Parent-completed scales for measuring seizure severity and severity of side-effects of antiepileptic drugs in childhood epilepsy: development and psychometric analysis.

We have developed two outcome measures for childhood epilepsy: a seizure severity (SS) scale and a side-effects (SE) scale. Both scales have been designed for completion by parents. The scales were tested in two pilot phases and the results of this stepwise analysis are described here. The final scales' psychometric properties were assessed in a group of 80 children with active epilepsy, representative of the population at whom the scales were aimed: children with chronic epilepsy, aged 4-16 years, including all seizure types and epilepsies, as well as children with neurological comorbidity. The SS scale and SE scale showed good internal consistency and test-retest stability. Although there was a significant positive correlation between the SS scale and the SE scale, this was low, indicating that the scales measure a different clinical trait. The SE scale consisted of two subscales: a Toxic subscale, measuring the severity of dose-related side-effects, and a Chronic subscale, measuring the severity of long-term behavioural and cognitive side-effects. These subscales for side-effects showed a high correlation and can be used as a joint scale. These scales have the potential to improve outcome assessment in childhood epilepsy and they can be used to assess important aspects of quality of life in this population

On the stability of low-order continuous and discontinuous mixed finite element methods in viscoeleastic fluid mechanics

In recent years a lot of research has been performed on the development of numerical tools for viscoelastic flow simulations. The nature of the governing equations, i.e. constitutive equations and conservation of mass and momentum, requires that special attention has to be paid to the numerical solution algorithm. For instance, a major problem that needs to be resolved is the loss of stability of standard Galerkin solution procedures with increasing Weissenberg numbers. To overcome this problem, several stabilising techniques have been proposed such as application of Petrov-Galerkin weighting or discontinuous methods, as is common for finite difference schemes. Another challenging task is created by the complex rheology of viscoelastic fluids. Since, realistic analysis of polymer flows compels the use of multiple viscoelastic modes, a very large number of global degrees of freedom is obtained when mixed methods are applied. This, in turn, requires a highly efficient solution strategy. The mixed finite element method that will be presented is based on a new Discontinuous Galerkin technique to obtain local discontinuous approximations of all independent variables. Although closely related to the mortar element method, this discontinuous technique allows for jumps across the element boundaries and does not require auxiliary variables to enforce continuity. Due to the local support of the polynomial basis, the method is suited for an element-by-element time marching algorithm yielding an efficient handling of the multitude of unknowns. Furthermore, the local character of the bases implies that the method is highly flexible and suited for adaptive polynomial refinement and non-matching grids