Background Placebo-controlled oral drug provocation tests (DPTs) are an important step in drug hypersensitivity diagnosis. Administration of placebo (an inert sostance not detectable from drug) is recommended to avoid psychological influences on the interpretation of DPT results, however actually little is known about how to deal a reaction to placebo and how to go further with the diagnostic p...

This paper develops an argument that agreement (in particular NP-predicate agreement) is a morphological and not a syntactic phenomenon. Narrowly, I argue against the proposition that the configurational/positional licensing of NPs (what was considered to be the domain of Case Theory in the LGB framework of the 1980s) involves checking/matching/valuing of Φfeatures (person, number, gender) in t...

It has been proposed that painful and non-painful referred sensations (RSs) are associated with reorganization of sensory pathways in patients with complete spinal cord injury (SCI). In order to investigate the referred sensation (RS) phenomenon and its correlation with neuropathic pain (NP) 48 patients with complete SCI, 24 with chronic NP and 24 without pain or paraesthesias were studied usin...

An NP-complete coloring or homomorphism problem may become polynomial time solvable when restricted to graphs with degrees bounded by a small number, but remain NP-complete if the bound is higher. For instance, 3-colorability of graphs with degrees bounded by 3 can be decided by Brooks’ theorem, while for graphs with degrees bounded by 4, the 3-colorability problem is NP-complete. We investigat...

Drug treatment is an important part of managing chronic disease, but people often choose not to start or continue with recommended treatments. As the efficacy of a drug is central to the decision to start or continue treatment, accurate and succinct communication of the benefits of treatment is emphasised in clinical practice. But the disadvantages and adverse effects of drugs are also importan...

The paper updates the word ”psychogenic”; suggests a pathophysiologic reading of the psychogenic contribute to CPP, via the stress-induced corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) signaling pathways, and differentiates predisposing, precipitating and maintaining factors; summarizes the pertinent evidence; focuses on the differential diagnosis between prominent “psychogenic” vs somatic etiology of C...

INTRODUCTION Patients require an accurate knowledge about placebos and their possible effects to ensure consent for placebo-controlled clinical trials is adequately informed. However, few previous studies have explored patients' baseline (ie, pretrial recruitment) levels of understanding and knowledge about placebos. The present online survey aimed to assess knowledge about placebos among patie...