Script Concordance Test in Pharmacology: Maiden experience from a Medical School in India.

Introduction: Script concordance test (SCT) is an innovative tool to teach and assess the clinical reasoning skills of medical students. It is the key aspect of clinical competency that enables the medical graduates to progress from novice to practicing general practitioner. SCT was used the first time in pharmacology to inculcate clinic reasoning skills in medical students by focusing on the topic of pharmacotherapy.

Bone Health in Patients with Epilepsy: A Community-based Pilot Nested Case-control Study.

Background: Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) adversely affect bone health and there are reports describing association of alternations of bone and mineral metabolism in epileptic patients.

Objectives: This study was undertaken to evaluate the bone profile (bone mineral parameters and bone mineral density [BMD]) of patients with epilepsy and compare them to their age-, gender-, and socioeconomic status-matched healthy controls in a community.

Materials And Methods: This was a nested case-control study conducted in fifty individuals, which included 25 cases (age above 18 years and on AEDs for at least 3 years) for which 25 controls were selected from the same community.

Item analysis of in use multiple choice questions in pharmacology.

Background: Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are a common method of assessment of medical students. The quality of MCQs is determined by three parameters such as difficulty index (DIF I), discrimination index (DI), and distracter efficiency (DE).

Objectives: The objective of this study is to assess the quality of MCQs currently in use in pharmacology and discard the MCQs which are not found useful.

D-penicillamine Induced Degenerative Dermopathy.

D-penicillamine interferes with elastin and collagen metabolism and produces several cutaneous and multi-systemic side-effects. We present two cases of Wilson's disease who on long-term penicillamine therapy developed drug-induced degenerative dermopathy manifesting as skin fragility over pressure sites and cutis laxa-like changes.