Pharmacovigilance contributes to health care. However, direct access to the underlying data for academic institutions and individual physicians or pharmacists is intricate, and easily employable ...analysis modes for everyday clinical situations are missing. This underlines the need for a tool to bring pharmacovigilance to the clinics. To address these issues, we have developed OpenVigil FDA, a novel web-based pharmacovigilance analysis tool which uses the openFDA online interface of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to access U.S. American and international pharmacovigilance data from the Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS). OpenVigil FDA provides disproportionality analyses to (i) identify the drug most likely evoking a new adverse event, (ii) compare two drugs concerning their safety profile, (iii) check arbitrary combinations of two drugs for unknown drug-drug interactions and (iv) enhance the relevance of results by identifying confounding factors and eliminating them using background correction. We present examples for these applications and discuss the promises and limits of pharmacovigilance, openFDA and OpenVigil FDA. OpenVigil FDA is the first public available tool to apply pharmacovigilance findings directly to real-life clinical problems. OpenVigil FDA does not require special licenses or statistical programs.
Over 30% of parturients undergoing spinal anesthesia for cesarean section become intraoperatively hypothermic. This study assessed the magnitude of hypothermic insult in parturients and newborns ...using continuous, high-resolution thermometry and evaluated the efficiency of intraoperative forced-air warming for prevention of hypothermia.
One hundred and eleven parturients admitted for elective or emergency cesarean section under spinal anesthesia with newborn bonding over a 5-month period were included in this retrospective observational cohort study. Patients were divided into two groups: the passive insulation group, who received no active warming, and the active warming group, who received convective warming through an underbody blanket. Core body temperature was continuously monitored by zero-heat-flux thermometry and automatically recorded by data-loggers. The primary outcome was the incidence of hypothermia in the operating and recovery room. Neonatal outcomes were also analyzed.
The patients in the passive insulation group had significantly lower temperatures in the operating room compared to the actively warmed group (36.4°C vs. 36.6°C, p = 0.005), including temperature at skin closure (36.5°C vs. 36.7°C, p = 0.017). The temperature of the newborns after discharge from the postanesthetic care unit was lower in the passive insulation group (36.7°C vs. 37.0°C, p = 0.002); thirteen (15%) of the newborns were hypothermic, compared to three (4%) in the active warming group (p < 0.01).
Forced-air warming decreases perioperative hypothermia in parturients undergoing cesarean section but does not entirely prevent hypothermia in newborns while bonding. Therefore, it can be effectively used for cesarean section, but special attention should be given to neonates.
A novel and simple method is presented for the preparation of a well-defined CeO2(100) model system on Cu(111) based on the adjustment of the Ce/O ratio during growth. The method yields ...micrometer-sized, several nanometers high, single-phase CeO2(100) islands with controllable size and surface termination that can be benchmarked against the known (111) nanostructured islands on Cu(111). Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability to adjust the Ce to O stoichiometry from CeO2(100) (100% Ce4+) to c-Ce2O3(100) (100% Ce3+), which can be readily recognized by characteristic surface reconstructions observed by low-energy electron diffraction. The discovery of the highly stable CeO x (100) phase on a hexagonally close packed metal surface represents an unexpected growth mechanism of ceria on Cu(111), and it provides novel opportunities to prepare more elaborate models, benchmark surface chemical reactivity, and thus gain valuable insights into the redox chemistry of ceria in catalytic processes.
