Pathological postpartum breast engorgement: prediction, prevention, and resolution.

BACKGROUND: Severe breast engorgement can cause substantial discomfort for mothers and interfere with an infant's ability to feed at the breast. This study explored the possibility of prediction of pathological postpartum breast engorgement in lactating women in relation to intense breast engorgement at the end of the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle and the possibility of prevention and resolution of postpartum breast engorgement with expression with a breast pump of colostrum before the appearance of transitional milk. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: The first group included 70 women with pathological postpartum breast engorgement. The second group included 52 postpartum women, with 24 women having colostrum extracted by the breast pump from each breast once or twice for a duration of 20-25 minutes sequentially in the first 2-3 days after delivery in addition to the removal of colostrum by the baby, before engorgement developed. Twenty-eight women had colostrum removed only by the baby. The degree of breast engorgement was assessed using the previously published Robson four-level scale. RESULTS: Of the 70 patients with severe postpartum engorgement studied in the first group, 90% showed intense breast engorgement in the late luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. Expression of colostrum milk in the first experimental group from each breast eliminated excessive breast engorgement in breastfeeding mothers. CONCLUSIONS: Presence of intense breast engorgement at the end of the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle may be one of the most important indicators useful for predicting severe postpartum breast engorgement. Extraction of colostrum before the appearance of transitional milk lowers the risk of excessive engorgement in breastfeeding women.

Country-specific correlations across Europe between modelled atmospheric cadmium and lead deposition and concentrations in mosses.

Previous analyses at the European scale have shown that cadmium and lead concentrations in mosses are primarily determined by the total deposition of these metals. Further analyses in the current study show that Spearman rank correlations between the concentration in mosses and the deposition modelled by the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) are country and metal-specific. Significant positive correlations were found for about two thirds or more of the participating countries in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005 (except for Cd in 1990). Correlations were often not significant and sometimes negative in countries where mosses were only sampled in a relatively small number of EMEP grids. Correlations frequently improved when only data for EMEP grids with at least three moss sampling sites per grid were included. It was concluded that spatial patterns and temporal trends agree reasonably well between lead and cadmium concentrations in mosses and modelled atmospheric deposition.

Long-term mercury dynamics in UK soils.

A model assuming first-order losses by evasion and leaching was used to evaluate Hg dynamics in UK soils since 1850. Temporal deposition patterns of Hg were constructed from literature information. Inverse modelling indicated that 30% of 898 rural sites receive Hg only from the global circulation, while in 51% of cases local deposition exceeds global. Average estimated deposition is 16 µg Hg m(-2) a(-1) to rural soils, 19 µg Hg m(-2) a(-1) to rural and non-rural soils combined. UK soils currently hold 2490 tonnes of reactive Hg, of which 2140 tonnes are due to anthropogenic deposition, mostly local in origin. Topsoil currently releases 5.1 tonnes of Hg(0) per annum to the atmosphere, about 50% more than the anthropogenic flux. Sorptive retention of Hg in the lower soil exerts a strong control on surface water Hg concentrations. Following decreases in inputs, soil Hg concentrations are predicted to decline over hundreds of years.

Elastic laser light scattering by GaAs surfaces.

Angle-resolved scattering (ARS) intensities were measured in the backscattering hemisphere for the (1 0 0) and (1 1 1) faces of GaAs single crystals. Three epitaxial layers were deposited onto the GaAs (1 0 0) single-crystalline wafers. The laser elastic light scattering shows the presence of a regular surface microrelief whose orientation corresponds to the crystallographic axes in the surface plane. We studied the statistical properties of this microrelief and determined the parameters that characterize the surface. We propose to use the ARS ratio for two wavelengths (in our case, 632.8 and 441.6 nm) to determine the topographical properties of scattering and to study crystal surface defects.