Despite advances in pharmacologic options for the management of surgical pain, there appears to have been little or no overall improvement over the last two decades in the level of pain experienced ...by patients. The importance of adequate and effective surgical pain management, however, is clear, because inadequate pain control 1) has a wide range of undesirable physiologic and immunologic effects; 2) is associated with poor surgical outcomes; 3) has increased probability of readmission; and 4) adversely affects the overall cost of care as well as patient satisfaction. There is a clear unmet need for a national surgical pain management consensus task force to raise awareness and develop best practice guidelines for improving surgical pain management, patient safety, patient satisfaction, rapid postsurgical recovery, and health economic outcomes. To comprehensively address this need, the multidisciplinary Surgical Pain Congress™ has been established. The inaugural meeting of this Congress (March 8 to 10, 2013, Celebration, Florida) evaluated the current surgical pain management paradigm and identified key components of best practices.
This study investigated young students' conceptions of their country's government, with a particular interest in the concept of representation, and examined the influence of instruction and ...development on the formulation of these ideas. The same 26 students were interviewed before and after instruction in American history in fifth and eighth grade. Interview responses led us to characterize students' conceptions of their country's government as focused on its structure with limited understanding of its philosophical or historical roots. Additionally, students tended to view their own system as positive and focused on negative features of other systems in drawing comparisons. Longitudinally, students' conceptions tended to show more consistency than growth. The discussion explores the content emphasis in traditional instruction and its effect on students' understandings of the foundations of their country's government and emphasizes the importance of the teacher's role in fostering development of students' nascent understandings of complex content in social studies.
Pulsed laser with visible wavelength (532nm) allows to modify the properties of graphene oxide (GO) sheets dispersed in water by finely tuning the amount of oxygen functionalities and, therefore, the ...degree of reduction. In this way both the hydrophilicity and the spectroscopic features of the GO suspension can be changed. This work reports the preparation of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and mixed solutions of GO or rGO and Degussa P25® titania nanoparticles by pulsed laser irradiation. The produced materials are characterized by scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Their ability to remove methylene blue from water is investigated by studying the dye decolorization.
In the present study, we estimated the cortical networks were from high-resolution EEG recordings in a group of spinal cord injured patients and in a group of healthy subjects, during the preparation ...of a limb movement. Then, we use the Markov Clustering method to analyse the division of the network into community structures. The results indicate large differences between the injured patients and the healthy subjects. In particular, the networks of spinal cord injured patient exhibited a higher density of clusters. In the Alpha (7-12 Hz) frequency band, the two observed largest communities were mainly composed by the cingulate motor areas with the supplementary motor areas, and by the pre-motor areas with the right primary motor area of the foot. This functional separation could reflect the partial alteration in the primary motor areas because of the effects of the spinal cord injury.
Two groups of patients with transient ischaemic attack and minor stroke without detectable haemodynamic stenotic lesions were evaluated by neuropsychological tests and compared with a control group. ...The mean values of the scores adjusted for age and educational background demonstrated that the patients with transient ischaemic attack did not have a worse performance than normal subjects in any of the tests, the patients with minor stroke had a worse performance than normals, particularly in Rey's figure-copying test (P less than 0.025), and the latter test was not affected by educational background or age of the subjects. The results are discussed with reference to other case series, and the importance of age and cerebral damage in causing intellectual impairment evaluated by neurophysiological tests is stressed.
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