A 3-year-old girl developed acute liver disease after treatment with valproate for 6 months. She developed the typical features of Reye syndrome. Serum free carnitine was decreased as well as 3-keto-valproic acid, the main metabolite of beta-oxidation of valproate. The serum valproate concentration was at the upper limit of the therapeutic range. The possible importance of carnitine in the pathogenesis of valproate induced liver disease is discussed.

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While current Postal Address Readers have been adapted and fine tuned once and off-line in a central development lab, the concept of next generation readers presented here will contain a built-in learning capability, which can be referred to as continuous learning from letters. This will be performed on different levels of reading and comprehension, enabling the system to adapt itself to slow changes of mail mix and writing conventions.Preconditions of an adaptive reading system are discussed and an outline of such a system is given, which not only keeps track with the slow changes of input, but also optimizes itself to site specific conditions, thus guaranteeing an optimal solution at each site and at any time within life cycle. The system presented here is funded by BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) within the projects READ and ADAPTIVE READ.

Programmed cell death as a regulating pathomechanism was observed in all tissue parts of CNV with variable extension. In patients with AMD, a correlation existed between the length of time that CNV existed before surgery and the incidence of apoptotic cells. Apoptosis was found more frequently in recent CNV than in long-standing lesions. The various activity found in CNV suggests that the success of treatment may depend on the moment of intervention. To characterize the role of apoptosis further inducing and inhibiting factors have to be analyzed.

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