Elevated Pre- and Postoperative ROTEM™ Clot Lysis Indices Indicate Reduced Clot Retraction and Increased Mortality in Patients Undergoing Liver Transplantation.

Background: The ROTEM™ clot lysis index, describing the decrease in firmness of a clot with time, predicts mortality in various settings. The variability of the clot lysis index in surgical procedures and the involved pathophysiological mechanisms are unknown. We therefore compared pre- and postoperative clot lysis indices in liver transplantation (LTX) procedures, determined the eventual association with mortality, and investigated the mechanisms underlying decreased clot lysis index using inhibitors of fibrinolysis and clot retraction, respectively.

[How Much Alarm Can the Human Being Tolerate?].

Due to growing technisation of intensive care the number of devices with integrated alarm systems is steadily increasing. However, most of the sounding alarms are false alarms causing high levels of frustration, aggression and inappropriate behaviour amongst the medical personnel. All this jeopardises patient care.

Diffusion tensor imaging of white matter involvement in essential tremor.

This study set out to determine whether there is white matter involvement in essential tremor (ET), the most common movement disorder. We collected diffusion MRI and analysed differences in fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) between ET patients and control subjects as markers of white matter integrity. We used both classical ROI-based statistics and whole-brain analysis techniques, including voxel-wise analysis with SPM5 and tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS).