Systematic review of guidelines for urinary incontinence in women.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: Urinary incontinence in women is the subject of multiple recommendations all over the world. The aim of our study was to compare methodologies and search for inconsistencies in texts and grades in these guidelines. METHODS: Seventeen recommendations from different medical societies in English, French and German were included. Their methodologies were analyzed, including writing methods, cyclicity, level of evidence (LE) and grades. The recommendations were synthesized and inconsistencies in texts and grades were studied. The quality of recommendations was evaluated with the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE II) scale. RESULTS: Methods, rigour and cyclicity varied depending on societies. LE and grades are broadly consensual for higher LE and grades and less so for lower LE and grades. The Collège National des Gynécologues et Obstétriciens Français, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynäkologie und Geburtshilfe, the European Association of Urology, the International Consultation on Urological Diseases and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence have an AGREE score ≥ 80 % (third quartile). Grading and textual inconsistencies are explained by the order of studies or the absence of high LE. CONCLUSION: With the present study we closely explored comparatively the methods and semantics of recommendations for urinary incontinence in women.

Uterine transplantation: Review in human research.

Uterine transplantation is the solution to treat absolute uterine fertility. In this review, we present the historical, medical, technical, psychological and ethical perspectives in human uterine transplantation research. We reviewed the PubMed database following PRISMA guidelines and added data presented by several research teams during the first international congress on uterine transplantation.

Contact gating at GHz frequency in graphene.

The paradigm of graphene transistors is based on the gate modulation of the channel carrier density by means of a local channel gate. This standard architecture is subject to the scaling limit of the channel length and further restrictions due to access and contact resistances impeding the device performance. We propose a novel design, overcoming these issues by implementing additional local gates underneath the contact region which allow a full control of the Klein barrier taking place at the contact edge. In particular, our work demonstrates the GHz operation of transistors driven by independent contact gates. We benchmark the standard channel and novel contact gating and report for the later dynamical transconductance levels at the state of the art. Our finding may find applications in electronics and optoelectronics whenever there is need to control independently the Fermi level and the electrostatic potential of electronic sources or to get rid of cumbersome local channel gates.

Massive and massless Dirac fermions in Pb1-xSnxTe topological crystalline insulator probed by magneto-optical absorption.

Dirac fermions in condensed matter physics hold great promise for novel fundamental physics, quantum devices and data storage applications. IV-VI semiconductors, in the inverted regime, have been recently shown to exhibit massless topological surface Dirac fermions protected by crystalline symmetry, as well as massive bulk Dirac fermions. Under a strong magnetic field (B), both surface and bulk states are quantized into Landau levels that disperse as B(1/2), and are thus difficult to distinguish. In this work, magneto-optical absorption is used to probe the Landau levels of high mobility Bi-doped Pb0.54Sn0.46Te topological crystalline insulator (111)-oriented films. The high mobility achieved in these thin film structures allows us to probe and distinguish the Landau levels of both surface and bulk Dirac fermions and extract valuable quantitative information about their physical properties. This work paves the way for future magnetooptical and electronic transport experiments aimed at manipulating the band topology of such materials.