OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of ambient bright light therapy (BLT) on agitation among institutionalized persons with dementia. METHODS High intensity, low glare ambient lighting was installed in activity and dining areas of a state psychiatric hospital unit in North Carolina and a dementia-specific residential care facility in Oregon. The study employed a cluster-unit crossover design inv...

Distal radius fracture is a common wound. It is reduced by surgery under anesthesia. Emergence agitation can often occur after anesthesia. It is associated with increased morbidity and hospital costs. However, there have been almost no reports in the medical literature on the occurrence of emergence agitation in adults. This study aimed to compare emergence agitation between isoflurane and prop...

BACKGROUND Some patients with advanced dementia cannot convey the experience of pain verbally and may react to pain with aggressive and agitated behaviors. We hypothesized that unrecognized pain could contribute to agitation and that low dose opioid therapy might reduce agitation by reducing pain. We therefore attempted to determine the effect of opioids on agitation in demented patients. MET...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Although agitation is thought to be common in the ICU, it has been poorly studied. We evaluated the incidence, risks factors, and outcomes of agitation in ICU. DESIGN Prospective observational study. INTERVENTIONS None. METHOD All consecutive ICU admissions over an 8-month period were analyzed. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Two hundred eleven patients were admitted a total o...

Emerging evidence indicates that agitation is an ominous precursor to imminent death by suicide, yet measures of it are few, and to our knowledge, no self-report measure of agitation exists. To fill this gap, we have developed the Brief Agitation Measure (BAM), which is designed as a brief measure to assess agitation. In this article, we provide preliminary evidence from 2 studies examining the...

Acute agitation and aggression are common symptoms in patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. In this review, we discuss the prevalence, clinical assessment strategies, treatment options, and current Western and Chinese guidelines for the management of acute agitation and aggression in patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Among available approaches, we discuss in detail re...

Objective: To evaluate the incidence of agitation in the first 7 days after intensive care unit admission, its risk factors and its associations with clinical outcomes. Methods: This single-center prospective cohort study included all patients older than 18 years with a predicted stay > 48 hours within the first 24 hours of intensive care unit admission. Agitation was defined as a Richmond Ag...

The effect of mechanical agitation on the microalgae Phaeodactylum tricornutum and Porphyridium cruentum was investigated in aerated continuous cultures with and without the added shear protectant Pluronic F68. Damage to cells was quantified through a decrease in the steady state concentration of the biomass in the photobioreactor. For a given aeration rate, the steady state biomass concentrati...

OBJECTIVES Agitation in nursing home residents with dementia leads to increase in psychotropic medication, decrease in quality of life, and to patient distress and caregiver burden. Music therapy has previously been found effective in treatment of agitation in dementia care but studies have been methodologically insufficient. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of individual music t...

AIMS The objective of the present study was to investigate the influence of aeration rate and agitation intensity on the production of mycelial biomass and exopolysaccharide (EPS) in Paecilomyces sinclairii. METHODS AND RESULTS The P. sinclairii was cultivated under various aeration and agitation conditions in a 5 l stirred-tank bioreactor. The highest mycelial biomass (30.5 g l-1) and EPS pr...