BACKGROUND Cases of higher-than-expected disease activity have been reported following fingolimod discontinuation. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to assess the risk of substantially higher-than-expected disease activity post-study drug discontinuation (SDD) at the individual patient level using data from the Phase III, placebo-controlled FREEDOMS and FREEDOMS II trials. METHODS Ba...

Shared decision diagram representations of a state-space have been shown to provide efficient solutions for model-checking of large systems. However, decision diagram manipulation is tricky, as the construction procedure is liable to produce intractable intermediate structures (a.k.a peak effect). The definition of the so-called saturation method has empirically been shown to mostly avoid this ...

OBJECTIVE To study the current application of selective decontamination of the digestive tract (SDD), the use of preoperative antibiotics and mechanical bowel preparation (MBP) in elective gastrointestinal (GI) surgery in surgical departments in the Netherlands. METHODS A point prevalence survey was carried out and an online questionnaire was sent to GI surgeons of 86 different hospitals. R...

BACKGROUND Patients with social developmental disorders (SDD), also known as autism spectrum disorders, may have impaired recognition of facial identity or facial expressions. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to determine whether SDDs were characterized by loss of a perceptual mechanism responsible for face expertise, as current theories suggest that such a loss should be selective for upright faces, d...

Bone densitometry has become the "gold standard" in osteoporosis diagnosis and treatment evaluation. It has also become more and more common to perform a second dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) measurement to monitor bone mineral density (BMD) status or the effect of therapeutic intervention. When a second measurement is performed on a patient, the clinician needs to distinguish between a...

We proposed that selective decontamination of the digestive tract (SDD) initiated after experimental burn injury would decrease myocardial inflammation and dysfunction after a second insult such as septic challenge. Rats were divided into eight experimental groups. Groups included sham burn plus sham sepsis, burn alone, sepsis alone, and burn plus sepsis given either water by oral gavage for 5 ...

Omeract IV started a discussion on the development of radiological response criteria in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Such criteria depend on the definition of what constitutes the minimum clinically important progression of damage. Because such a definition is currently not available, as a first step we have used the concept of random measurement error to determine what is the smallest detectable...

Dear Editor, After 30 years of selective digestive decontamination (SDD) research, the lack of generally accepted definitions and concepts on infection and infection control still hinders a constructive discussion. The recent review by Muskiet et al.1 and the related editorial2 suggest a disturbing lack of understanding of the essentials of the classical SDD strategy. More specifically, both au...

We thank Krueger and colleagues for their critical comments (1). We fully agree that selective digestive tract decontamination (SDD) is not a substitute for good infection control, especially hand hygiene. With respect to their argument that our findings are in sharp contrast to what is known so far about the effect of SDD on the risk of acquisition of colistin-resistant bacteria, we feel diffe...

Despite the increasing body of evidence supporting the hypothesis of schizophrenia as a disconnection syndrome, studies of resting-state EEG Source Functional Connectivity (EEG-SFC) in people affected by schizophrenia are sparse. The aim of the present study was to investigate resting-state EEG-SFC in 77 stable, medicated patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) compared to 78 healthy volunteers (HV)....