Of 615 patients with diverticular disease of the colon, 429 had diverticula in the cecum and ascending colon, 98 in the sigmoid and descending colon and 88 in both the right- and left-side colon. The right-sided type was more common in younger people and more predominant in men, whereas the left-sided type was more common in the elderly and showed no difference in numbers between men and women. More than 50 per cent of patients were asymptomatic and 25 per cent complained of disturbed bowel function. The frequency of diverticulitis was not related to location, but to the number of diverticula. Seventy-seven were complicated by acute inflammation (right-sided diverticulitis, 61, and left-sided diverticulitis, 16). Many patients with right-sided diverticulitis improved with medical treatment and the operative procedure of choice was drainage of the inflamed area with supplemental appendectomy.

No abstract

No abstract

We report a method of correcting a near-infrared (0.90-1.35 µm) high-resolution (λ/∆λ ∼ 28, 000) spectrum for telluric absorption using the corresponding spectrum of a telluric standard star. The proposed method uses an A0 V star or its analog as a standard star from which on the order of 100 intrinsic stellar lines are carefully removed with the help of a reference synthetic telluric spectrum. We find that this method can also be applied to feature-rich objects having spectra with heavily blended intrinsic stellar and telluric lines and present an application to a G-type giant using this approach. We also develop a new diagnostic method for evaluating the accuracy of telluric correction and use it to demonstrate that our method achieves an accuracy better than 2% for spectral parts for which the atmospheric transmittance is as low as ∼20% if telluric standard stars are observed under the following conditions:(1) the difference in airmass between the target and the standard is 0.05; and (2) that in time is less than 1 h. In particular, the time variability of water vapor has a large impact on the accuracy of telluric correction and minimizing the difference in time from that of the telluric standard star is important especially in near-infrared high-resolution spectroscopic observation.

For a detailed analysis of stellar chemical abundances, high-resolution spectra in the optical have mainly been used, while the development of near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph has opened new wavelength windows. Red giants have a large number of resolved absorption lines in both the optical and NIR wavelengths, but the characteristics of the lines in different wave passbands are not necessarily the same. We present a selection of Fe I lines in the z ′ , Y , and J bands (0.91-1.33 µm). On the basis of two different lists of lines in this range, the Vienna Atomic Line Database (VALD) and the catalog published by Meléndez & Barbuy in 1999 (MB99), we selected sufficiently strong lines that are not severely blended and compiled lists with 107 Fe I lines in total (97 and 75 lines from VALD and MB99, respectively). Combining our lists with high-resolution (λ/∆λ = 28, 000) and high signalto-noise (> 500) spectra taken with a NIR spectrograph, WINERED, we present measurements of the iron abundances of two prototype red giants: Arcturus and µ Leo. A bootstrap method for determining the microturbulence and abundance together with their errors is demonstrated. The standard deviations of log ǫ Fe values from individual Fe I lines are significantly smaller when we use the lines from MB99 instead of those from VALD. With the MB99 list, we obtained ξ = 1.20 ± 0.11 km s −1 and log ǫ Fe = 7.01 ± 0.05 dex for Arcturus, and ξ = 1.54 ± 0.17 km s −1 and log ǫ Fe = 7.73 ± 0.07 dex for µ Leo. These final values show better agreements with previous values in the literature than the corresponding values we obtained with VALD.