Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is one of the most provocative topics facing society today. Given the great responsibility conferred on physicians by recent laws allowing PAS, a careful examination of this subject is warranted by psychiatrists and other specialists who may be consulted during a patient's request for PAS. In this article, recent evidence regarding the implementation of PAS in t...

Le bébé collodion est un aspect clinique grave caractérisé par une peau luisante, tendue et vernissée; une membrane rigide responsable d'un syndrome dysmorphique. Sur le plan génétique on note une anomalie de la kératinisation, le plus souvent de transmission autosomique récessive. Le diagnostic repose essentiellement sur les données cliniques et anamnestiques, mais peut être confirmé, dans cer...

Interventional paired associative stimulation (PAS) can induce plasticity in the cortex, and this plasticity was previously shown to be disordered in the primary motor cortex in focal hand dystonia (FHD). This study aimed to test whether associative plasticity is abnormal in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) in FHD and whether PAS modulates excitatory or inhibitory interneurons within the c...

Posterior acoustic shadowing (PAS) can bias breast tumor segmentation and classification in ultrasound images. In this paper, half-contour features are proposed to classify benign and malignant breast tumors with PAS, considering the fact that the upper half of the tumor contour is less affected by PAS. Adaptive thresholding and disk expansion are employed to detect tumor contours. Based on the...

This study was designed to examine whether corticocortical paired associative stimulation (cc-PAS) can modulate interhemispheric inhibition (IHI) in the human brain. Twelve healthy right-handed volunteers received 90 paired transcranial stimuli to the right and left primary motor hand area (M1(HAND)) at an interstimulus interval (ISI) of 8 ms. Left-to-right cc-PAS (first pulse given to left M1(...

Much attention has focused on the hypothesis that there is enhanced plasticity of sensorimotor circuits in patients with dystonia. A common experimental method to assess plasticity in dystonia research is paired associative stimulation (PAS). Excessive, nonfocal effects of PAS were observed in early studies of dystonia; however, these large effects have not been uniformly replicated. In this vi...

Battin et al examined data on deaths from physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in Oregon and on PAS and voluntary euthanasia (VE) in The Netherlands. This paper reviews the methodology used in their examination and questions the conclusions drawn from it-namely, that there is for the most part 'no evidence of heightened risk' to vulnerable people from the legalisation of PAS or VE. This critique fo...

PAS domains regulate the function of many intracellular signaling pathways in response to both extrinsic and intrinsic stimuli. PAS domain-regulated histidine kinases are common in prokaryotes and control a wide range of fundamental physiological processes. Similarly regulated kinases are rare in eukaryotes and are to date completely absent in mammals. PAS kinase (PASK) is an evolutionarily con...

Neurofibromatosis 1 (NF1) is an autosomal dominant disorder that predisposes sufferers to various forms of neoplasia. Among affected individuals, 15%-20% develop astrocytomas, especially pilocytic astrocytomas (PA), which are benign and classified as grade I by the World Health Organization. They are generally well circumscribed, and their progression is slow. NF1-associated PAs (NF1-PAs) occas...