The “contagious” clinician

Contagious Cancer

Although cancer can on occasion be caused by infectious agents such as specific bacteria, parasites, and viruses, it is not generally considered a transmissible disease. In rare circumstances, however, direct communication from one host to another has been documented. The Tasmanian devil is now threatened with extinction in the wild because of a fatal transmissible cancer, devil facial tumor di...

Contagious yawning and the brain.

Contagious yawning, the onset of a yawn triggered by seeing, hearing, reading, or thinking about another person yawn is a well-documented phenomenon. The mechanisms that drive contagious yawning are as yet unknown, but there is recent evidence of a link between contagious yawning and self-processing (S.M. Platek, S.R. Critton, T.E. Myers, G.G. Gallup Jr., Contagious yawning: the role of self-aw...

Contagious Sets in Expanders

We consider the following activation process in d-regular undirected graphs: a vertex is active either if it belongs to a set of initially activated vertices or if at some point it has at least r active neighbors, where 1 < r ≤ d is the activation threshold. Such processes have been studied extensively in several fields such as combinatorics, computer science, probability and statistical physic...

Coagulation for the clinician.

Psychopharmacology for the Clinician

A 47-year-old man with a long history of alcohol dependence and impaired control over intake has refused all the approaches suggested to him (e.g., detoxification followed by residential treatment, Alcoholics Anonymous, cognitive–behavioural therapy). He maintains a reasonable psychosocial adjustment (i.e., family relations, work, leisure), and physical damage (neurological, cardiovascular, liv...