Comparative Study of Physical Activity, Leisure Preferences, and Sedentary Behavior among Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish University Students.

Objective: The objective of this study is to describe and compare the levels of physical activity, preferences for leisure-time physical activity, and the frequency of non-sedentary behaviors of Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish students attending higher education.

Methods: A total of 1354 students (21.2 ± 2.

Preliver transplant red cell distribution width predicts postliver transplant mortality.

Purpose: Prognostication following liver transplantation is limited. Red cell distribution width (RDW) has been associated with morbidity and mortality in a variety of diseases. We hypothesize RDW is predictive of mortality postliver transplantation.

[Philippe Pinel and secret remedies].

At the beginning of the 19th century, every medical discovery had to be examined by the School of Medicine in Paris according to the regulation of the 'secret medicines'. The members of the commission made the analysis of the formula or the suggested method and reported their conclusion before an assembly of professors. 1070 reports were proposed between 1795 and 1821 but about forty Pinel's reports remain unknown.

[ The hospitalization of Jews in mental hospitals under Vichy in the department of the Seine].

The author presents the state of his research about a question not very studied till now in a French départment whose specificities have to be considered. The studying of some fifty medical records and some unpublished documents allows to point out how people persecuted by racial laws have been set in psychiatric hospitals and protected. As for their goods it seems that the system intending to protect psychiatric in-patients during their stay at the hospital has been turned away and used to despoil the patents "claimed or alleged Jews".

[Death by starvation in French psychiatric hospitals during the occupation].

The author reports the tragic event which happened in the psychiatric hospitals where several thousands patients died by starvation during the occupation. He treats with a judicial inquiry in the wake of the death of fifteen patients in the psychiatric hospital of Toulouse.

[Parisian psychiatric institutions under the Empire, as seen by a German visitor].

The author is setting out a book printed at Bayreuth in 1809 and stating a visit of parisian hospitals between 1806 and 1808 by the German botanist and medic August Friedrich Schweigger. The only part of that relation translated in French is concerning mental hospitals; it gives an out of ordinary look upon health cares in France during the 1st Empire.

[Esquirol in 1805: titles, publications, performed duties].

Presentation of an unpublished letter from J.E.D.

[An unpublished letter from Joseph Daquin: the draft of a diary on the insanes].

The author presents an unpublished letter from Joseph Daquin, a savoyard physician contemporary of Philippe Pinel to the minister Chaptal. This letter gives and outline of the practical researches lead by this other pioneer of psychiatry, on the relation to establish with the insane on one hand, on the influence of the moon on madness on the other hand.

[Philippe Pinel in 1784. A "foreign" physician in front of the Paris Faculty of Medicine].

Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), the most famous French alienist was forbidden to practice medicine in Paris during the "Ancien Régime" as he had obtained his doctorate from a provincial faculty. Having been twice an unfortunate candidate to a competition which would have allowed him to resume his studies, he was also rejected in 1784 for functions at Court. The circumstances of these failures are reinvestigated here in the light of various documents some of which unpublished.

[From "morbus democraticus" to passionate idealism. Different reactions of French alienists after the Commune of Paris].

Literary and medical works published immediately after the fall of the Commune of Paris purport an analysis which deserves a critical reading: the study of the influence that alcoholism and the federate movement had on each other, easily naïve and not without excess, stamped with obviously reactionary emotions, appears as historically and scientifically questionable as the proposals towards an interpretation of the event in terms of mental pathology. The search of cases of insanity among the rebels, the idea that their acts could only express some kind of phrenopathic disorder opens the debate on the very existence of some morbid types such as Falret's and Pottier's "reasoning, inexhaustible and proselyte lunatics", the "many characters with fanciful projects, including reformists of the human race, and various utopists" that Morel includes in his classification of hereditary insanity, Serieux's and Capgras "idealists concerned with justice" found amongst delusions related to altruistic claims, Dide's and Guiraud's "idealistic passions, social reformers, anarchists" appear to us as very outdated classifications, on the border of the psychiatric field.

[Use of baclofen in a patient with severe self mutilation].

The authors have drawn up a report on an adult under observation, who, for years, showed signs of the self-mutilation which endangered his life. The use of "Baclofen" led to a reduction of this self-mutilation. The main action of the product was linked to the muscle relaxing properties of the molecule.

[Sleep deprivation and dexamethasone suppression test in healthy volunteers].

One night sleep deprivation in 10 healthy volunteers was performed: none of them presented an abnormal dexamethasone suppression test (DST) during the following afternoon. In this experimentation, a short deprivation of sleep does not alter DST. Etiopathogenic hypothesis of DST abnormalities (and other factors) have been discussed.