EFFECTS OF 6-MONTHS TREATMENT WITH DONEPEZIL AND RIVASTIGMIN ON RESULTS OF NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS OF MMSE, NPI, CLOCK AND BENDER IN PATIENTS WITH ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Alzheimer's disease is the most common degenerative disease of brain. Nowadays, the most common treatment being used to slow down disease progression, include Donepezil , Rivastigmine and Galantamine, which all of them act as inhibitors of acetyl cholinesterase. General purpose of our study was to show effects of treatment with Donepezil and Rivastigmine, as two drugs that commonly used for treatment of AD in Iran and to compare these effects between two drugs. Samples selected from patients who had Alzheimer` disease with DSM IV criteria and were candidate of receiving Donepezil or Rivastigmine, as treatment of AD, for the first time. We used four neuropsychological tests including MMSE, NPI, Clock and Bender to assess patient's cognitive and behavioral changes during treatment with two drugs. Patients divided to two groups (each group 35 cases); Patients with plan of taking Donepezil entered into one of the groups and patients with plan of taking Rivastigmine entered into another. The four tests were completed once before starting treatment and then, 1 month, 3 months and 6 months after treatment with Donepezil and Rivastigmine. MMSE, 6 months after treatment with Donepezil, improved from 20.63 before treatment to 21.83, which is statistically significant (P = 0.04). Also, MMSE, 6 months after treatment with Rivastigmine, improved from 20.03 before treatment to 22.71, which was statistically significant (P = 0.007). About Clock test, there was a significant improvement from 5.74 before treatment to 6.4 after 6 months of treatment with Rivastigmine; while this significant improvement was not seen in patients receiving Donepezil. In two other tests, no significant differences were seen before and after treatment. Also, No significant difference was detected between two groups and so no different effects on these tests between Donepezil and Rivastigmine in 6 months period of treatment

Model-based estimation of loop gain using spontaneous breathing: A validation study

Non-invasive assessment of ventilatory control stability or loop gain (which is a key contributor in a number of sleep-related breathing disorders) has proven to be cumbersome. We present a novel multivariate autoregressive model that we hypothesize will enable us to make time-varying measurements of loop gain using nothing more than spontaneous fluctuations in ventilation and CO(2). The model is adaptive to changes in the feedback control loop and therefore can account for system non-stationarities (e.g. changes in sleep state) and it is resistant to artifacts by using a signal quality measure. We tested this method by assessing its ability to detect a known increase in loop gain induced by proportional assist ventilation (PAV). Subjects were studied during sleep while breathing on continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) alone (to stabilize the airway) or on CPAP + PAV. We show that the method tracked the PAV-induced increase in loop gain, demonstrating its time-varying capabilities, and it remained accurate in the face of measurement related artifacts. The model was able to detect a statistically significant increase in loop gain from 0.14 ± 10 on CPAP alone to 0.21 ± 0.13 on CPAP + PAV (p < 0.05). Furthermore, our method correctly detected that the PAV-induced increase in loop gain was predominantly driven by an increase in controller gain. Taken together, these data provide compelling evidence for the validity of this technique