[Chili for therapy of trigeminus neuralgia: a case report].

We report the case of a 39-year-old female patient who suffered from trigeminal neuralgia of the left lingual nerve for 6 years. The previous therapy according to the guidelines including a Jannetta operation was unsuccessful. Only after beginning with daily mastication and consumption of very hot chilli peppers has the patient become reliably pain-free.

The memory fitness program: cognitive effects of a healthy aging intervention.

Context: Age-related memory decline affects a large proportion of older adults. Cognitive training, physical exercise, and other lifestyle habits may help to minimize self-perception of memory loss and a decline in objective memory performance.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine whether a 6-week educational program on memory training, physical activity, stress reduction, and healthy diet led to improved memory performance in older adults.

Clinical equivalence of IV paracetamol compared to IV dipyrone for postoperative analgesia after surgery for breast cancer.

Objective: To assess clinical efficacy of IV paracetamol 1 g and IV dipyrone 1 g on a 24-h dosing schedule in this randomised, double-blinded study of 40 ASA I-III (American Society of Anesthesiologists classification of physical status) patients undergoing surgery for breast cancer.

Research Design And Methods: General anaesthesia using remifentanil and propofol was performed for surgery. The patients were randomly allocated to two groups, receiving infusions of paracetamol 1 g/100 mL (Para Group) or of dipyrone 1 g/100 mL (Dipy Group) 30 min before arrival in the recovery area and every 6 h up to 24 h postoperatively.

["Relaxant" awake but still relaxed].

We report on a 23-year-old female patient who underwent removal of the implants after maxillary surgery. At the end of surgery the administration of anaesthetic agents was discontinued. During the following 30 min several attempts were made to wake the patient, but she did not respond to verbal or pain stimuli.

Erythropoietic reconstitution, macrophages and reticulin fibrosis in bone marrow specimens of CML patients following allogeneic transplantation.

A clinicopathological study was conducted on 351 bone marrow trephine biopsies derived from 124 patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) at standardized endpoints before and after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT). The purpose was to investigate quantitative changes of the nucleated erythroid precursor cell population and other associated features such as resident bone marrow macrophages and myelofibrosis and to elucidate their relevance on engraftment parameters. Monoclonal antibodies were applied for the identification of erythroid precursors and the labeling of mature macrophages; argyrophilic (reticulin-collagen) fibers were demonstrated by a silver impregnation technique.

Nonstationarity and 1/f noise characteristics in heart rate.

The power spectrum of human heart rate (HR) measured over 24 h exhibits "power-law" 1/f alpha-type spectral behavior with alpha approximately 1. We investigate possible nonstationarity in time of the exponent alpha using maximum likelihood estimation, which allows relatively short data segments to be used. Examination of 24-h HR records from ambulatory normal and congestive heart failure (CHF) subjects indicates that the power-law structure of HR is nonstationary.

Characteristics of depressive symptoms in elderly urban and rural African Americans.

Background: Despite considerable progress in the epidemiology of late life depression, little data have been documented in the scientific literature on depressive symptoms among elderly African Americans. The present investigation identifies characteristic symptoms of depression in African American community-resident elders.

Method: Ninety-six African American men and women aged 60 years and older, with equal representation from urban and rural counties in west Tennessee, composed the sample.

Dynamic detection of rhythmic oscillations in heart-rate tracings: a state-space approach based on fourth-order cumulants.

This paper presents a new procedure specifically aimed at providing a dynamical detection of the oscillations occurring in long-term heart-rate (HR) tracings. The procedure is based on a time-variant state-space modelling of the fourth-order cumulants of the HR signal. The state-space estimator was selected because of its demonstrated capability to distinguish between deterministic and stochastic components of the signal, while the fourth-order cumulants of the signal were used as input of the model to further reduce adverse effects of coloured, white and l/f Gaussian noise possibly present in the input data.

Application of the correlation integral to respiratory data of infants during REM sleep.

Non-linear time sequence analysis has been performed on infant sleep measurement data in order to obtain more information about the respiratory processes. As a first step, respiration data during REM sleep were analysed with methods from non-linear dynamics, especially, the correlation integral and the slope of its log-log plot, representing the correlation dimension. Before calculation of the correlation integral, a special kind of filtering has to be applied to the data.