Open Respir Arch
March 2024
A 41-year-old man was admitted to the Emergency Department with bilateral numbness in lower extremities and left femoral palsy. He also reported constitutional symptoms, vomiting and non-bloody diarrhoea for the last several months. He had a previous history of eosinophilic asthma with erratic follow-up.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNonlinear Dynamics Psychol Life Sci
October 2015
Many physiological systems are paradigmatic examples of complex networks, displaying behaviors best studied by means of tools derived from nonlinear dynamics and fractal geometry. Furthermore, while conventional wisdom considers health as an 'orderly' situation (and diseases are often called 'disorders'), truth is that health is characterized by a remarkable (pseudo)-randomness, and the loss of this pseudo-randomness (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: We study the extent to which procalcitonin (Pro-CT) and/or C-reactive protein (CRP) may be helpful in the early triage of febrile patients admitted to a general internal medicine ward.
Methods: This is a prospective, observational study on 62 admitted patients in whom a temperature >38°C had been observed the day before inclusion.
Results: Neither Pro-CT nor CRP was able to discriminate infectious (or bacterial) diseases from the other etiologies as a group, with an area under the ROC curve of 0.
The classic anatomo-clinic paradigm based on clinical syndromes is fraught with problems. Nevertheless, for multiple reasons, clinicians are reluctant to embrace a more pathophysiological approach, even though this is the prevalent paradigm under "which basic sciences work. In recent decades, nonlinear dynamics ("chaos theory") and fractal geometry have provided powerful new tools to analyze physiological systems.
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