NEOPLASM study: Real-life use of lacosamide in patients with brain tumor-related epilepsy.

Background: The choice of antiepileptic drug (AED) therapy in patients with brain tumor-related epilepsy (BTRE) is complicated, and there are a lack of robust clinical trial data to date.

Methods: The NEOPLASM (Neuroncologic Patients treated with LAcoSaMide) study was a 6-month, multicenter, retrospective, observational study in patients with BTRE treated with lacosamide. Patients were started on lacosamide because of a lack of efficacy or adverse events (AEs) with prior AEDs or suitability versus other AEDs, according to clinical practice.

Bilateral inferior frontal language-related activation correlates with verbal recall in patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy and typical language distribution.

Language fMRI has been used in the presurgical evaluation of drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy patients. Previous studies have demonstrated that left temporal lobe epilepsy (LTLE) patients with atypical language lateralization are at lower risk of postsurgical verbal memory decline, hypothesizing co-occurrence of verbal memory and language reorganization presurgically. Furthermore, it has been proposed that the recruitment of right frontal language-related areas is associated with the preservation of verbal memory performance in these patients.

Rational polytherapy with lacosamide in clinical practice: results of a Spanish cohort analysis RELACOVA.

There has been little long-term success with polytherapy for patients with refractory partial-onset epilepsy. The rational combination of antiepileptic drugs based on their mechanism of action may help improve treatment efficacy and tolerability. Lacosamide, a novel sodium channel blocker (SCB), was investigated in 158 patients with partial-onset epilepsy in the prospective, multicenter, observational, RELACOVA cohort study conducted in Spain.

Application of chemometric tools for automatic classification and profile extraction of DNA samples in forensic tasks.

In this paper a method for the automatic DNA spots classification and extraction of profiles associated in DNA polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis is presented and it integrates the use of image processing techniques and chemometrics tools. A software which implements this method was developed; for feature extraction a combination of a PCA analysis and a C4.5 decision tree were used.