1,720,972 research outputs found
Long-term cyclosporine treatment in a group of severe myasthenia gravis patients
No full textWe evaluated cyclosporine A (CsA) treatment in 9 patients (6 female and 3 male), 16-63 years old, with severe myasthenia gravis (MG) for a mean period of 2 years (range 16-36 months). All of the patients had been previously treated either with corticosteroids or by combined immunotherapy, and 5 needed periodic plasma exchanges. The reduction of plasmapheresis cycles in the 5 patients who needed periodic plasma exchange to mantain an acceptable quality of life showed an impressive cost-benefit analysis. During CsA treatment 7 of 9 patients improved their muscle strength and functional score. In all the patients except one the corticosteroid dosage was reduced and in 7 of the 9 patients the dose reduction was over 50% with subsequent reduction of the corticosteroid side effects. The findings showed that initiation of CsA treatment increased muscle strength and reduced corticosteroid dosage. The most common CsA side effects were: a serum creatinine increase that occurred in the first 6-12 months of therapy in 8 patients, other side effects like hypertrichosis and gingival hyperplasia were present in four patients. Blood pressure increase was found in only one patient. CsA treatment may be a valuable and cost effective treatment in severe MG
Short and long-term follow-up in a cohort of 48 DMD patients treated with corticosteroids
No full textYour actions in my cerebellum: subclinical deficits in action observation in patients with unilateral chronic cerebellar stroke
No full textEmpirical evidence indicates that cognitive consequences of cerebellar lesions tend to be mild and less important than the symptoms due to lesions to cerebral areas. By contrast, imaging studies consistently report strong cerebellar activity during tasks of action observation and action understanding. This has been interpreted as part of the automatic motor simulation process that takes place in the context of action observation. The function of the cerebellum as a sequencer during executed movements makes it a good candidate, within the framework of embodied cognition, for a pivotal role in understanding the timing of action sequences. Here, we investigated a cohort of eight patients with chronic, first-ever, isolated, ischemic lesions of the cerebellum. The experimental task consisted in identifying a plausible sequence of pictures from a randomly ordered group of still frames extracted from (a) a complex action performed by a human actor ("biological action" test) or (b) a complex physical event occurring to an inanimate object ("folk physics" test). A group of 16 healthy participants was used as control. The main result showed that cerebellar patients performed significantly worse than controls in both sequencing tasks, but performed much worse in the "biological action" test than in the "folk physics" test. The dissociation described here suggests that observed sequences of simple motor acts seem to be represented differentially from other sequences in the cerebellum
Per 'convivere' con la malattia: psicoterapia di gruppo con pazienti affetti da miastenia gravis ed epilessia. Un confronto
No full textIl lavoro descrive due esperienze di psicoterapia di gruppo ad orientamento psicodinamico con pazienti affetti da miastenia gravis ed epilessia. Oggi si riconosce infatti la necessità di un approccio integrato ai pazienti con patologie organiche, diretto non solo al controllo dei sintomi del quadro clinico, ma riguardante anche l'esperienza personale di malattia di ciascun paziente, i suoi vissuti e le conseguenze sociali e familiari della malattia stessa. L’esperienza terapeutica nasce dall’ipotesi che la psicoterapia di gruppo possa costituire un contenitore adatto a ridurre l’angoscia che non trova altri spazi di contenimento. Sperimentare la capacità di elaborarla rinforza l’autostima e ripara dall’umiliazione narcisistica provocata non solo dalla malattia, ma anche dagli effetti spesso devastanti delle terapie fisiche. Nel nostro lavoro si è scelto di descrivere le due esperienze di psicoterapia attraverso la presentazione dei temi che si sono sviluppati, succeduti ed intrecciati nel corso del trattamento terapeutico. Le due esperienze hanno, accanto ad aspetti comuni, soprattutto per quanto riguarda i temi sviluppatesi nel corso del processo terapeutico, anche molte differenze, in particolare relativamente allo sviluppo del processo stesso. Sicuramente in entrambi i gruppi hanno agito i fattori terapeutici generali descritti in letteratura in riferimento alla psicoterapia di gruppo, ma anche fattori specifici ai gruppi con pazienti affetti da patologia organica. In entrambi i gruppi è stato possibile cogliere la differenza tra i veri sintomi propri della malattia e la sintomatologia transitoria legata a stati d'ansia o a conflitti personali, ma soprattutto l’esperienza ha avuto una importante funzione di rispecchiamento e rimodellamento dell’immagine di Sé e dell’identità. E’ stato possibile, in particolare, affrontare la relazione tra identità e vergogna. La malattia, che rappresenta un attacco al corpo, viene sentita da questi pazienti come una ferita narcisistica al senso di Sé, che mina le basi della propria identità. Nei gruppi i pazienti, non più esposti alla possibilità di sentire disprezzo e umiliazione, nella relazione con persone che vivevano la loro stessa condizione, si sono sentiti rispecchiati come persone intere e hanno potuto, quindi, recuperare una propria identità non più rigidamente strutturata nel ruolo di malato, ma ricca di tutte le sue sfaccettature
The glucocorticoid receptor N363S polymorphism and steroid response in Duchenne Dystrophy
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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