Management of acute ischemic stroke after pulmonary resection: incidence and efficacy of endovascular thrombus aspiration.

OBJECTIVE: We analyzed acute ischemic stroke by thromboembolism in the early period after lung cancer surgery. METHODS: A retrospective review of the clinical records of patients who underwent lung resection for primary lung cancer was performed. Patients who underwent lobectomy, bilobectomy, and pneumonectomy were included. The clinical characteristics of the patients, the incidence of atrial fibrillation (Af) after surgery, and the incidence of acute ischemic stroke were analyzed. The clinical courses of patients having acute ischemic stroke were also reviewed. RESULTS: In 4 (0.6%) of 696 patients, acute ischemic stroke occurred in the early period during hospitalization after lung cancer surgery. Acute ischemic stroke occurred within 4 days in three cases and after 4 days in one case. The resection site of the lung was the left side in all cases, and there were three cases of left upper lobectomy and one case of left lower lobectomy. As for the two recent patients, thrombus removal was performed by a neurosurgeon, and both cases achieved successful recanalization. The time between symptom detection and recanalization was 205 and 170 min, respectively. One patient was cured without any residual effect of disease, and the other patient's hemiplegia resolved and aphasia improved. CONCLUSION: Since cerebral infarction impairs the patient's quality of life, thrombus removal should be considered if possible.

Zero-multipole summation method for efficiently estimating electrostatic interactions in molecular system.

The zero-multipole summation method has been developed to efficiently evaluate the electrostatic Coulombic interactions of a point charge system. This summation prevents the electrically non-neutral multipole states that may artificially be generated by a simple cutoff truncation, which often causes large amounts of energetic noise and significant artifacts. The resulting energy function is represented by a constant term plus a simple pairwise summation, using a damped or undamped Coulombic pair potential function along with a polynomial of the distance between each particle pair. Thus, the implementation is straightforward and enables facile applications to high-performance computations. Any higher-order multipole moment can be taken into account in the neutrality principle, and it only affects the degree and coefficients of the polynomial and the constant term. The lowest and second moments correspond respectively to the Wolf zero-charge scheme and the zero-dipole summation scheme, which was previously proposed. Relationships with other non-Ewald methods are discussed, to validate the current method in their contexts. Good numerical efficiencies were easily obtained in the evaluation of Madelung constants of sodium chloride and cesium chloride crystals.

[Assessment of meteorological conditions in relation to the onset of spontaneous pneumothorax in young adults].

Thirty-eight patients less than 30-year-old with spontaneous pneumothorax, of which onset date were known between January 2001 and December 2007, were included in this study. Meteorological factors such as temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, amount of rainfall and actual sunshine duration were assessed for the onset days of spontaneous pneumothorax (SP days) compared with days without pneumothorax (non-SP days) in the analyzed periods. The difference of those meteorological factors between the index day and one day before were also assessed. No significant difference was found in meteorological factors between SP and non-SP days. While, significant change in minimal temperature between SP days and non-SP days was found (+1.000 degrees C vs -0.015 degrees C, p=0.019). Meteorological factors may affect the onset of spontaneous pneumothorax in young adults. However, further assessment of accumulation of the patients is necessary including multi-institute study.