Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to L Umansky.
There are 2 stages of alopecia, anagen and telogen effluvium, both of which may be associated with medication-related alopecia. We describe massive hair loss in a 51-year-old woman during treatment with Seroxat (paroxetine), which remitted after it was discontinued. Pathological mechanisms of drug-associated alopecia are complex and have yet to be fully elucidated.
Psychogenic polydipsia and its frequent complication, water intoxication, are well-known to psychologists. There are biochemical and psychiatric theories of psychogenic polydipsia which often correlate with each other. A 48-year-old man with chronic paranoid schizophrenia developed symptoms of psychogenic polydipsia. This provoked disturbances in electrolyte balance, resulting in a rapid decrease in serum sodium concentration and eventual death. There is a paucity of information and little awareness of this problem in the professional literature.
Economical methods by which gene function may be analysed on a genomic scale are relatively scarce. To fill this need, we have developed a transposon-tagging strategy for the genome-wide analysis of disruption phenotypes, gene expression and protein localization, and have applied this method to the large-scale analysis of gene function in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Here we present the largest collection of defined yeast mutants ever generated within a single genetic background--a collection of over 11,000 strains, each carrying a transposon inserted within a region of the genome expressed during vegetative growth and/or sporulation. These insertions affect nearly 2,000 annotated genes, representing about one-third of the 6,200 predicted genes in the yeast genome. We have used this collection to determine disruption phenotypes for nearly 8,000 strains using 20 different growth conditions; the resulting data sets were clustered to identify groups of functionally related genes. We have also identified over 300 previously non-annotated open reading frames and analysed by indirect immunofluorescence over 1,300 transposon-tagged proteins. In total, our study encompasses over 260,000 data points, constituting the largest functional analysis of the yeast genome ever undertaken.
Priapism or pathological, prolonged erection, is a rare adverse effect sometimes associated with psychotropic medication and is due to alpha adrenergic receptor blockade. Priapism in a 44-year-old mental patient receiving risperidone is described. Urinary retention was relieved by catheterization, followed by saline irrigations. Priapism was relieved when a hematoma was evacuated from his penis. This may be the first description of priapism following risperidone alone, since a previous report included a patient receiving risperidone together with 2 other psychotropic medications. Priapism should be looked for in men receiving risperidone, a novel antipsychotic medication.