One hundred consecutive patients who shivered following general or regional anesthesia and a surgical procedure were randomly treated with 25 mg pethidine, 2.5 mg morphine, 25 micrograms fentanyl or sodium chloride 0.9%, given in equal intravenous volumes over a 15-min period. The effects were evaluated every 5 min after the first injection. There was a spontaneous, time-related disappearance of shivering in the sodium chloride-treated patients. In the pethidine-treated group, shivering disappeared more than twice as fast as in the control group. The difference was highly significant at 15 and 20 min (P less than 0.001) and was unrelated to weight, body temperature or duration of anesthesia. Women responded sooner than men, reaching significance at 10 min (P less than 0.05), while men did so only at 20 min. Morphine or fentanyl had no effect. Nausea and vomiting were minimal and of equal incidence in narcotic- and placebo-treated patients.

Craving is a central concept in alcohol, and other substance, research. Beginning in 1955 the World Health Organization outlined a working definition of the term to be used in research and clinical settings. However, the semantic interpretation of craving as a concept is not widely agreed upon. Since the publication of this first craving definition, a handful of studies have been conducted to investigate differences in operational definitions of craving, and have demonstrated a lack of agreement between studies and across research subjects. With this background as evidence, our research group investigated, when left to their own semantic understanding of the terms, if regular alcohol consumers would rate craving for alcohol and desire for alcohol in similar ways using related descriptors. Thirty-nine healthy, non-binging regular alcohol consumers were studied across periods of their typical alcohol consumption and imposed alcohol abstinence, collecting ratings of desire and craving for alcohol approximately every two hours across the two experimental periods, and during neutral and alcohol related imagery viewing. Among these non-binging regular drinkers, ratings of desire and craving for alcohol are consistently different while drinking according to a persons typical routine or abstaining, throughout the day, and when viewing alcohol cue imagery.

The emerging area of dynamic brain network analysis has gained considerable attraction in recent years. While current tools have proven useful in providing insight into dynamic patterns of brain networks, development of multivariate statistical frameworks that allow for examining the associations between phenotypic traits and dynamic patterns of system-level properties of the brain, and drawing statistical inference about such associations, has largely lagged behind. To address this need we developed a mixed-modeling framework that allows for assessing the relationship between any desired phenotype and dynamic patterns of whole-brain connectivity and topology. Unlike current tools which largely use data-driven methods, our model-based method enables aligning neuroscientific hypotheses with the analytic approach. We demonstrate the utility of this model in identifying the relationship between fluid intelligence and dynamic brain networks using resting-state fMRI (rfMRI) data from 200 subjects in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) study. To our knowledge, this approach provides the first model-based statistical method for examining dynamic patterns of system-level properties of the brain and their relationships to phenotypic traits.

Purpose: To evaluate brain synchronization and connectivity differences in post‐surgery/per‐irradiation patients and healthy controls with two different MEG approaches: ECD (equivalent current dipole) and SAM (synthetic aperture magnetometry). Methods: An 8 min resting state scan was collected from 5 post‐surgery/pre‐irradiation patients and 5 sex/age‐matched control subjects. Scans were collected on a CTF MEG 275‐sensors system. All subjects were scanned in upright, open‐eyes position in a magnetically shielded room. MRI whole brain volume was divided into 4mm voxels allowing sensor signal space to be mapped into brain space. Measured signals were filtered into Δ, o/, α and β bandwidths and localized by ECD and SAM. SAM is a type of beamforming, a signal processing technique for sensor array data; the method works like a digital filter by focusing on each voxel while attenuating the majority of signal from all other voxels. Resultant SAM waveforms were evaluated to reject muscle and/or non‐physiological artifacts. The ECD method was applied to the same data and bandwidths to localize sources, its orientations and strengths. Statistical analysis evaluated connectivity and synchronization using dPLI (direct phase lag index) and IC (imaginary coherence). Resultant SAM and ECD maps were compared for differences and similarities. Results: Currently the project is collecting data. The full per‐irradiation data is expected to be completed by June 2013. The study goal is to establish the best method/approach to evaluate resting state MEG data. Conclusion: We expect 3 possible outcomes of the study: no difference, subtle difference, statistically significant difference in resting state analysis between these two methods. The two first outcomes are easy to address by choosing the most time‐efficient method. The last case will require further investigation of both methods to establish the ground of the difference and the most appropriate method analysis for the resting state. Partial support by Radiation Oncology and Neurology Departments at Wake Forest Baptist Health System and by Dalton McMichael Fund in Cancer Research. No conflict of interest is reported.