High-dose vitamin D supplementation can increase total osteocalcin concentrations that may reduce insulin resistance in individuals at risk for prediabetes or diabetes mellitus. Magnesium is a cofactor in vitamin D metabolism and activation. The purpose of this study was to determine the combined effect of vitamin D and magnesium supplementation on total osteocalcin concentrations, glycemic indices, and other bone turnover markers after a 12-week intervention in individuals who were overweight and obese, but otherwise healthy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Poor vitamin D and magnesium status is observed in individuals who are overweight and obese (Owt/Ob) and is often associated with a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease. Magnesium is a cofactor that assists vitamin D metabolism. We aimed to determine the efficacy of a combined magnesium and vitamin D regimen compared with vitamin D only on increasing serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD) concentrations and the effects of these supplements on cardiometabolic outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Simulation-based surgical training (SBST) is predicated on the assumption that trainees transfer their acquired skills and competencies into the operating room. Research on transfer of surgical training has focused on trainees' performance improvements and not on their actual opportunity to transfer their trained skills.
Methods: This was a retrospective study conducted using data on surgical procedures performed by first-year trainees in abdominal surgery, gynaecology and urology in the Central Denmark Region.
Knowledge of the anatomy of the skull and its bones forms an important part of the understanding required for the study and practice of safe clinical dentistry. The use of serious games in healthcare education is well-documented, but there is comparatively little evidence for their use in dental education. Intrinsically integrated rewards are a game mechanic that can be motivational for serious game users.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe "stone heart" syndrome is a rare but often fatal complication of cardiac surgery associated with hypertrophy of the myocardium. The mechanisms behind the syndrome are not fully understood. In this case report, we describe two cases of stone heart in newborn girls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGhost imaging is a counter-intuitive phenomenon-first realized in quantum optics-that enables the image of a two-dimensional object (mask) to be reconstructed using the spatio-temporal properties of a beam of particles with which it never interacts. Typically, two beams of correlated photons are used: one passes through the mask to a single-pixel (bucket) detector while the spatial profile of the other is measured by a high-resolution (multi-pixel) detector. The second beam never interacts with the mask.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExciton-polaritons are hybrid light-matter quasiparticles formed by strongly interacting photons and excitons (electron-hole pairs) in semiconductor microcavities. They have emerged as a robust solid-state platform for next-generation optoelectronic applications as well as for fundamental studies of quantum many-body physics. Importantly, exciton-polaritons are a profoundly open (that is, non-Hermitian) quantum system, which requires constant pumping of energy and continuously decays, releasing coherent radiation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present the first measurement for helium atoms of the tune-out wavelength at which the atomic polarizability vanishes. We utilize a novel, highly sensitive technique for precisely measuring the effect of variations in the trapping potential of confined metastable (2^{3}S_{1}) helium atoms illuminated by a perturbing laser light field. The measured tune-out wavelength of 413.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActa Anaesthesiol Scand
November 2015
This case report describes hypoglycemia during methadone escalation in an 8-year-old girl with acute lymphatic leukemia. After a significant increase in the methadone dosage, the blood glucose decreased from 12 mmol/l to 1 mmol/l. Nutrition and other medications were meticulously checked and no other apparent explanation was found.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFControlled transfer of orbital angular momentum to an exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensate spontaneously created under incoherent, off resonant excitation conditions is a long-standing challenge in the field of microcavity polaritonics. We demonstrate, experimentally and theoretically, a simple and efficient approach to the generation of nontrivial orbital angular momentum states by using optically induced potentials-chiral polaritonic lenses. These lenses are produced by a structured optical pump with a spatial distribution of intensity that breaks the chiral symmetry of the system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn important aspect of the rapidly growing field of quantum atom optics is exploring the behavior of ultracold atoms at a deeper level than the mean field approximation, where the quantum properties of individual atoms becomes important. Major recent advances have been achieved with the creation and detection of reliable single-atom sources, which is a crucial tool for testing fundamental quantum processes. Here, we create a source comprised of a single ultracold metastable helium atom, which enables novel free-space quantum atom optics experiments to be performed with single massive particles with large de Broglie wavelengths.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Studies show that traumatic stress symptoms are common in parents of children admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Family-centred care (FCC) has shown promising potential in reducing levels of traumatic stress in this group of parents.
