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J Psychiatr Res 2021 Apr 16;136:384-387. Epub 2021 Feb 16.

Department of Psychiatry, Griffin Memorial Hospital, 900 E Main St, Norman, OK, 73071, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Oklahoma State University, 1111 W 17th St, Tulsa, OK, 74107, USA. Electronic address:

Objective: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is cleared for treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) but is an investigational treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD). The aim of this study is to compare the characteristics of patients who received DBS as part of standard care for OCD versus those who received it a part of a research protocol for MDD.

Methods: The inpatient sample (N = 110) was drawn from the 2012-2014 Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), and included adults with a primary discharge diagnosis of MDD (N = 50) or OCD (N = 60) and primary procedure of DBS. Read More

Clin Drug Investig 2021 Feb 9;41(2):183-191. Epub 2021 Feb 9.

Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza", Rome, Italy.

Background: Schizophrenia is one of the mental disorders with the highest economic and social costs, with an important burden on patients, caregivers, and society.

Objective: The objective of this study was to estimate the direct and social security costs of schizophrenia in Italy. As far as direct costs are concerned, those related to hospitalizations and pharmaceutical expenditure have been analyzed, while disability benefits (DBs) and incapacity pensions (IPs) have been considered for the social security costs. Read More

Can J Neurol Sci 2020 Aug 28:1-11. Epub 2020 Aug 28.

Department of Psychiatry, Queen's University, ICES-Queen's, Kingston, ON, Canada.

Objectives: To compare long-term survival of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with deep brain stimulation (DBS) to matched controls, and examine whether DBS was associated with differences in injurious falls, long-term care, and home care.

Methods: Using administrative health data (Ontario, Canada), we examined DBS outcomes within a cohort of individuals diagnosed with PD between 1997 and 2012. Patients receiving DBS were matched with non-DBS controls by age, sex, PD diagnosis date, time with PD, and a propensity score. Read More

PLoS One 2019 17;14(6):e0218353. Epub 2019 Jun 17.

icddr,b (International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh), Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Background: Blood collection, transportation and storage remain a problem in countries where infrastructure, laboratory facilities and skilled manpower are scarce. This limits evaluation of immune responses in natural infections and vaccination in field studies. We developed methods to measure antigen specific antibody responses using dried blood spot (DBS) in cholera, ETEC and typhoid fever patients as well as recipients of oral cholera vaccine (OCV). Read More

Eur J Drug Metab Pharmacokinet 2019 Dec;44(6):729-741

Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton,, AB, Canada.

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of tacrolimus in whole blood obtained from venipuncture is routinely practiced. Dried blood spotting (DBS) may act as a suitable alternative for tacrolimus TDM due to relative ease of sampling and processing. The objective of this literature review was to provide a critical evaluation on the feasibility (i. Read More