Diagnostic and prognostic uncertainty is one of the major psychological stressors for patients in acute and chronic illness, as well as for parents of children with disabilities or chronic disease. Whereas the parents' feeling of uncertainty is undoubtedly very strong shortly after the birth of a child with disabilities, the long-term effects on the parents of having or not having a precise genetic diagnosis, in terms of emotional stress, remain unclear. In this study, mothers of non-disabled children are compared to mothers of children with Down syndrome, and to mothers of children with a diagnostically unassigned mental retardation with regard to the level of anxiety, feelings of guilt, and emotional burden. While the mothers of children with Down syndrome score comparably to the mothers of non-disabled children, the results show broad psychoemotional disadvantages for mothers of children with a mental retardation of unknown etiology. Consequently, the value of genetic diagnosis of infantile disabilities encompasses, beyond clinical considerations like therapy planning and assignment of the recurrence risk for siblings, significant and long-lasting emotional relief for the parents.
In porous materials, such as foams or pressed powder boards, the thermal conductivity via the gas phase represents at ambient temperatures a significant or even dominant contribution to the total thermal conductivity. The variation of the thermal conductivity of an open porous material with gas pressure is a function of the pore size. In the pressure range below 1 bar, measurement of thermal conductivity offers a non-destructive probe of pore sizes larger than 100 nm. If the thermal conductivity setup also allows for measurements at higher pressures, the pore size range can be extended to even smaller values.Experimental data for a variety of different porous materials such as open porous foams, granular porous and nonporous materials and aerogels, porous solids with an adjustable mean pore size in the meso-or macro-pore range, are presented. The pore characteristics determined from thermal conductivity measurements are compared to morphological data derived from nitrogen sorption and small angle X-ray scattering data.The potential and limits of this method in terms of the extraction of an average pore size and a pore size distribution are discussed.
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