Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to C Derham.
Extracranial spread of meningiomas to involve the middle ear is very rare. We present the case of a 43-year-old woman with a known cerebellopontine angle meningioma who subsequently presented with left-sided otalgia and a middle-ear mass extruding through the tympanic membrane due to local invasion of the meningioma. The tumour was excised surgically. A discussion of the relevant literature is also presented.
The case notes and court reports of 1,000 consecutive outpatient referrals to a regional forensic outpatient service were studied retrospectively. Socio-demographic, psychiatric and forensic information was collected. The sample was predominantly male, Caucasian and relatively young in comparison with a general psychiatric population. The commonest source of referral was from defense solicitors and the commonest reason for referral was for a court report. A wide range of diagnoses and offences were noted. A number of differences were found in the frequency of gender, ethnicity and diagnosis according to the source of, and reason for, referral.
In many hospitals it is common practice for nurses working in intensive care units to visit patients on the ward when a stay in the intensive care unit is anticipated following elective surgery. The purpose of the preoperative visit is to minimise fear and anxiety by preparing patients for their admission by providing information about the unit, the equipment used and responding to any questions. However, although there is extensive evidence to support the advantages of information--giving prior to stressful events the author could find no evaluation of the type of information given by intensive care staff. The purpose of the study was three fold. Firstly to discover the type of information patients would like to receive. Secondly to use this data in compiling a booklet which could be used to supplement the preoperative visit. Thirdly to evaluate the contents of the booklet. Postoperatively 20 patients evaluated the booklet by means of a self-administered questionnaire. These were completed 48 h after their transfer from the unit. Overall patients were satisfied with the information contained in the booklet but felt they required additional advice about their proposed surgery and needed more time to absorb the information they had been given.
There has long been discussion as to the relative merits of the lithium formulations available in the UK. Two of these have been shown to exhibit similar pharmacokinetics in normal volunteers and both are now marketed as controlled release formulations. In this study the serum lithium profiles of these formulations were compared in patients at two centres during the first 4 h after the dose, and at 24 h. We were unable to show any significant difference between the formulations in respect of maximum serum lithium concentrations or the concentration at each time point.