This paper describes the techniques for controlling pain by the physical means that are most widely used clinically, particularly in the case of fibromyalgia. They are grouped on the basis of the physical energy used: mechanical, thermal (including magnetic and electromagnetic), and light (LASER). The main underlying neurophysiological mechanisms are gate activation, the stimulation of descendi...

Subjective factors influencing placebo response have been a focus of numerous theoretical conceptualizations and empirical research. One such factor, individual's personality, has been linked to different clinical conditions, their expressions and treatment outcomes. Thus, there is little surprise many researchers have tried to identify placebo-prone personality over the years. Because of certa...

IN recent years, in a number of centres in different countries, depriving the patient of his night's sleep has been tried as a treatment for depression. Table I shows the findings from ten centres. Pflug and Tolle (1971) sleep-deprived fifty-seven subjects. The twenty-three healthy subjects and the eleven patients with neurotic depression showed little change in mood, as measured by rating scal...

Knowledge of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) in crocodilians (Crocodylia) is limited, and their distribution among extant species is unclear. Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of these retroelements in 20 species of crocodilians by studying the pro-pol gene. The results showed that crocodilian ERVs (CERVs) cluster into two major clades (CERV 1 and CERV 2). CERV 1 clustered as a sis...

When infused into the lateral cerebral ventricles of rabbits, human endogenous pyrogen (EP) preparations induced dose-dependent increases in slow-wave sleep concomitant with increasing body temperature. Heating EP to 70 degrees C destroyed its sleep-promoting and pyrogenic activity. Anisomycin (an antipyretic) prevented EP from increasing body temperature without affecting its sleep-promoting a...

Patients in the mental health care system typically make more or less irregularly spaced visits to psychiatrists, both within and between episodes of a given illness. A Markov model is constructed which can predict the utilization of psychiatric services for such patients. Unlike previous Markov models of utilization, the current model takes as its starting point a model of an actual disease, s...

The pathophysiological mechanisms underlying fibromyalgia are still unknown, although some evidence points to endogenous opioid dysfunction. We examined how endogenous opioid antagonism affects pain and mood for women with and without fibromyalgia. Ten women with fibromyalgia and ten age- and gender-matched, healthy controls each attended two laboratory sessions. Each participant received naltr...

establish the presence of a more ancient ERV component in the murine genome, comprised of isolated, highly degraded insertions. These sequences evidence a transition in murine evolutionary history, beginning about one million years ago, wherein the ancient ERV families that have counterparts in humans and other large mammals were overtaken by a wave of newly acquired and/or transpositionally ac...

In this issue of Cell Stem Cell, Karimi et al. (2011) show that DNA methylation and histone H3 lysine 9 trimethylation (H3K9me3) have distinct genomic targets in mouse ESCs. In particular, loss of H3K9me3 leads to derepression of select endogenous retroviruses and subsequent ectopic transcription of adjacent genes.

Almost 8% of the human genome comprises endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). While they have been shown to cause specific pathologies in animals, such as cancer, their association with disease in humans remains controversial. The limited evidence is partly due to the physical and bioethical restrictions surrounding the study of transposons in humans, coupled with the major experimental and bioinform...