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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amjsurg.2005.09.008 Byline: Ronan A. Cahill (a), Regina Harty (b), Seamus Cotter (b), R. Gordon K. Watson (a) Keywords: Parathormone; Parathyroid hormone response; Thyroid surgery Abstract: Confident determination of adequate residual parathyroid function early after thyroid surgery could facilitate the discharge of patients soon after their operation without the need for subsequent serum calcium monitoring and/or calcium and vitamin D supplementation. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Surgery, Waterford Regional Hospital, Waterford, Ireland (b) Department of Biochemistry, Waterford Regional Hospital, Waterford, Ireland Article History: Received 24 April 2005; Revised 27 September 2005 Article Note: (footnote) The Statgen Intraoperative PTH Analysis equipment (but no consumables) was supplied free of charge for the study by Cambridge Diagnostic Services (Cambridge, UK). No right of manuscript approval was sought by or granted to the company.

We study two-color QCD with two flavors of Wilson fermion as a function of quark chemical potential μ and temperature T. We find evidence of a superfluid phase at intermediate μ and low T where the quark number density and diquark condensate are both very well described by a Fermi sphere of nearly free quarks disrupted by a BCS condensate. Our results suggest that the quark contribution to the energy density is negative (and balanced by a positive gauge contribution), although this result is highly sensitive to details of the energy renormalization. We also find evidence that the chiral condensate in this region vanishes in the massless limit. This region gives way to a region of deconfined quark matter at higher T and μ, with the deconfinement temperature, determined from the renormalized Polyakov loop, decreasing only very slowly with increasing chemical potential. The quark number susceptibility χq does not exhibit any qualitative change at the deconfinement transition. We argue that this is because χq is not an appropriate measure of deconfinement for two-color QCD at high density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]