Agomelatine is a new antidepressant with a novel profile of pharmacological action. The clinical efficacy of agomelatine has been established in major depression, but its actions on emotional bias are unknown. Consequently, the current experimental study assessed the effect of agomelatine on emotional processing in healthy volunteers using an Emotional Test Battery shown to be sensitive to sero...

BACKGROUND There has been a long-standing controversy about the possibility that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants might induce suicidality in some patients. METHODS Starting from the clinical studies that gave rise to this issue, this paper reviews an unselected cohort of randomized clinical trials (RCTs), a series of meta-analyses undertaken to investigate aspect...

A feasibility study on the applicability of an ultrasound decorrelation method to urinary flow imaging was carried out in 20 healthy male volunteers, to provide a basis for a non-invasive approach to diagnose bladder outlet obstruction. Each volunteer voided five times in a flow meter in standing position. During each voiding, ultrasound radiofrequency frames were acquired transperineally at di...

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disabling disease with unknown etiology. There is accumulating evidence of altered cardiovascular autonomic responses to different somatic stressors, in particular orthostatic stress, whereas autonomic responses to mental stress remain to be investigated. In this study, we explored cardiovascular autonomic responses to a simple mental stress test in CFS patie...

Recently, oxidative stress has been reported to contribute an important role in the decline of physical function as age advances. Numerous antioxidants can improve both physical and psychological performances resulting in the increase of health-related quality of life (HQOL). Therefore, we hypothesized that Centella asiatica, a medicinal plant reputed for nerve tonic, strength improvement and a...

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate whether patients with increased or decreased gastric motility can be differentiated from healthy volunteers by means of real time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Patients and methods: Ten healthy volunteers, 10 patients with gastroparesis, and 10 patients with functional pylorospasm/peptic pyloric stenosis underwent real time MRI. All patients...