The aim of this prospective, uncontrolled clinical study was to evaluate the tolerability and the efficacy of levetiracetam as add-on treatment in 78 adults and 44 children with intractable epilepsy. The patients' seizure frequency in the 8 weeks baseline period was compared to their seizure frequency after a mean follow-up of 8 months of treatment.A greater than 50% reduction in seizure freque...

For chronic insomniacs, getting a good night’s sleep may appear to be impossible. Fortunately nature provides a natural sleep aid that is both safe and effective. L-tryptophan is an amino acid found in many foods, including turkey. Turkey is well known to cause drowsiness, and the culprit is large amounts of tryptophan. For many years L-tryptophan was the nutritional supplement of choice for ch...

Phenazepam use in the state of Georgia has increasingly become a trend for a drug market looking at new and different recreational drugs. This paper examines the psychomotor effects of phenazepam on individuals and their ability to operate a motor vehicle. This study reviewed phenazepam cases of impaired drivers that were submitted to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Division of Forensic S...

Sedated sleep and sleep deprivation are commonly used methods to increase the diagnostic yield of the electroencephalogram (EEG), especially in the evaluation of people with epilepsy, but the rate of activation achieved by them is controversial, as is the issue of whether it is sleep itself, or sleep deprivation which is responsible for their alleged efficacy. We retrospectively studied the EEG...

BACKGROUND High pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and inappropriate gestational weight gain (GWG) are associated with adverse short and long-term maternal and neonatal outcomes and may act as modifiable risk factors on the path to overweight/obesity, but their social patterning is not well established. This study investigates the association of education with BMI and GWG across two consecutiv...

An endogenous growth model on finance and growth is formulated, and empirical analyses are conducted. The model exhibits structural shifts and breaks caused by institutional changes, suggesting that a linear approach is inadequate. To address this point empirically, we fit data for 90 countries from 1960–2000 to a standard growth equation with a proxy for financial activity. Firstly, it is show...

Pooled data analysis was performed on individual data from 807 pregabalin- and 367 placebo-treated patients with treatment-resistant partial seizures with or without generalization from four placebo-controlled studies evaluating the short-term efficacy, safety and tolerability of add-on pregabalin 150-600 mg/day. Short-term add-on treatment with pregabalin resulted in statistically significant ...

Evidence-basis in chronic pain management in the United States has tragically fallen by the wayside over recent decades, resulting in the pernicious convergence of deterioration of care received by suffering patients with excessive profiteering by a number of the myriad stakeholders in the “business” of pain medicine [1]. As this special series on the transformation of the “profession” of pain ...

Rhodococcus equi is an emerging opportunistic pathogen in immunocompromised patients. A lungtransplant recipient developed weight loss, nonproductive cough, dyspnea, and somnolence. Computed tomogram showed a pulmonary nodule and pleural changes in the right allograft that was due to R. equi infection. Alteration of cell-mediated immunity is a predisposing risk factor for R. equi infection in h...

OBJECTIVE Attention to physician wellness has increased as medical practice gains in complexity. Physician satisfaction with practice is critical for quality of care and practice growth. The purpose of this study was to model physicians' self-reported Satisfaction with Competence as a function of their perceptions of the Quality of Health Services, Distress, Coping, Practice Management, Persona...