BACKGROUND The Vegetative and Minimally Conscious States (VS; MCS) are characterized by absent or highly disordered signs of awareness alongside preserved sleep-wake cycles. According to international diagnostic guidelines, sleep-wake cycles are assessed by means of observations of variable periods of eye-opening and eye-closure. However, there is little empirical evidence for true circadian sl...

Narcolepsy, a disorder characterized by fragmented bouts of sleep and wakefulness during the day and night as well as cataplexy, has been linked in humans and nonhuman animals to the functional integrity of the orexinergic system. Adult orexin knockout mice and dogs with a mutation of the orexin receptor exhibit symptoms that mirror those seen in narcoleptic humans. As with narcolepsy, infant s...

TACROLIMUS OINTMENT VERSUS PIMECROLIMUS CREAM IN PATIENTS WITH ATOPIC DERMATITIS INVOLVING THE HEAD AND/OR NECK Robert Kirsner, MD, PhD, University of Miami School of Medicine, Miami, FL, United States; Richard Antaya, MD, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, United States; Alan B. Fleischer, Jr, MD, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, United States; Rich...

To Whom, When, and How Much to Discount? A Constrained Optimization of Customized Temporal Discounts Joseph Johnson a,∗, Gerard J. Tellis b,1, Edward H. Ip c,2 a University of Miami, United States b Marshal School of Business, University of Southern California, United States c Wake Forest University School of Medicine, 3rd Floor MRI Building Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27103, Un...

Stress plays a key role in the development of psychiatric disorders and has a negative impact on sleep integrity. In mice, chronic social defeat stress (CSDS) is an ethologically valid model of stress-related disorders but little is known about its effects on sleep regulation. Here, we investigated the immediate and long-term effects of 10 consecutive days of social defeat (SD) on vigilance sta...

Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity is a key indicator of a vigilance state, and quantitative analyses of the EEG have revealed profound differences both between and within vigilance states in humans. We summarize recent studies that investigated how the spectral composition of the EEG during the three vigilance states, that is, wakefulness, rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep, is mod...

When people learn that I study lethal injection, they are usually curious to know more (or at least they are polite enough to ask questions). Interestingly, the question that arises most often— from lawyers, law students, and laypeople—is why states behave as they do. In the wake of botched executions and ample evidence of lethal injection‘s dangers, why do states fail to address their executio...

The massive national experiment in electricity deregulation — launched by over a dozen states more than a decade ago, in the wake of the Reagan revolution — has failed on multiple counts. Intended to reduce electricity rates, deregulation instead increased rates. For the 10 months through October 2006, average rates in deregulated states were 55 percent higher than in regulated states. Volatili...

The structure of sleep across the night as expressed by the hypnogram, is characterised by repeated transitions between the different states of vigilance: wake, light and deep non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This review is concerned with current knowledge on these state transitions, focusing primarily on those findings that allow the integration of data ...