During the last twenty years, attention lias been given to the psychological factor in skin disease : its importance is now generally recognized. May I submit a few examples for your consideration '? Alopecia Areata was once held to be due to infection ; the idea has been dropped. It has been attributed to some obscure nervous reflex action produced by molar teeth, defects of vision, and even t...

1494 Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 14, No. 9, September 2008 Most studies underestimate overall prevalence by assessing it in a specifi c timeframe; to the contrary, head lice infestation is a dynamic process that can spread hypergeometrically in closed environments such as schools and in the community (7). The pointprevalence reported by Heukelbach et al (8) may represe...

BACKGROUND The prediction of fibrosis is an essential part of the assessment and management of patients with chronic liver disease. Non-invasive tests (NITs) have a number of advantages over the traditional standard of fibrosis assessment by liver biopsy, including safety, cost-effectiveness, and widespread accessibility. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine the accuracy of certa...

Various substrates were tested for their ability to restore the amplitude of contraction of hypody-namic electrically-stimulated rat ventricle strips suspended in a phosphate-buffered medium. Greatest recovery of the contractile activity was obtained with pyruvate; lactate, /3-hydroxybutyrate and acetate were more effective than succinate and glucose. The finding that glucose, in contrast to py...

The somato-dendritic subthreshold-operating A-type K + current (I SA) plays a crucial role in neuronal excitability. It regulates spike timing and frequency, dampens the back propagation of action potentials into dendrites and has an important role in dendritic signal processing (Hoffman et al., 1997). Hence, any alteration of I SA current density or gating kinetics could then have important co...

A 49-sear-old man came to) LAG-USC Medical Center with a sixweek history o)fblood-streaked sputum. During the preceding three weeks he had lost 22 pounds in weight. He complained of general fatigue, occasio)nal occurrences offever, chills and night sweats. He had no cough, shortness of breath, abdominal pain or cramping. Three weeks before presentation he experienced diarrhea, which lasted for ...

Sir, The spectrum of psychodermatology is quite wide. One of the more controversial diseases in this group is Morgellons disease; where the patient usually a female, complaints of fibers of glass/other material coming out of her skin. We would like to report a case of Morgellons disease, which responded well to antipsychotic medications. A 50-year-old married female presented with complaints of...

L et me preface my comment with the following caveat: I am skeptical of the value of a scholarly journal article that attempts to critically evaluate the "canonical version" of an economic theory, particularly when the theory in question deals with a phenomenon as complex as the business cycle. Added to this is my uneasiness over the fact that the version that is chosen for criticism (Rothbard ...

Migrants from countries with scarce resources represent an increasing worldwide phenomenon providing a daily challenge for governments and humanitarian organizations [1, 2]. A teenage refugee from East Africa was admitted to our intensive care unit (ICU) with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), hypotension, and jaundice. Nits were present on her scalp and she had no relevant past medica...

We read with interest the letter by Cutuli et al. [1] describing a case of severe co-infection by Leptospira spp. and Borrelia recurrentis in a young female refugee from East Africa. We would like to comment on several issues raised by their paper. First, the authors state “nits were present on her scalp...”. In our opinion, this sentence may mislead readers as meaning that “head lice” (Pedicul...