the most common type of childhood-onset epilepsy syndrome is childhood absence epilepsy (cae) with well-defined electro clinical features but unknown pathological basis. the incidence of absence epilepsy is about 2 and 8 out of every 100 000 children up to the age of 16, and the prevalence is 2 and 10% of children with any form of epilepsy. children with cae suffer from high rate of pretreatmen...

The placebo effect has often been considered a nuisance in basic and particularly clinical research. This view has gradually changed in recent years due to deeper insight into the neuro-bio-behavioral mechanisms steering both the placebo and nocebo responses, the evil twin of placebo. For the neuroscientist, placebo and nocebo responses have evolved as indispensable tools to understand brain me...

Defining dose requirement, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics Clinical anaesthetists administer doses of drugs to obtain various degrees of drug effect. Some anaesthetic drug effects, such as muscle relaxation, are relatively easy to quantitate, whereas others such as anaesthetic depth are much more difficult. Anaesthetic dose requirement can be defined as the dose of drug that produces a de...

In 1994, Douglas Graham Altman, one of the greatest statisticians all time, wrote "We need less research, better and research done for good reasons". Twenty-seven years ago, Altman pointed out that system favored unscientific behavior "bad science" was easy to publish, highlighting financial implications this amount poorly designed with erroneous statistical methods, unrepresentative samples, o...

Kisspeptins have emerged as potent elicitors of gonadotropin secretion and, therefore, putative targets for pharmacological intervention. In this context, desensitization of gonadotropin responses to continuous administration of kisspeptins has begun to be characterized, but information so far available is mostly restricted to LH responses in males, whereas the similar phenomenon in females, of...

The aim of this study was to assess bovine plasma cortisol response to blood sampling, to 5-min isolation in a novel arena and to dexamethasone blockade and ACTH stimulation. Twelve 10-month old heifers of the Friesian and Salers breeds were used. Blood collection, carried out via a jugular cannula or caudal venipuncture, had no significant effect on cortisol level. This level increased by abou...

Although dose-response curves are commonly used to describe in vivo cutaneous α-adrenergic responses, modeling parameters and analyses methods are not consistent across studies. The goal of the present investigation was to compare three analysis methods for in vivo cutaneous vasoconstriction studies using one reference data set. Eight women (22 ± 1 yr, 24 ± 1 kg/m(2)) were instrumented with thr...

Repeated processing of the same information is associated with decreased neuronal responses, termed repetition suppression (RS). Although RS effects (i.e., the difference in activity between novel and repeated stimuli) have been demonstrated within several brain regions, such as the medial temporal lobe, their precise neural mechanisms still remain unclear. Here, we used functional magnetic res...