1,721,456 research outputs found

    Practical guidance for prescribing with aripiprazole in bipolar disorder

    No full text
    Background: Aripiprazole differs from other atypical antipsychotics in its pharmacological and clinical profile. Scope: As aripiprazole has been available in the USA for bipolar mania since 2004, clinical experience-sharing from clinical and research use of this agent can assist with initiation and administration in practice. The clinical experience-guided recommendations provided herein are based on clinical practice of the author (intended as clinical opinions and general suggestions of the author and/or hypotheses to be scientifically tested) and a review of the literature (based on a PubMed search and limited to double-blind, randomised, controlled clinical trials) to provide the most current aripiprazole studies in bipolar mania. This article is designed to share the experience gained over time by the author on the prescribing of aripiprazole, how best to approach initiation of and switching to aripiprazole, and how and when to use adjunctive medications. Findings: In the treatment of a manic episode, aripiprazole may be initiated at 15 mg/day and adjusted as required (down to 5-10 mg/day or up to 30 mg/day). When switching to aripiprazole, it is frequently advisable to maintain the therapeutic dose of current medication, add aripiprazole 5, 10 or 15 mg/day, and adjust between 10 and 30 mg/day depending on response and tolerability. Only once an effective aripiprazole dose is reached can the prior medication be gradually discontinued. A tolerability profile different from other atypical antipsychotics should be expected. Side-effects, if they occur, are usually manageable and frequently resolve soon after initiation. Conclusions: Practical guidance for prescribing aripiprazole in bipolar mania is provided to assist clinicians using aripiprazole for the treatment of bipolar mania in real-world practice; for example, with dose selection, for the switching strategies and for the management of side-effects. © 2008 Informa UK Ltd

    Medical monitoring in patients with bipolar disorder: a review of data

    No full text
    Patients with bipolar disorder have been found to have high rates of endocrine and cardiovascular disorders as well as obesity. Some health problems may be influenced by the psychiatric disorder itself, and, similarly, health problems may influence the course of bipolar disorder. Further, some pharmacologic treatments used for bipolar disorder have been associated with obesity, diabetes, hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia, metabolic syndrome, prolonged QTc, and thyroid dysfunction. To optimize care and achieve the best possible treatment outcomes, integrated psychiatric and medical care is needed

    On the Robust Synthesis of Logical Consensus Algorithms for Distributed Intrusion Detection

    Full text link
    We introduce a novel consensus mechanism by which the agents of a network can reach an agreement on the value of a shared logical vector function depending on binary input events. Based on results on the convergence of finite-state iteration systems, we provide a technique to design logical consensus systems that minimizing the number of messages to be exchanged and the number of steps before consensus is reached, and tolerating a bounded number of failed or malicious agents. We provide sufficient joint conditions on the input visibility and the communication topology for the method’s applicability. We describe the application of our method to two distributed network intrusion detection problems

    Racecar Longitudinal Control in Unknown and Highly-Varying Driving Conditions

    Full text link
    This paper focuses on racecar longitudinal control with highly-varying driving conditions. The main factors affecting the dynamic behavior of a vehicle, including aerodynamic forces, wheel rolling resistance, traction force resulting from changing tire-road interaction as well as the occurrence of sudden wind gusts or the presence of persistent winds, are considered and assumed to have unknown models. By exploiting the theory on delayed input-state observers and using measurement data about the vehicle and wheel speeds, a dynamic filter that allows the online reconstruction of the above-mentioned unknown time-varying quantities is derived. Moreover, by exploiting the notion of effective tire radius, a reduced-degree-of-freedom model for the longitudinal vehicle dynamics is obtained, which is independent of the traction force and that enables, when used with the observer filter described above, an accurate speed control compensating for the resistance forces. One appealing feature of the proposed estimation and control method is that it requires no model information about such forces, for which, at the state-of-the-art, only heuristic approximations to be a-priori identified are available. Its effectiveness is shown via the simulation of scenarios where the car is required to execute aggressive maneuvers and the asphalt road surface abruptly changes from dry to wet, snowy, and icy. The evaluation also reveals that the proposed estimation technique outperforms standard solutions even in the presence of measurement noise
    corecore