In a study by Cruse et al. published in BMC Medicine, patients with severe brain damage who were in the Vegetative or Minimally Conscious States (VS or MCS, respectively) from traumatic and nontraumatic etiologies had assessments of circadian rhythms using an actigraph, a device worn on a limb to evaluate circadian rhythmicity, in this population. This is a novel approach and is being used as a...

The National Dementia Strategy was published in February 2009. It was eagerly anticipated and has generated a good deal of sustained media interest, widened awareness, and heightened expectation of better help for people with dementia. The three ambitions of the strategy--to raise awareness, facilitate assessment, and improve services--are unquestionably correct; but the assumptions, emphases, ...

In the past, well histories such as produced chloride concentration and injection rate data have been used to identify well-to-well relationships and thereby to recognize injection return flow paths in the reservoir. One of the difficulties in earlier approaches has been the need to make some kind of assumption of the expected form of the production histories. By using nonparametric regression,...

Choice underpins everything we do as critical care clinicians. We choose whether to treat, when to treat and how to treat from an ever-increasing selection of alternatives, and whether to afford the costs associated with the decisions we have made. Some recent articles have looked at how one chooses to ventilate patients (noninvasively or not), how to deal with and avoid ventilator-acquired pne...

This article examines the reception of the early modern hospital among the indigenous people of the Andes under Spanish colonial rule. During the period covered by this study (sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries), the hospital was conceived primarily as a manifestation of the sovereign’s paternalistic concern for his subjects’ spiritual well being. Hospitals in the Spanish American colonies w...