News Medical's "Thought Leaders" series is a selection of articles written by national and
international experts and trusted advisers in health and medicine. All the articles are
written by experts who have been invited as recognised leaders in their fields to provide
a "state of the art" contribution.
Valproate (sodium salt of valproic acid) is an anticonvulsant used in the treatment of epilepsy, migraine and bipolar disorder as well as some other off label psychiatric indications.
Parenteral nutrition is intravenous nutrition for patients who are unable to eat or be tube fed. It is used with more than 300,000 patients per year - a quarter of whom are children and newborns.
This work is the product of an extraordinary consortium called the Epilepsy Phenome/Genome project (EPGP). It is a consortium of 27 centres in the U.S. and internationally with several hundred physicians and staff who have worked together to enrol more than 4000 patients with epilepsy and their family members.
Liver transplantation is a surgical procedure in which a liver (or part of a liver) is removed from a donor and placed into a recipient. Although some transplants use a portion of the liver of living donors, the vast majority of donors are deceased.
Measles is a disease marked by fever, rash, and cold symptoms (red eyes, cough, runny nose) that results in a temporary suppression of the immune system and a drop in vitamin A levels.
Ireland, and many other countries, is witnessing increases in problematic and complex youth mental health challenges. In Ireland, specifically, there has been a rash of high profile cases where young people have unfortunately not been able to deal with stress, bullying and other issues.
Here at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine we are running a project called the Vaccine Confidence Project and we have a global surveillance monitoring information around the world on media, social media, all sorts of information, reports from governments, UN, other sources, looking for any what we call “signals” of public distrust or concerns that come up.
Colorectal cancer is a malignant neoplasm affecting the large bowel and the rectum mainly after the 5th decade of life and representing the second cause of death for cancer in western countries (the third in women). In about 15-20% of patients there is an inherited predisposition.
Children with PTSD suffer significant distress or negative impacts on their daily lives. Estimates of the prevalence of PTSD in children and adolescents experiencing trauma are generally very high, at 30% to 40%.
Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are the currently recommended drugs for treating malaria. However, they are expensive, which limits their affordability. This means that people with malaria are likely to buy cheaper, less effective antimalarials such as chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine; or to simply buy painkillers and antipyretics.
Condoms and lubricants are widely used by both women and men and so they are part of many people’s sexual experiences. They are used for both pleasure-related reasons as well as, in the case of lubricants, comfort and making sex easier for people. The use of condoms of course reduces the risk of pregnancy or infection.
Our bodies were designed to be active. The human body is not meant to spend long periods of time sitting but that’s what our modern lives have led us to do. The result has been the increase in obesity seen across the world, and up to 20 other conditions including cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Itch was actually defined by a German physician more than 350 years ago. His name was Samuel Hafenreffer. He defined itch as an unpleasant sensation that makes people want to scratch. You probably think this is a very simple definition but itch is really a very complex sensory modality.
Miscarriage is defined as the spontaneous loss of pregnancy before the baby reaches viability. Besides the physical trauma, miscarriage causes considerable anxiety, stress, and depression.
Malaria is a tropical, mosquito-borne disease. It is found all over the tropics, in every continent but diminished now a great deal in most of Latin America, most of Asia. Still 90% of the world’s deaths due to malaria – are in Africa and most of them are in young children in Africa.
The term 'dementia' is used to describe symptoms that occur when the brain is affected by specific diseases and conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, Lewy Bodies or Korsakoff’s syndrome.
Bionic devices are implants which replace biological functions which have been lost due to nerve damage. They use electrical signals to stimulate the remaining nerve cells following disease or injury. Although the term bionic was only coined in the late 1950s, the earliest bionic devices were cardiac pacemakers, developed in the early 1900s. However the first commercial implantable units were not available until the 1950s.
Flusurvey is an online system of tracking influenza across the UK. We are linked to other flu surveys across Europe, so there are about 12 flu surveys across Europe in total.
Our review included analyses of drug and device studies conducted in humans. The drugs or devices could be compared to placebo or sham treatments, or other effective treatments. The drugs and devices examined for this review are used for a wide variety of clinical conditions, including cardiovascular and psychiatric diseases.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurological condition that is caused when brain cells, that produce the chemical messenger dopamine, start to die.