BACKGROUND Tapering strips can be used for the gradual reduction of the dose of certain types of drugs such as antidepressants and benzodiazepines. The strips contain a slightly lower dose on each consecutive day. This prevents the withdrawal symptoms still experienced by too many patients and lowers the risk of relapse. AIM To make tapering strips of antidepressant drugs available for patien...

The analytical design procedure of lowsensitivity, low-power, low-pass (LP) 2-and 3-order class-4 active-RC allpole filters, using impedance tapering, has already been published [1][2]. In this paper the desensitisation using impedance tapering is applied to the design of LP 4-order filters. The numerical design procedure was performed by Newton’s iterative method. Analytically designed unity-g...

The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of an intensified training phase followed by a tapering phase on the salivary immunoglobulin A concentration and on the upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) symptoms in young male basketball players. The session rating of perceived exertion method was used to quantify the internal training load, and the Wisconsin Upper Respiratory Sympt...

BACKGROUND Benzodiazepine withdrawal programmes have never been experimentally compared with a nonintervention control condition. AIMS To evaluate the efficacy and feasibility of tapering off long-term benzodiazepine use in general practice, and to evaluate the value of additional group cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). METHOD A 3-month randomised, 3-month controlled trial was conducted ...

We present an experimental and theoretical study of the energy transfer between modes during the tapering process of an optical nanofiber through spectrogram analysis. The results allow optimization of the tapering process, and we measure transmission in excess of 99.95% for the fundamental mode. We quantify the adiabaticity condition through calculations and place an upper bound on the amount ...

Objectives RA patients receiving TNF inhibitors (TNFi) usually maintain their initial doses. The aim of the Optimizing Treatment with Tumour Necrosis Factor Inhibitors in Rheumatoid Arthritis trial was to evaluate whether tapering TNFi doses causes loss of clinical response. Methods We enrolled RA patients receiving etanercept or adalimumab and a DMARD with DAS28 under 3.2 for over 3 months. ...

The nonparanormal model assumes that variables follow a multivariate normal distribution after a set of unknown monotone increasing transformations. It is a flexible generalization of the normal model but retains the nice interpretability of the latter. In this paper we propose a rank-based tapering estimator for estimating the correlation matrix in the nonparanormal model in which the variable...