Patient awareness and symptoms from an incisional hernia

Incisional hernia is a common postoperative complication following open abdominal surgery with incidence varying between 3% and 20%.1 Approximately half of all incisional hernias are diagnosed within 1 year following surgery. In the United Kingdom alone, about 10,000 incisional hernia repairs are performed annually. Incisional hernia repairs are generally elective with emergency repair due to incarceration or strangulation constituting about 15% of repairs.1 Incisional hernia repair is not a low-risk operation and generally has relatively poor results due to chronic postoperative pain and high recurrence rates.2−3 Little has been published on patients' awareness of incisional hernia following open abdominal surgery. Moreover, there are very few publications on indications for incisional hernia repair and on the natural course of such hernias. The literature suggests that symptoms and complaints usually presented by patients include pain, discomfort, cosmetic complaints, skin problems, incarceration, strangulation, functional disability, and pulmonary dysfunction.4−6 The aim of this study was to investigate whether patients were aware that they had a hernia. In addition, we sought to determine symptoms for those who knew that they had an incisional hernia

Flavor violating top decays and flavor violating quark decays of the Higgs boson

In the standard model flavor violating decays of the top quark and of the Higgs boson are highly suppressed. Further, the flavor violating decays of the top and of the Higgs are also small in MSSM and not observable in current or in near future experiment. In this work we show that much larger branching ratios for these decays can be achieved in an extended MSSM model with an additional vector like quark generation. Specifically we show that in the extended model one can achieve branching ratios for $t\to h^0 c$ and $t\to h^0 u$ as large as the current experimental upper limits given by the ATLAS and the CMS Collaborations. We also analyze the flavor violating quark decay of the Higgs boson, i.e., $h^0\to b\bar s + \bar b s$ and $h^0\to b\bar d + \bar b d$. Here again one finds that the branching ratio for these decays can be as large as $O(1)\%$. The analysis is done with inclusion of the CP phases in the Higgs sector, and the effect of CP phases on the branching ratios is investigated. Specifically the Higgs sector spectrum and mixings are computed involving quarks and mirror quarks, squarks and mirror squarks in the loops consistent with the Higgs boson mass constraint. The resulting effective Lagrangian with inclusion of the vector like quark generation induce flavor violating decays at the tree level. The test of the branching ratios predicted could come with further data from LHC13 and such branching ratios could also be accessible at future colliders such as the Higgs factories where the Higgs couplings to fermions will be determined with greater precision.Comment: 26 pages. 8 figure

What is the literal meaning of a sentence?

In this paper, Katz and Searle's controversy over literal meaning will be discussed in the light of relevance theory. Although their notions are drastically different, these notions have their places in utterance interpretation processes and there is no point in deciding whose notion is right. Katz's notion can be characterised as a relevance notion logical form which is an output of the hearer's knowledge of grammar, while Searle's, propositional form, which is a contextually enriched logical form. 1 will introduce a relevance notion literal interpretation which can not only be contrasted with figurative use, but also with non-figurative loose use (e.g. France is hexagonai)

Distribution of intertidal upogebiid shrimp (Crustacea : Decapoda : Thalassinidea) in Japan

The distributions of six intertidal species of Upogebiidae were determined by collecting shrimp from 74 sites on tidal flats and boulder beaches in Japan, from northern Honshu (the main island of Japan) to the Ryukyu Archipelago (southwestern Japan). Upogebia major, U. issaeffi, and Austinogebia narutensis were not found in the Ryukyu Archipelago, whereas U. carinicauda and U. pugnax were collected only from the Ryukyus or warmer regions exposed to the Kuroshio Current. Upogebia yokoyai was collected all over Japan and was the most common species in this study. From the viewpoint of habitat, U. yokoyai and U. issaeffi were unique in that the former was distributed mainly on brackish tidal flats and the latter mainly on boulder beaches. The identity of the upogebiid shrimp in some reports was corrected