Search

Summary: We conducted a literature review of 55 pregnancies with symptomatic Group A streptococcus (Streptococcus pyogenes) infection reported in English (20 cases), French (2 cases) and Japanese (33 cases) to seek ways of improving prognosis. Multiparous women (83% [39/47]) in the third trimester (90% [47/52]) were prone to infection from winter to spring (75% [21/28]). Onset was heralded by flu-like symptoms, such as high fever (94% [46/49]), with upper respiratory (40% [22/55]) and/or gastrointestinal symptoms (49% [27/55]). Characteristic findings were early onset of shock (91% [50/55]) and infection-induced strong uterine contraction (73% [40/55]) suggestive of placental abruption. The clinical course was too acute and severe to rescue the mother (58% [32/55] died) and/or infant (66% [39/59] died). However, outcome has improved over the last decade, with rescue of 68% (15/22) of the mothers since 2000, and early use of antibiotics (71% [22/31] survived) and use of intravenous immunoglobulin (91% [10/11] survived) were associated with favourable outcome. Early use of antibiotics and intravenous immunoglobulin may improve outcome of pregnant women suffering from flu-like symptoms, shock and strong uterine contractions suggestive of placental abruption. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of large argon clusters impacting on silicon targets were performed. The characteristics of crater formation, a typical collisional effect with large cluster impact were examined from the viewpoint of incident energy, cluster size and incident angle. The MD simulation results suggested that the condition where an incident cluster penetrates into the solid target and causes a crater is mainly dominated by the incident energy-per-atom rather than total incident energy of the cluster. Additionally, the MD simulations of sequential multiple cluster impacts and grazing-angle cluster irradiation on irregular surface structures were studied to characterize the surface modification effects with large cluster ion beam process. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

To examine the influence on aromatase and sulfatase pathways in estrogen pool by drugs reported to cause gynecomastia as the side effect, 29 ethical drugs were incubated with human placental microsomes as an enzyme source. The percent inhibition of drugs on aromatase pathway was obtained by sum of the velocity constants of two products, estrone (E1) and estradiol (E2) from testosterone (T) as the substrate, and that on sulfatase pathway was obtained as the velocity constant of production of E1 from estrone sulfate (E1S). Although several drugs including ketoconazole showed a significant inhibition effect on aromatase pathway at their non-clinical over-dose concentration (100 μM), no influence on the inhibition was observed in any drugs at their approximately therapeutic concentration (1 μM). However, several drugs including spironolactone gave the product ratio (E2/E1) having higher value than that of the control, the result means spironolactone inhibits the conversion of E2 to E1. No inhibitory effect of the drugs tested on estrogen production from E1S (sulfatase pathway) was confirmed. The results suggest the possibility that the tested drugs known to cause gynecomastia have no inhibitory effect essentially on aromatase and sulfatase pathways. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Modern integrated devices and electrical circuits have often been designed with carbon nanostructures, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene due to their high thermal and electrical transport properties. These transport properties are strongly correlated to their acoustic phonon and carrier dynamics. Thus, understanding the phonon and carrier dynamics of carbon nanostructures in extremely small regions will lead to their further practical applications. Here, we demonstrate ultrafast time-resolved electron diffraction and ultrafast transient spectroscopy to characterize the phonon and carrier dynamics at the boundary of quasi-one-dimensional CNTs before and after Joule annealing. The results from ultrafast time-resolved electron diffraction show that the CNTs after Joule annealing reach the phonon equilibrium state extremely fast with a timescale of 10 ps, which indicates that thermal transport in CNTs improves following Joule annealing. The methodology described in this study connects conventional macroscopic thermo- and electrodynamics to those at the nanometer scale. Realistic timescale kinetic simulations were performed to further elaborate on the phenomena that occur in CNTs during Joule annealing. The insights obtained in this study are expected to pave the way to parameterize the unexplored thermal and electrical properties of carbon materials at the nanometer scale. Image 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]