Peculiarities of glomus-sparing eversion carotid endarterectomy.

Described in the article are technical peculiarities of performing eversion carotid endarterectomy with the preservation of the structure of the carotid glomus. Atherosclerosis of the carotid artery bifurcation appears to influence the onset and course of arterial hypertension. An important role therein is played by barorefl ex and glomus dysfunction. The operation of carotid endarterectomy decreases the background arterial pressure but in a series of cases, with destroyed structures of the carotid glomus, induces alterations in the pattern of arterial hypertension with the development of hyper- and hypotensive crises. The authors have worked out an operation of glomus-sparing eversion carotid endarterectomy, combining advantages of the eversion technique and prevention of glomus dysfunction. The outcomes of 25 operations demonstrated a positive antihypertensive eff ect of the new technique, with no systemic haemodynamic impairments observed in the patients after surgery.

A triplet of differently shaped spin-zero states in the atomic nucleus 186Pb

Understanding the fundamental excitations of many-fermion systems is of significant current interest. In atomic nuclei with even numbers of neutrons and protons, the low-lying excitation spectrum is generally formed by nucleon pair breaking and nuclear vibrations or rotations. However, for certain numbers of protons and neutrons, a subtle rearrangement of only a few nucleons among the orbitals at the Fermi surface can result in a different elementary mode: a macroscopic shape change. The first experimental evidence for this phenomenon came from the observation of shape coexistence in 16O (ref. 4). Other unexpected examples came with the discovery of fission isomers and super-deformed nuclei. Here we find experimentally that the lowest three states in the energy spectrum of the neutron deficient nucleus 186Pb are spherical, oblate and prolate. The states are populated by the alpha-decay of a parent nucleus; to identify them, we combine knowledge of the particular features of this decay with sensitive measurement techniques (a highly efficient velocity filters with strong background reduction, and an extremely selective recoil-alpha-electron coincidence tagging methods). The existence of this apparently unique shape triplet is permitted only by the specific conditions that are met around this particular nucleus.