A comparative ID migraine screener study in ophthalmology, ENT and neurology out-patient clinics

Migraine is more likely to be misdiagnosed in patients with comorbid diseases. Not only primary care physicians, but also specialists might misdiagnose it due to the lack of diagnostic criteria awareness. The ID migraine test is a reliable screening instrument that may facilitate and accelerate migraine recognition. This study aimed to compare the prevalence and characteristics of migraine in a large sample of patients admitted to clinics of ophthalmology (OC), ear, nose and throat diseases (ENTC) and neurology (NC), as well as to validate the use of the ID migraine test in OC and ENTC settings. This was a multicentre (11 cites) study of out-patients admitting either to NC, ENTC or OC of the study sites during five consecutive working days within 1 week. From each of the clinics, 100 patients were planned to be recruited. All recruited patients were interviewed and those having a headache complaint received an ID migraine test and were examined for headache diagnosis by a neurologist, blinded to the ID migraine test result. A total of 2625 subjects were recruited. Only 1.3% of OC patients and 5.4% of ENTC patients have been admitted with a primary complaint of headache, whereas the percentage of NC patients suffering from headache was 37.6%. Whereas 138 patients (19.3%) in OC, 154 (17.3%) in ENTC and 347 (34%) in NC were found to be ID migraine test positive, 149 patients (20.8%) in OC, 142 (16%) in ENTC and 338 (33.1%) in NC were diagnosed with migraine. The sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive ratios of the ID migraine test were found to be similar in all clinics. An important fraction of the patients admitted to NC, as well as to OC and ENTC, for headache and/or other complaints were found out to have migraine by means of a simple screening test. This study validated the ID migraine test as a sensitive and specific tool in OC and ENTC, encouraging its use as a screening instrument.Pfizer-Türkiy

Primary Sjögren's Syndrome Presenting As Neuromyelitis Optica

PubMed ID: 17162200This report presents a patient with Devic's neuromyelitis optica associated with primary Sjögren's syndrome. Her first attack was right-sided optic neuritis at age 10 years. Attacks involving both optic nerves and medulla spinalis were recorded during the ensuing years. The diagnosis of Sjögren's syndrome could not be made until the second decade because it was not suspected. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Childhood-onset optic neuritis as the first manifestation of Behçet's disease

A 15-year-old girl presented with sudden blurring of vision in both eyes, which was recurring for the third time. The fundoscopy demonstrated bilateral optic disc edema with macular star exudates. The diagnosis of Behçet's disease (BD) could be made 5 months after the first visual disturbance, when the other manifestations of the disease occurred. Although ocular involvement is frequent, primer optic neuritis has rarely been reported in BD. Childhood onset of the disorder is very uncommon as well. To our knowledge, this is the first report of optic neuritis as the first manifestation of BD in the pediatric age group. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Headache in primary Sjögren's syndrome: A prevalence study

PubMed ID: 18355394Objectives - To determine the prevalence of headache in patients with primary Sjögren's syndrome (pSS) and to examine the relationship between headache types and clinical, serologic features of the disease. Methods - The study enclosed 133 patients with the diagnoses of pSS and 97 healthy controls. A questionnaire designed to assess the presence of headache and if present to classify it according to the criteria of the International Headache Society was used. Results - In 133 of the pSS patients evaluated, 104 had headache. No association was present between types of headache and the clinical and laboratory manifestations of the disease. Both migraine and tension-type headache were more common in patients with pSS when compared with healthy controls (P < 0.001). Conclusions - The high prevalence of migraine in pSS patients might be explained by a vascular headache triggered by immuno-mediated disease activity without an obvious clinic or laboratory marker. Copyright © 2008 The Authors

Multimodal evoked potentials in primary Sjögren's syndrome without neurological manifestations

We evaluated multimodal evoked potentials in patients with primary Sjögren's syndrome without clinical neurological manifestations. While brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEP) were performed in ninety patients visual (VEP) and somatosensory evoked potentials (SEP) could be evaluated in fifty-eight patients. The control group included 20 healthy adults matched for sex and chronological age. VEP and AEP studies did not reveal any abnormality. In SEP; N9-N13 interpeak latencies were significantly prolonged in the patients group. However, the latency of N9 potentials recorded from Erb's point was normal as well as the N13-N20 interpeak latencies. This result indicates that central branches of the primary sensory neurons are involved in Sjögren's syndrome

Predicting the sentiment in sentences based on words: An exploratory study on ANEW and ANET

Current practices for sentiment prediction from text mostly involve words-in-a-bag approach that utilize techniques such as support vector machines or naive Bayes. In this study, ANET (Affective Norms for English Text) sentence ratings of pleasure and arousal are compared with ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words) word ratings using regression and single layer neural networks. The sentences in ANET are decomposed into their words to obtain valence and arousal ratings from ANEW. A stop list is formed for non-words as well as words that are not found in ANEW. Then we studied whether the sentence sentiment reflected in terms of valence and arousal can be predicted from the sentiment of words in the sentence. Using linear regression, we found that approximately 35% of the variance in ANET valence and arousal ratings can be explained by ANEW valence and arousal ratings. Furthermore, Pearson correlation coefficient for ANEW and ANET ratings are similar for both valence and arousal, and close to 0.6. We also trained neural networks to investigate if non-linear approximations improved prediction of sentence sentiments from the constituent words. Out of several feedforward neural network configurations, a network with 200 hidden layer nodes turned out to be capable of identifying sentence sentiments accurately: the words' valence and arousal values explained 88 % of the variance in the sentences' valence ratings and 91 % of the variance in the sentences' arousal ratings. This preliminary study indicates that a proper choice of neural network might be adequate to estimate sentiments of sentences from sentiments of words

Application of ADM1 model to a full-scale anaerobic digester under dynamic organic loading conditions

The IWA Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 (ADM1) was used to simulate the full-scale anaerobic sludge digester of Ankara Central Wastewater Treatment Plant. The digester is a completely mixed, once through continuous flow type which is being fed with a primary and secondary sludge mixture. The variability and unpredicted nature of the primary sludge composition was expected to challenge the model. A one-year dynamic data set from the digester was used for model calibration and validation in the study. The standard ADM1 model was corrected in the study with regard to nitrogen and carbon mass balances. A good correlation between the measured and simulated data was obtained for biogas yield, total volatile fatty acids and pH after heuristically calibrating stoichiometric and kinetic parameters of the ADM1 model. The simulation is sensitive to influent composition