Recently, most studies reported magnesium as a N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist and its analgesic and perioperative anaesthetic effects have been discussed with central desensitization pathway. We investigated the effects of caudal ropivacaine plus magnesium and compared with ropivacaine alone on postoperative analgesia requirements. After hospital ethic committee's consent, 60 patients (ASA I-II, 2-10 years old) who had lower abdominal or penoscrotal surgery were enrolled in the study. After general anaesthesia induction, caudal blockage was applied. Patients were randomly assigned in two groups. Ropivacaine 0.25% was administered to Group R (n=37), ropivacaine 0.25% plus 50 mg magnesium to Group RM (n=23) in 0.5 ml kg-1 volume. Postoperative analgesia level was recorded at 15 min and 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 h by using Paediatric Objective Pain Scale (POPS) and The Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontoria Pain Scale (CHEOPS). Postoperative motor blocks were evaluated with Modified Bromage Motor Block Scale. According to demographic characteristics, there were no significant differences between the two groups (P>0.05). POPS, CHEOPS, Bromage Motor Scales, analgesia duration and adverse effects were similar in Group R and Group RM. It has been shown that addition of magnesium as an adjuvant agent to local anaesthetics for caudal analgesia has no effect on postoperative pain and analgesic need.

A method to determine the electric field scattered by a dielectric sphere with a permittivity and conductivity varying only in the radial direction is presented. In order to take advantage of the spherically symmetrical geometry, the interior electric field is expanded in terms of vector spherical harmonics which are orthogonal over a spherical surface. Using the orthogonality of those functions with the vector wave functions in the expanded form of the free space dyadic Green's function, one can reduce the 3-D electric field integral equation into a system of 1-D integral equations. The scalar coefficients of the series expansion for the interior electric field are then obtained by solving this system of equations. For the medium outside the sphere, the scattered field is evaluated through the same procedure. Comparisons with alternative methods for specific cases demonstrate that the method is reliable in determining the interior field and the scattered field, for spherical objects with layered or continuously varying radial profile.

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Treatment with levosimendan provided better cardioprotection with cold cardioplegic arrest followed by global hypothermic ischaemia in isolated rat hearts.