There have been several case reports of seizure-like activity associated with fentanyl (1-3) and sufentanil ( 6 6 ) during induction of anesthesia as well as postoperatively (7). As yet there have been no reports of such activity described with alfentanil. Case ReportA 60-year-old, 70-kg male was scheduled for an L P 5 laminectomyldiscectomy. He had a history of atherosclerotic heart disease with prior myocardial infarction in 1981 and stable angina. He also had a history of atherosclerotic peripheral vascular disease with prior abdominal aortic aneurysm repair in 1982. His medications included propranolol, dipyridamole, isosorbide, and diazepam. He had no prior history of a seizure disorder or other neurologic disease. Except for a slightly decreased left patellar tendon reflex and back tenderness, his physicaI examination was within normal limits.The patient was given his usual cardiac medications plus, one hour prior to surgery, metoclopramide 10 mg, ranitidine 150 mg and diazepam 5 mg. He also received 1 mg of midazolam iv just prior to entering the operating room. He was monitored with an EKG, an automated sphygmomanometer, a precordial stethoscope, and a pulse oximeter prior to, during, and after induction of the anesthesia. Following the preoxygenation, he was given 1500 Fg of alfentanil(25 pglkg) over 30 seconds. He developed a tremor in the right arm, and then in the left arm, followed by coarse jerking movements of both legs. The movement became progressively more rhythmic and coarse. Then his eyes rolled up and he became

Studies of motherese or child-directed speech (CDS) have paid scant attention to fathers' speech when talking to children. This study compares mothers' and fathers' use of CDS in terms of fundamental frequency (F0) production, examining natural speech from a very large database of hundreds of hours of family speech including mothers, fathers, and preschool children. The day-long recordings are collected with specialized recording software and body-worn hardware, then analyzed with automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology (LENA Research Foundation, Boulder, CO). CDS is defined here as speech in a conversational exchange between the parent and child, and adult-directed speech (ADS) is speech between adults or speech in which the child is not a (vocal) participant. Results confirm many reports in the literature of mothers' increased F0 during CDS. Results fail to show a difference in the F0 characteristics between fathers' CDS and ADS speech. This shows that children's linguistic experience with fathers is different than with mothers. This result could be useful to improve ASR techniques and better understand the role of usage in natural language acquisition and the role fathers play in the language acquisition process.

A study to evaluate the duration of sympathetic and sensory block in the L2 and L5 dermatome distributions using thermography and pinprick was conducted. Twenty patients received epidural block using 2% lidocaine with epinephrine. Onset and duration of the sensory and sympathetic blocks were determined and compared statistically. There was no difference between the duration of sensory and sympathetic block over the L2 dermatome, but sympathetic block was significantly longer than sensory block in the L5 dermatome. This study demonstrates that the duration of sympathetic block can be either longer or shorter than sensory block in L2 and L5 dermatomes. This has important implications for interpretation of results of differential epidural studies in that one cannot predict the duration of sympathetic block based on duration of sensory block.

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