[Effective factors in multifamily therapy in patients with eating disorders : Critical appraisal and implications for practice].

Multifamily therapy (MFT), the treatment of several families simultaneously, is an established method of psychotherapy used in a wide range of diagnoses. However, there is limited knowledge about the exact factors of action of this treatment method. The development of MFT as a separate form of therapy is presented, as are its previous applications in the treatment of patients with eating disorders.

Single, very low rituximab doses in healthy volunteers - a pilot and a randomized trial: implications for dosing and biosimilarity testing.

There are no  dose-finding trials available for rituximab that could guide dosing in non-malignant diseases. We hypothesized that currently used doses (≥375 mg/m) exceed several hundred-fold the half-maximal effective dose, which is most sensitive for detecting putative differences between biosimilars and important for dose finding. In an open label, exploratory trial healthy volunteers received single infusions of rituximab at doses of 0.

The leaf-area shrinkage effect can bias paleoclimate and ecology research.

Premise Of The Study: Leaf area is a key trait that links plant form, function, and environment. Measures of leaf area can be biased because leaf area is often estimated from dried or fossilized specimens that have shrunk by an unknown amount. We tested the common assumption that this shrinkage is negligible.

[Changes in pensioning and psychosomatic assessment].

Appropriate evaluation of a patient's handicapping or disabling conditions, of his or her capacity for work and gainful activity rank among the recurring tasks in inpatient rehabilitation. Published recently, the Beeinträchtigungsschwere-Score (BSS; a score for determining the severity of a condition) constitutes a highly practicable instrument for these purposes, well suited to the clinical setting. Particular difficulties are encountered in the assessment of patients already in the pension award process, a population where the original disease picture has been superimposed by numerous chronification factors of a psychological, social and economic nature so that a so-called invalidity pensioning career has set in.

[Psychosomatic disorders in the area of environmental medicine. Environmental medicine--environmental psychology].

In environmental medicine, we frequently see patients who have a very firm, sometimes fixated view of the nature of their disease, and they do not except the correction by the physician but only confirmation. Therefore, we face the task to undertake these patients a careful medical and psychological differential diagnosis. In a major number of cases, the symptoms are caused not by supported environmental effects but by an unknown diagnosis, and recognition and treatment would be impossible in case of an uncritical adoption of the patient's illness theory.