BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:Because the substructures of the thalamus are not visible on standard T1-and T2-weighted MR images, planning of deep brain stimulation implantation relies on stereotactic atlas coordinates. The goal of the present work was to test whether an optimized 3D MPRAGE protocol can depict thalamus substructures.

Moreover, the treatment with benzodiazepines is common practice in the absence of class I or II level of evidence. Here we assessed the role of benzodiazepines in the conservative management of acute lumbar disc prolapse.Using a placebo-controlled, double-blinded design, 60 patients were randomized to receive placebo or diazepam in addition to mechanical physiotherapy and analgesics for the first seven days of conservative treatment of clinically and radiologically confirmed lumbar disc prolapse. The primary objective was to evaluate if physiotherapy plus analgesics, but without benzodiazepines, is equivalent to the same therapy plus benzodiazepines. The primary endpoint was centralization of referred pain at day 7.Twenty-six female and 34 male patients were enrolled. The median age was 42 years (range 22-68 years). Analysis of the primary endpoint demonstrated equivalence between placebo and diazepam (median 60% versus 50% reduction of distance of referred pain at day 7) within the predefined equivalence tolerance of 20% at a significance level of p<0.05.Regarding the secondary endpoints, the median duration of the stay in hospital was shorter in the placebo arm (8 vs 10 days, p=0.008), and the probability of pain reduction on a visual analog scale by more than 50% was twice as high in placebo patients (p<0.0015).Benzodiazepines should not be used routinely in patients treated with mechanical physiotherapy for lumbar disc prolapse.

Our study is to date the largest practice-based trial that examines the value of the markers CDT and gamma-GT and their combinations for the screening of at-risk drinking in general practice under routine conditions. Our ROC analysis clearly demonstrated that the combination of the markers gamma-GT and %CDT under routine conditions with a behaviorally oriented reference standard leads to an improvement of diagnostic performance, more so than the use of single markers.

An exact differentiation of the SN from the CC is not possible on the basis of T2w images but rather on the basis of the underlying calculated T2 values from the triple echo sequence.