Cognitive functioning in stabilized first-episode psychosis patients.

This paper describes the cognitive functioning of a community cohort of individuals presenting with a first episode of a schizophrenia spectrum psychosis. Data were obtained for 107 patients (mean age 25 years) following stabilization of acute psychotic symptoms, mostly with the use of novel antipsychotics, on measures of intellectual, memory, attentional and executive functioning using a standardized battery of cognitive measures, including WAIS III and WMS III. While patients generally performed in the average range across the majority of measures, deficits (Z-scores >1.

Communicating radiation exposure: a simple approach.

Objective: The aim of this article is to provide a general method to help explain radiation exposure to patients presenting for nuclear medicine procedures. The concept is to convert the effective dose from any nuclear medicine procedure to the equivalent time in months or years to obtain the same effective dose from background radiation.

Methods: The effective dose of each common diagnostic nuclear medicine procedure was obtained from the literature and the corresponding background equivalent radiation time (BERT) was calculated assuming an average background radiation of 3 mSv/y.

Relationship of current and past smoking to mortality and morbidity in patients with left ventricular dysfunction.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of smoking in patients with left ventricular dysfunction.

Background: The impact of smoking in patients with left ventricular dysfunction has not been well-studied.

Methods: We compared the incidence of death, hospitalization due to heart failure and myocardial infarction (MI) in current smokers to ex-smokers of < or =2 years and ex-smokers of >2 years duration to never-smokers among participants of the Study Of Left Ventricular Dysfunction (SOLVD) Prevention and Intervention trials.

A full genome search in multiple sclerosis.

The aetiology of multiple sclerosis (MS) is uncertain. There is strong circumstantial evidence to indicate it is an autoimmune complex trait. Risks for first degree relatives are increased some 20 fold over the general population.