Articles: outcome.
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First episode schizophrenia (FES) patients tend to be more responsive to treatment. An adequate response has been associated with a favourable long-term course in FES patients. ⋯ Different antipsychotic treatment regimens have been evaluated in terms of their efficacy in reducing symptoms of FES with psychological interventions gaining increasing importance in the treatment concept of patients suffering from their first illness episode. Therefore, aim of this review is to summarize current evidence on the response patterns, the most important predictors of response/non-response as well as on effective treatment interventions in FES patients.
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Many chemotherapeutic regimens produce neutropenia, which predisposes to microbial infection. However, not all neutropenic individuals develop infections, so the ability to predict this outcome would be a powerful clinical tool. ⋯ The authors demonstrate that when the neutrophil concentration approaches the critical concentration, bacterial populations in contact with them exhibit bistability. Their experimental findings raise the intriguing possibility of greater variability in bactericidal activity of neutrophils from healthy adults than heretofore recognized; their model predicts that this could have life-and-death consequences.