Insufficient hours of sleep were prevalent in this population. The Spanish version of the PDSS was a reliable tool in middle-school-aged children. Reports of snoring or witnessed apneas and daytime sleepiness as measured by PDSS were independent predictors of poor academic performance.

Detection of desaturations on the pulse oximetry signal is of great importance for the diagnosis of sleep apneas. Using the counting of desaturations, an index can be built to help in the diagnosis of severe cases of obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome. It is important to have automatic detection methods that allows the screening for this syndrome, reducing the need of the expensive polysomnography based studies. In this paper a novel recognition method based on the empirical mode decomposition of the pulse oximetry signal is proposed. The desaturations produce a very specific wave pattern that is extracted in the modes of the decomposition. Using this information, a detector based on properly selected thresholds and a set of simple rules is built. The oxygen desaturation index constructed from these detections produces a detector for obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome with high sensitivity (0.838) and specificity (0.855) and yields better results than standard desaturation detection approaches.

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The present multicenter study reports the results of a clinical trial, designed on the basis of a pharmacodynamic study published previously (Bantar et al., J. Chemother 2000; 12: 223-227) to assess the efficacy of amoxicillin/sulbactam (875 mg/125 mg), given orally twice-a-day for 7 days in the treatment of patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Eighty-four evaluable subjects older than 19 years with clinical symptoms and features suggestive of CAP, consulting from June 2000 to March 2002 and meeting the PORT risk class I through III, were enrolled in the study. Mean age (y +/- standard deviation) was 46.7 +/- 16.3 and 62% of the patients had some co-morbidity predisposing for CAP. Several individuals (77.4%) fell into a low-risk class (i.e. PORT I or II) and 22.6% of patients belonged to a moderate-risk class at the start of treatment. Six patients (6.45%) had pneumococcal bacteremia. Streptococcus pneumoniae was the organism most frequently isolated (61.9% of all the patients in whom an etiologic diagnosis was made), followed by Haemophilus influenzae. Clinical success was observed in 97.6% of the patients (confidence interval 95%, 94.3%-100%). Almost all the individuals with clinical success became afebrile within the first 3 days of therapy. Ten patients (11.8%) reported mild or moderate adverse events (especially diarrhea) possibly related to the antimicrobial therapy, but this did not lead to withdrawal from the trial. The results of this study suggest that amoxicillin/sulbactam (875 mg/125 mg) is an efficacious and well tolerated option for treating patients with CAP belonging to a low-moderate risk class and support the use of a short, oral (7-day) b.i.d. regimen.

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