Objectives: To investigate the association between parents' experience of nursing care and levels of traumatisation, to identify potential gender differences within this group, and to examine the possible relationships among the severity of a child's illness, the parents' fear of losing their child, and the parents' experience of support and development of acute stress disorder (ASD) symptoms.
Introduction: Preoperative anxiety is common in children and it is associated with an adverse post-operative outcome. The modified Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale (m-YPAS) was developed to assess preoperative anxiety in children. The purpose of this study was to translate and adapt the m-YPAS to Danish cultural and linguistic conditions and to test its face validity and inter-rater reliability in a clinical setting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA fundamental property of a three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate is long-range coherence; however, in systems of lower dimensionality, not only is the long-range coherence destroyed but additional states of matter are predicted to exist. One such state is a "transverse condensate," first predicted by van Druten and Ketterle [Phys. Rev.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether an initial post-operative lactate level is a predictor of mortality, need for peritoneal dialysis (PD), duration of intubation or length of stay (LOS) in the intensive care unit (ICU) in children undergoing cardiac surgery.
Method: A retrospective, observational follow-up study was conducted in 206 children undergoing cardiac surgery from 2006 to 2007. Multivariate logistics regression analyses were performed to determine whether the lactate level was an independent risk factor.
The coherence properties of amplified matter waves generated by four-wave mixing (FWM) are studied using the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method. We examine two limits. In the first case stimulated processes lead to the selective excitation of a pair of spatially separated modes, which we show to be second order coherent, while the second occurs when the FWM process is multimode, due to spontaneous scattering events which leads to incoherent matter waves.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpeckle patterns produced by multiple independent light sources are a manifestation of the coherence of the light field. Second-order correlations exhibited in phenomena such as photon bunching, termed the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect, are a measure of quantum coherence. Here we observe for the first time atomic speckle produced by atoms transmitted through an optical waveguide, and link this to second-order correlations of the atomic arrival times.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn direct analogy to the textbook example of light guided in a few-mode fiber (FMF), we report the observation of the first excited mode of an optically guided atomic beam. We selectively excite the atomic analog of the LP₀₁ optical mode by controlling the energy distribution of ultracold atoms loaded into the guide, resulting in a modal structure dominated by a 47(2)% population in the first excited transverse mode. The ability to guide lower-order modes has been essential to demonstrating optical effects such as multimode interferometry, slow light, and entanglement, and an atomic analog to a FMF may lead to similarly useful applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA major advance in understanding the behavior of light was to describe the coherence of a light source by using correlation functions that define the spatio-temporal relationship between pairs and larger groups of photons. Correlations are also a fundamental property of matter. We performed simultaneous measurement of the second- and third-order correlation functions for atoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe have used the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect to directly compare the density correlations of a pulsed atom laser and a pulsed ultracold thermal source of metastable helium. It was found that the isotropic RF outcoupling of atoms from a Bose-Einstein condensate does not result in decoherence, while the 'bunching' typical of incoherent sources was observed for thermal atoms. This new method significantly increases data acquisition rates compared to previous measurements, and also permits future novel experiments which may allow us to probe processes such as the birth and death of a condensate by monitoring correlation effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExited atoms may relax to the ground state by radiative decay, a process which is usually very fast (of order nanoseconds). However, quantum-mechanical selection rules can prevent such rapid decay, in which case these "metastable" states can have lifetimes of order seconds or longer. In this Letter, we determine experimentally the lifetime of the longest-lived neutral atomic state-the first excited state of helium (the 2(3)S1 metastable state)-to the highest accuracy yet measured.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report the first real-time feedback control of an atom laser. The unique feature of metastable helium atoms, the production of ions in the atom laser outcoupling process, is exploited to actively control the spatial location inside the Bose-Einstein condensate where outcoupling occurs. Unlike alkali atom lasers, this provides almost instantaneous feedback which reduces frequency, amplitude and spatial mode fluctuations in the atom laser beam.
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