lamotrigine (ltg), a newly developed antiepileptic drug (aed), is efficacious in treating refractory epilepsy. this study was designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of ltg as add-on therapy in 40 children with refractory epilepsy. the trial was an open-labeled prospective study in children with drug-resistant epilepsy aged <14 years, who had at least 4 seizures per month in spite of recei...

epilepsy is a neurological disease of the central nervous system. it is estimated that about 50-70 million people worldwide suffer from this chronic disorder and 20 to 30% are resistant to conventional anti-epileptic drugs. in the epilepsy therapeutic arena, there is real need for developing novel antiepileptogenesis treatments that offer a way to prevent the onset or the progression of the dis...

We provide the first formal foundation of SAND attack trees which are a popular extension of the well-known attack trees. The SAND attack tree formalism increases the expressivity of attack trees by introducing the sequential conjunctive operator SAND. This operator enables the modeling of ordered events. We give a semantics to SAND attack trees by interpreting them as sets of series-parallel g...

We have performed an experimental study on the evolution of sand ripples formed under the action of an oscillatory flow. An annular sand-water cell was used in order to investigate a wide range of parameters. The sand ripples follow an irreversible condensation mechanism from small to large wavelength until a final state is reached. The wavelength and the shape of these stable sand patterns are...

Instability of liquefaction is one of the major reasons which results in the failure of earth structure such as dam. The present study focuses on the simulation of static liquefaction behavior for granular materials such as sand and sand-silt mixtures. Based on micromechanical analysis of inter-particle behavior, a simple one-scale model is proposed to simulate the stress-strain response of san...

biotin is a water-soluble vitamin and co-factor for activation of carboxylases apoenzymes. biotinidase enzyme is essential for release of biotin from apoenzymes. absence of biotinidase is an autosomal recessive trait with a prevalence of 1 in 60000. clinical manifestations of biotinidase deficiency include dermatitis, alopecia, seizures, hypotonia, developmental delay, hearing loss, visual impa...

background: patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease (gerd) unresponsive to proton pump inhibitor (ppi) therapy are often labeled as having refractory gerd. one of the probable etiologies of refractory gerd is delayed gastric emptying. refractory gerd associated with gastroparesis is a complex condition with no definitive treatment to date. we opted, for the first time, to test the hypothe...

treatment of severe immune thrombocytopenic purpura (itp) accompanied by life-threatening bleeding events is challenging and a combination of treatment measures should be undertaken to rapidly increase the platelet count. herein, we report a case of severe itp in a seven-year-old boy who suffered from massive bleeding which was totally unresponsive to conventional therapeutic interventions. sin...

background: the induction chemotherapy regimen for acute myeloid leukemia has evolved as once induction is completed patients progress through the consolidation phase and achieve remission in 76% of cases. for patients with relapsed or refractory disease, alternative chemotherapy agents are available. monoclonal antibody therapy with biological agents, such as the immunotoxin gemtuzumab ozogami...

The presence of lizards in bromeliads has been widely documented. Nevertheless, the possibility of some type of preference or specificity among lizards for particular bromeliad species has not yet been investigated. Therefore, this study aims to document the presence of Abronia oaxacae in six species of tank bromeliads found in pine forests, pine-live oak forests, and live oak groves during bot...