Cardiovascular side effects of psychopharmacologic therapy.

WHO defined in 1976 psychopharmaca as drugs affecting psychological functions, behaviour and self-perception. Psychopharmacology is the study of pharmacological agents that affect mental and emotional functions. Creative approach to psychopharmacotherapy reflects a transdisciplinary, integrative and person-centered psychiatry.

Polymyalgia rheumatica--an underdiagnosed disease.

Characteristic features of polymyalgia rheumatica, a widely underdiagnosed disease, are described. The features of the disease are illustrated by the authors' own experience in the treated patients, and compared with literature data. According to the authors' experience, patients with polymyalgia rheumatica are mostly treated for inaccurate diagnoses such as cervicobrachial or lumbosacral syndrome, seronegative rheumatoid arthritis, unexplained febrile state, or precipitated erythrocyte sedimentation rate of unknown etiology.

Severe pancreatitis as first symptom of mumps complicated with pseudocyst and abscess of pancreas.

A 22-year-old man, a refugee from Bosnia, developed serious pancreatitis complicated with pseudocyst and pancreatic abscess. Staphylococcus aureus was isolated from pus and blood cultures. On day 12 of illness, parotitis and epididymitis appeared with elevated specific IgG antibody levels to the mumps virus.

[Cardiac sarcoidosis verified histologically by endovenous myocardial biopsy].

The female patient with sarcoidosis simultaneously involving the lungs, heart, liver, eyes, skin and lacrimal glands is presented. The diagnosis of this disorder was established by biopsy of the liver and skin as well as by at our institution newly introduced method of endovenous blind-myocardial biopsy. Generalized active sarcoidosis had brought the patient into a very profound cachectic state (body weight 48 kg), but her life was directly endangered by granulomatous inflammation of the myocardium with the development of cardiac decompensation, grade I and II atrioventricular conduction disturbances as well as by transitory and total AV block with frequent arrhythmias.