N ot long ago, the personal assistant to an actress left me a voicemail message. In the past, I had provided travel care—vaccines and malaria pills, treatments for pesky rashes and other overseas ills—to the actress, her husband, and members of their entourage. Two or three years had passed since our last visit, but, of course, I remembered the glamorous crew. The aging celebrity—still beautifu...

In this paper, we discuss about the bivariate generalized Poisson distribution for the cortisol awakening response and multiple sclerosis in humans. Dysregulation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has been frequently been reported in multiple sclerosis (MS). So far, HPA axis function in MS has predominantly been studied under pharmacological stimulation which is associated with a...

Giant? The Potentials and the Pitfalls1 In 2009 the World Bank published a report entitled Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant: Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in the Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond. The report highlights the agricultural potential of Africa’s Guinea Savannah (henceforth GS) zone, which it describes as “one of the largest underused agricultural land reserves in the world” (p...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to evaluate the contribution of personality traits in explaining the relationship between workplace stressors and variations in salivary cortisol concentrations. METHOD Multilevel regression analyses were performed on a sample of 401 employees from 34 Quebec firms. Saliva samples were collected five times a day (on awakening, 30 min after awakening, ...

BACKGROUND Studies on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis) function amongst patients with chronic pain show equivocal results and well-controlled cohort studies are rare in this field. The goal of our study was to examine whether HPA-axis dysfunction is associated with the presence and the severity of chronic multi-site musculoskeletal pain. METHODS Data are from the Netherlands Stu...

BACKGROUND Animal studies often require reliable measures for anaesthetic drug effects. Lately, EEG-based depth of anaesthesia estimation has been widely applied to rat models. This study investigated the reliability of different EEG spectral properties in revealing awakening from isoflurane anaesthesia in rats. METHODS Adult Wistar rats with previously implanted frontal epidural electrodes w...

Chronic sleep disturbance induced by traffic noise is considered to cause environmental sleep disorder, which increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and other stress-related diseases. However, noise indices for the evaluation of sleep disturbance are not based on the neurophysiological process of awakening regulated by the brainstem. In this study, through the neurophysi...

CONTEXT The rise of cortisol concentrations after awakening is well documented in adults and children and commonly used as easily accessible marker of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) reactivity. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the existence of a salivary cortisol awakening response (CAR) in infants, and to estimate its association with birth outcome. SETTING The ...