Waking Up in Two Nations

Waking up to narcolepsy.

Narcolepsy with cataplexy, certainly one of the most fascinating problems in medicine, always seemed (to us) an unlikely candidate for an autoimmune or infectious etiology. In typical cases, the CSF is bland and MRI unrevealing. Powerful evidence (summarized in reference 1) that abnormalities of the hypocretin system contribute to narcolepsy came initially from genetic studies revealing that ca...

Waking up to Global Warming

Waking up to chronic care.

W e are currently experiencing in the United Kingdom something of a backlash against the recent assertions that the National Health Service (NHS) has something to learn from the large Health Maintenance Organizations in the United States such as Kaiser. Whatever the arguments about the relevance of comparisons between our systems, the Chronic Care Model (CCM) is a transatlantic development that...

Waking Up from the American Dream

For eight consecutive months in 2006, Colorado had a greater number of home foreclosures than any other state in the country. Largely attributable to the Denver housing market, this dubious statewide distinction raises questions as to the foreclosure rates and trends in communities beyond the state’s capitol, where little analytical research has been conducted. This project delves into the loca...

Waking up the dormant dentate gyrus.

Commentary Identification and characterization of the vast variety of hippo-campal principal neurons and interneurons are necessary to understand the role that each cell type plays in the complex network alterations leading to epilepsy (1). Over several decades, research has focused on which cells are necessary, sufficient, or extraneous for hippocampal dysfunction often observed in animal mode...