Then the daily dose of pramipexole was up titrated or tapered by 0.125 mg/day at each

subsequent examination. RLS symptoms and daytime somnolence were evaluated using the International RLS Study Group rating scale (IRIS), FGFR inhibitor Clinical Global Impressions Severity of illness (CGI-S) and the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), respectively.

Results: Conversion from clonazepam to pramipexole resulted in significant reductions of IRLS (16.3 +/- 8.7 to 9.1 +/- 6.3) and ESS (6.5 +/- 4.2 to 4.4 +/- 3.2). CGI scores demonstrated improvement after conversion. In 4 patients (15%), adverse events such as somnolence, sensation of oppression in the lower limbs, diarrhea, or nausea were present. Correlation analysis demonstrated a significant relationship between these daily doses. Spearman’s Selleckchem URMC-099 correlation coefficient was 0.662. Our study, however, has some limitations

since it is an open-label trial and includes only 26 patients. Further studies using a double-blind design or a crossover design are recommended.

Conclusions: Statistical analysis demonstrated a 4:1 conversion for clonazepam to pramipexole. When switchover from clonazepam to pramipexole is done, this conversion ratio may be helpful to determine the initial dose of pramipexole for treating RLS. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.”
“Efficient coding, redundancy reduction, and other information theoretic optimization principles have successfully explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Here we examine the hypothesis that behavioral strategies that are optimal for survival must necessarily involve efficient information processing, and ask whether there can be circumstances in which

deliberately sacrificing some information can lead to higher utility? To this end, we present an analytically tractable model for a particular instance of a perception-action loop: a creature searching for a randomly moving food source confined to a 1D ring world. The model incorporates the statistical structure of the creature’s world, the effects of the creature’s actions on that structure, and the creature’s strategic decision process. The underlying model takes the form of a Markov process on an infinite dimensional state space. this website To analyze it we construct an exact coarse graining that reduces the model to a Markov process on a finite number of “”information states”". This mathematical technique allows us to make quantitative comparisons between the performance of an information-theoretically optimal strategy with other candidate search strategies on a food gathering task. We find that

1. Information optimal search does not necessarily optimize utility (expected food gain).

2. The rank ordering of search strategies by information performance does not predict their ordering by expected food obtained.

3.