A qualitative description of falls in a neuro-rehabilitation unit: the use of a standardised fall report including the International Classification of Functioning (ICF) to describe activities and environmental factors.

Purpose: Falls are a recognised problem for people with long-term neurological conditions but less is known about fall risk in young adults. This study describes fallers' and falls' characteristics in adults less than 60 years old, in a neuro-rehabilitation unit.

Methods: This single-centre, longitudinal, observational study included 114 consecutive admissions to a UK neuro-rehabilitation unit over 20 months.

Effect of acute antidepressant administration on negative affective bias in depressed patients.

Objective: Acute administration of an antidepressant increases positive affective processing in healthy volunteers, an effect that may be relevant to the therapeutic actions of these medications. The authors investigated whether this effect is apparent in depressed patients early in treatment, prior to changes in mood and symptoms.

Method: In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-groups randomized design, the authors examined the effect of a single 4-mg dose of the norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor reboxetine on emotional processing.

The role of serotonin in nonnormative risky choice: the effects of tryptophan supplements on the "reflection effect" in healthy adult volunteers.

Risky decision-making involves weighing good and bad outcomes against their probabilities in order to determine the relative values of candidate actions. Although human decision-making sometimes conforms to rational models of how this weighting is achieved, irrational (or nonnormative) patterns of risky choice, including shifts between risk-averse and risk-seeking choices involving equivalent-value gambles (the "reflection effect"), are frequently observed. In the present experiment, we investigated the role of serotonin in decision-making under conditions of uncertainty.

Tryptophan supplementation induces a positive bias in the processing of emotional material in healthy female volunteers.

Rationale: The serotonin precursor L-tryptophan (TRP) is available as a nutritional supplement and is licensed as an antidepressant in a number of countries. However, evidence of its efficacy as the primary treatment for depression is limited, and the direct action of TRP on the symptoms of depression and anxiety has not been well-characterised.

Objectives: The present study assessed whether TRP induces cognitive changes opposite to the negative biases found in depression and characteristic of those induced by serotonergic antidepressants in healthy volunteers.