4,090 research outputs found
Levetiracetam in clinical practice: efficacy and tolerability in epilepsy.
BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to evaluate efficacy and tolerability of levetiracetam (LEV) in patients with different epilepsy syndromes.
METHODS: We evaluated epileptic patients seen in the previous 18 months, including all patients with present or past exposure to LEV. Tolerability of LEV therapy was evaluated in all patients; efficacy was evaluated only in patients who had received LEV for at least six months. Two hundred and two patients were included in the study. Patients were considered responsive when showing a > 50% reduction in seizures frequency and non-responders when seizure frequency was unchanged, worsened or showed a reduction < 50%.
RESULTS: Thirty patients did not complete six months of LEV treatment and dropped out. 57.4% of the patients with uncontrolled seizures treated for at least six months were responders, with 27.7% seizure free. Adverse effects were observed in 46 patients (23%) and were responsible for early drop out in 26. Adverse effects occurred significantly more often in females than in males (30.6% vs 13.2%); moreover, nearly 30% of women with adverse effects complained of more than one adverse effect, while this was never observed in male patients.
CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows LEV as a well tolerated and effective treatment, both in monotherapy and as an add-on. Further investigations on larges samples are needed to investigate the issue of gender-related tolerability
QoE in Pull Based P2P-TV Systems: Overlay Topology Design Tradeoff
Abstract—This paper presents a systematic performance anal-ysis of pull P2P video streaming systems for live applications, providing guidelines for the design of the overlay topology and the chunk scheduling algorithm. The contribution of the paper is threefold: 1) we propose a realistic simulative model of the system that represents the effects of access bandwidth heterogeneity, latencies, peculiar characteristics of the video, while still guaranteeing good scalability properties; 2) we propose a new latency/bandwidth-aware overlay topology design strategy that improves application layer performance while reducing the underlying transport network stress; 3) we investigate the impact of chunk scheduling algorithms that explicitly exploit properties of encoded video. Results show that our proposal jointly improves the actual Quality of Experience of users and reduces the cost the transport network has to support. I
Transient epileptic amnesia: an emerging late-onset epileptic syndrome.
Transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) is a distinct neurologic condition occurring in
late-middle/old age and presenting with amnesic attacks of epileptic nature and
interictal memory disturbances. For many years this condition has been associated
with the nonepileptic condition of transient global amnesia (TGA) and still today
is poorly recognized by clinicians. Despite the clinical and laboratory findings
that distinguish TEA from TGA, differential diagnosis may be difficult in the
individual patient. Every effort must be employed for an early diagnosis, since
antiepileptic treatment may readily control both ictal episodes and memory
disturbances
Polycystic ovary syndrome in women using valproate: a review.
Valproate (VPA) is a highly effective drug successfully employed in several neuropsychiatric diseases. In the last 15 years, an increased prevalence of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) associated with VPA use has been reported in both women with epilepsy and women with bipolar disorders. However, data on this subject are contrasting and it is possible that different factors might play a role in the development of PCOS in these patients. The risk of developing PCOS during VPA treatment seems to be higher in women with epilepsy than in women with bipolar disorders, and this might be due to an underlying neuroendocrine dysfunction related to the seizure disorder. Gynecologists must be aware of the possibility that PCOS in these populations of patients might be related to VPA use, and a careful multi-specialist approach is required for evaluating the risks and benefits of this treatment in the presence of features of PCOS
Investigating the potentials and limitations of capillary-fed vapor generators: A heat and mass transfer study
Passive fluid transport, which plays a crucial role in a wide range of processes from engineering to biology field, is becoming increasingly attractive due to the prospect of a lower energy demand. Here, we focus the attention on passive thermal evaporation, which is considered an emerging and promising water treatment technique. In detail, we report an extensive theoretical study of capillary-driven fluid flow in hydrophilic and porous materials to be used as thermal evaporators in water treatment devices such as vapor generators or distillers. These materials are designed to spontaneously and properly soak up the water to be treated and absorb thermal energy, establishing a continuous vapor generation. Design guidelines are reported and extensively discussed with the aim of preventing dry-out phenomena, which could compromise the correct functioning of the component and limit the performance. The results presented here envision a potential component size on the order of meters, which is, to the best of our knowledge, two orders of magnitude more than the size effectively explored in the experimental tests reported in the recent literature. Moreover, this modelling framework may be leveraged to assist innovation actions on materials and/or manufacturing techniques, further increasing the competitiveness and the widespread deployment of passive and sustainable solutions
Orchestrating Forest Policy in Italy: Mission Impossible?
In the Italian political and economic agenda the forest sector occupies a marginal role. The forest sector in Italy is characterized by a high institutional fragmentation and centralized decision-making processes dominated by Public Forest Administrations. Public participation in forest policy processes has been implemented since the 1990s at national, regional and local levels in several cases. However, today no significant changes have been observed in the overall governance of the forest sector and stakeholders' involvement in Italian forest policy decision-making is still rather limited. The aims of this paper are to describe the state of forest-related participatory processes in Italy at various levels (national, regional and local) and identify which factors and actors hinder or support the establishment and implementation of participatory forest-related processes in the country. The forest-related participatory processes are analyzed adopting a qualitative-based approach and interpreting interactive, complex and non-linear participatory processes through the lens of panarchy theory
Strengthening measurements from the edges: application-level packet loss rate estimation
Network users know much less than ISPs, Internet exchanges and content providers about what happens inside the network. Consequently users cannot either easily detect network neutrality violations or readily exercise their market power by knowledgeably switching ISPs. This paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to empower users by proposing two models to estimate -- via application-level measurements -- a key network indicator, i.e., the packet loss rate (PLR) experienced by FTP-like TCP downloads. Controlled, testbed, and large-scale experiments show that the Inverse Mathis model is simpler and more consistent across the whole PLR range, but less accurate than the more advanced Likely Rexmit model for landline connections and moderate PL
Optimization of Association Rules Extraction Through Exploitation of Context Dependent Constraints
A Fast and Efficient Incremental Approach toward Dynamic Community Detection
Community detection is a discovery tool used by network scientists to analyze
the structure of real-world networks. It seeks to identify natural divisions
that may exist in the input networks that partition the vertices into coherent
modules (or communities). While this problem space is rich with efficient
algorithms and software, most of this literature caters to the static use-case
where the underlying network does not change. However, many emerging real-world
use-cases give rise to a need to incorporate dynamic graphs as inputs.
In this paper, we present a fast and efficient incremental approach toward
dynamic community detection. The key contribution is a generic technique called
, which examines the most recent batch of changes made to an
input graph and selects a subset of vertices to reevaluate for potential
community (re)assignment. This technique can be incorporated into any of the
community detection methods that use modularity as its objective function for
clustering. For demonstration purposes, we incorporated the technique into two
well-known community detection tools. Our experiments demonstrate that our new
incremental approach is able to generate performance speedups without
compromising on the output quality (despite its heuristic nature). For
instance, on a real-world network with 63M temporal edges (over 12 time steps),
our approach was able to complete in 1056 seconds, yielding a 3x speedup over a
baseline implementation. In addition to demonstrating the performance benefits,
we also show how to use our approach to delineate appropriate intervals of
temporal resolutions at which to analyze an input network
- …