We empirically explore the relevance and efficiency of risk‐taking behavior in tournaments. We use data from the National Basketball Association (NBA) and measure risk‐taking by the fraction of ...three‐point shots in basketball games. We examine how point differences between teams during games affect their subsequent risk‐taking behavior. It is found that teams that are trailing are more likely to increase their use of three‐point shots. We additionally analyze the consequences of this change in behavior. Enhanced risk‐taking is inefficient in the vast majority of cases and is only beneficial if a team is trailing by a rather large margin. We discuss possible explanations for these decision errors. (JEL M5, D81, J30)
We have studied (001) surface terminated cerium oxide nanoparticles grown on a ruthenium substrate using physical vapor deposition. Their morphology, shape, crystal structure, and chemical state are ...determined by low-energy electron microscopy and micro-diffraction, scanning probe microscopy, and synchrotron-based X-ray absorption spectroscopy. Square islands are identified as CeO
2
nanocrystals exhibiting a (001) oriented top facet of varying size; they have a height of about 7 to 10 nm and a side length between about 50 and 500 nm, and are terminated with a
p
(2 × 2) surface reconstruction. Micro-illumination electron diffraction reveals the existence of a coincidence lattice at the interface to the ruthenium substrate. The orientation of the side facets of the rod-like particles is identified as (111); the square particles are most likely of cuboidal shape, exhibiting (100) oriented side facets. The square and needle-like islands are predominantly found at step bunches and may be grown exclusively at temperatures exceeding 1000 °C.
CeO
2
(100) nanostructures form during high-temperature molecular beam epitaxy and are stabilized by a coincidence lattice at the interface.
The growth, morphology, structure, and stoichiometry of ultrathin praseodymium oxide layers on Ru(0001) were studied using low-energy electron microscopy and diffraction, photoemission electron ...microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. At a growth temperature of 760 °C, the oxide is shown to form hexagonally close-packed (A-type) Pr
2
O
3
(0001) islands that are up to 3 nm high. Depending on the local substrate step density, the islands either adopt a triangular shape on sufficiently large terraces or acquire a trapezoidal shape with the long base aligned along the substrate steps.
Unraveling
in situ
the nanoscale morphology, chemistry, and crystallographic structure of epitaxial praseodymia on a ruthenium single crystal support.
Single crystalline magnetron sputter-deposited Ru(0001) epitaxial thin films on c-plane sapphire were prepared and used as a template for reactive CeO2 growth. Low-energy electron microscopy and ...diffraction, as well as transmission electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy, experiments were performed to investigate the crystallinity and morphology of the prepared films. Multiple cycles of Ar+ sputtering and high-temperature annealing produces films of exceptional surface quality. High-temperature reactive ceria growth leads to perfectly aligned triangular single-crystalline CeO2(111) islands of extraordinary morphological and structural homogeneity. At the chosen growth conditions, ceria nucleation takes place only at V-shaped surface defects on the otherwise atomically flat Ru terraces, opening up the possibility to influence the nucleation by introducing artificial surface defects using standard etching techniques. Due to their high crystallinity and extraordinary surface quality, these substrates present a low-cost alternative to Ru single crystals for model studies in heterogeneous catalysis and also allow for the use of destructive investigation techniques and irreversible surface modifications.
Low-energy electron microscopy and microillumination low-energy electron diffraction (μLEED) were used to investigate the structural properties of TbO x films grown on Cu(111) in ultrahigh vacuum. ...Our results reveal that the morphology and structure of the terbia films depend sensitively on the surface temperature during growth. Deposition at room temperature produces terbia films that uniformly cover the surface but lack long-range order that is detectable with LEED. Annealing in O2 induces the formation of three-dimensional TbO x islands that grow as dendrites and cause the disordered terbia to dewet from the Cu(111) substrate. LEED measurements show that the terbia dendrites are crystalline with a hexagonal (1.4 × 1.4) structure with respect to the Cu(111) surface, which is consistent with cubic fluorite-like TbO x (111). In contrast to room temperature growth, deposition at 475 °C produces mainly rectangular TbO x islands that coexist with smaller quantities of irregularly shaped islands. Utilizing μLEED, we identify the rectangular domains as the cubic fluorite-like TbO x (112) structure while the irregularly shaped islands are TbO x (111). The TbO x (112) structure has a rectangular unit cell of dimensions (3.58 Å × 8.86 Å) that grows in registry with the Cu(111) surface by aligning the short side of the rectangular cell parallel to a close-packed direction of Cu(111). Analysis shows that the longer lattice vector of TbO x (112) coincides with every fourth row of the Cu(111) surface, while the shorter lattice vector has a 5:7 coincidence relation with Cu(111). Lastly, we find that the TbO x (112) phase is less stable than the (111) phase and incorporates into the TbO x (111) domains above 530 °C.
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