Impact of the biopsychosocial model of disability on the medicolegal assessment of personal injury.

Background: The objective of this paper was to determine whether the medicolegal assessment of injured and disabled persons is based on the biopsychosocial model of disability proposed by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health.

Methods: We searched for the word disability and other keywords, occurring alone or in combination as well as the meaning given to the word "disability" in two Belgian legal databases (JURA and STRADALEX) for the period from 1960 to 2020.

Results: The use of the term disability has increased over time, more so from 2001 to 2010, in areas of public health law, labor relations, and personal injury law.

Defining personal loss after severe brain damage.

The impact of disorders of consciousness in terms of compensation for patients' personal non-economic injuries often raises vigorous debates in legal courts. Attributing personal loss to non-communicating brain damaged patients based on assessment of residual levels of consciousness remains controversial. Is the loss of consciousness in vegetative or minimally conscious state a condition to be compensated for? Does alteration of consciousness diminish the seriousness of injury? To answer these challenging medico-legal questions, three distinct aspects are here taken into consideration: (i) the recognition that disorders of consciousness constitute a personal injury for non-communicative patients; (ii) the scope of the compensation for this injury and (iii) the purpose of the compensation granted.

Locked-in syndrome in children: report of five cases and review of the literature.

The locked-in syndrome is a rare neurologic disorder defined by (1) the presence of sustained eye opening; (2) preserved awareness; (3) aphonia or hypophonia; (4) quadriplegia or quadriparesis; and (5) a primary mode of communication that uses vertical or lateral eye movement or blinking. Five cases are reported here, and previous literature is reviewed. According to the literature, the most common etiology of locked-in syndrome in children is ventral pontine stroke, most frequently caused by a vertebrobasilar artery thrombosis or occlusion.

Reporting systems in healthcare from a case-by-case experience to a general framework: an example in anaesthesia.

Reporting systems are becoming more widespread in healthcare. Since they may become mandatory under the pressure of insurance companies and administrative organizations, it is important to begin to go beyond a case-by-case approach and to move to a system where there is a general reflection on the best conditions of development and setting up of such systems in medicine. In this paper, we review existing reporting systems, break down their components, examine how they are constructed and propose some ideas on how to articulate them in a dynamic process in order to improve the validity of the tool as mediator of safety, quality and well-being at work.

Contribution of PET studies in diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration.

Five patients with clinical features of corticobasal degeneration (CBD) were studied with PET imaging. The main clinical findings included a unilateral extrapyramidal motor disorder, without significant response to levodopa, as well as clumsiness, dysarthria, apraxia and a clear asymmetry of neurological signs. PET studies with (18)F-labeled 2-deoxy-2-fluoro-D-glucose disclosed mainly a significant hypometabolism in the thalamus and motor cortex controlateral to the more affected limbs.