Tropical soils degraded by slash-and-burn cultivation can be recultivated when amended with ashes and compost.

In many tropical regions, slash-and-burn agriculture is considered as a driver of deforestation; the forest is converted into agricultural land by cutting and burning the trees. However, the fields are abandoned after few years because of yield decrease and weed invasion. Consequently, new surfaces are regularly cleared from the primary forest.

Validation of the Spanish version of the SCOFF questionnaire for the screening of eating disorders in primary care.

Objective: To assess the performance of the Spanish version of a new screening tool (the SCOFF) for the detection of eating disorders (EDs) in primary care.

Design: validation study. The psychiatric interview Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN) was used as the "gold standard.

Topiramate as a treatment for pain in multisomatoform disorder patients: an open trial.

Multisomatoform disorder (MSD), defined as 3 or more medically unexplained, currently distressing physical symptoms in addition to a long (> or =2 years) history of somatization, is a prevalent and disabling disorder in which few pharmacological trials have been referred to in the literature. Thirty-five MSD patients from the Somatoform Disorders Unit of the Miguel Servet University Hospital, Zaragoza, Spain, with pain of more than 3 months as the main symptom, were treated with topiramate in doses ranging from 300-400 mg/day. Patients were assessed at baseline and at one and six-months follow-up with the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ), Pain Visual Analogue Scale (PVAS), Clinical Global Impresión (CGI), Global Assessment Functioning (GAF) and Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale (HADS).

Validation of the Spanish version of the Perceived Stress Questionnaire.

Objective: To validate in Spanish the Perceived Stress Questionnaire (PSQ), a questionnaire to assess stress for research purposes in psychosomatic patients.

Method: The test was administered to a healthy population (N=174) of nursing students and health workers and to a clinical sample (N=80) of patients attending a psychiatric outpatient consultation.

Results: Concurrent validity: General and Recent PSQ scores correlated high with trait anxiety (r=.