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Several epidemiological studies have demonstrated at the individual level an elevated risk of cardiovascular death for women who have been using oral contraceptives. Nevertheless, there has been no detectable increase in the number of cardiovascular deaths during the last fifteen years in countries where the use of oral contraceptives has become widespread. In this paper, we have tried to analyse this apparent contradiction and to discuss the causal nature of the relationship linking oral-contraceptives and cardiovascular death. For this purpose, we present a bibliographical summary of the relevant studies as well as an analysis of the trend in cardiovascular deaths among women in France from 1968 to 1975.

Introduction: The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale was initially developed as a rapid method to assess symptom change in psychiatric inpatients of various diagnoses. The original version was expanded to an 18-item version and thereafter to a 24-item version to increase sensitivity to a broader range of psychotic and affective symptoms. The latest version of the expanded 24- item BPRS provides probe questions and detailed anchor points for the ratings for each item., Literature Findings: Studies have shown the expanded and anchored 24-item BPRS to be a sensitive and effective measure of psychiatric symptoms with good interrater reliability that can be maintained over time. To our knowledge, there are eight published papers including factor analyses of the BPRS-E(A). While many similarities are evident between these studies, inconsistencies are apparent that may have been due to sample size, characteristics and / or methodological differences in the factor analysis computation. Among these studies, six provided a four-factor solution. There was no French version of this scale available., Methods: After its translation into French and back translation, we investigated the validity of the French BPRS-E(A) version. We carried out a component analysis on the data of 111 participants of various diagnoses, mostly hospitalised for a first psychotic episode, yielding to a three-factor solution (positive symptoms--disorganisation; depression-anxiety and negative symptoms)., Results: A good internal consistency and interrater reliability were found. These results confirm the psychometric value of the BPRS-E(A) in its French version. We compared those findings to earlier reports; similarities and differences are discussed., (Copyright © 2009 L’Encéphale, Paris. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.)

Psychiatric literature documenting increased rates of psychotic illness among migrants in European countries has been more and more reported during the past two decades. Social causes to this phenomenon have been highlighted. In this paper, we review and discuss this literature from the cultural psychiatry perspective. We can point three limitations to these works : the definition of the studied groups, the cultural validity diagnoses, and the psychic impact of migration and its complexity not being considered enough. The above considerations lead us to go forward with studies addressing this question. The need to construct methodologies addressing psychiatric epidemiology, transcultural psychiatry and human sciences is underlined.

The history of the word panic, of the concepts of Panic attack and of Panic Disorder is a complex one. The adjective word panic, derived from the Greek, stressed initially the intensity of a feeling of unjustified, individual or collective, fear, similar to the reaction provoked, according to the mythology, by the intervention of the God Pan. In their present meanings, the concepts belong to the group of anxiety states, the Panic attack being a symptom characterized by a paroxysmal anxiety which may appear in various psychopathological states, whereas the Panic Disorder is a nosological category whose diagnostic criterium is the appearance, with a definite frequency, of Panic attacks. The disorder is frequently associated to agoraphobia considered, when it exists, as a complication. It is necessary to describe, in addition to the terms and concepts related to panic, the history of the terms angoisse and anxiété (and of the equivalent ones in English and German, since many studies dealing with the subject have been written in those languages) and the history of agoraphobia. The history of the word panic and of the psychiatric concepts to which it is applied today are partially different as are the current meanings of the adjective and the substantive (and today of the verb to panic) from their technical meanings. In the technical vocabulary the substantive word refers on the one side to an abnormal group behaviour whose mechanisms, when it appears in an army by also elsewhere, are studied by social psychopathology. On the other side it has been used until recently, but only in psychiatric texts written in English, for describing acute individual states of high anxiety, eventually associated with other symptoms, and considered as pertaining-in contrast to the Panic attack in its present meaning-to various psychiatric illnesses (melancholic panic, homosexual panic). A description of states similar in their aspects, including the association to agoraphobia, to the present Panic attack, may be found in the literature of the XIXth century. Essential in this respect is the description of anxiety neurosis which Freud isolated in 1895 from neurasthenia and defined by the coexistence of a state of moderate and permanent anxiety and of anxiety attacks, whose manifestations were identical to those of the present Panic attack. Under the influence of Klein's researches which, from 1962 on, demonstrated the differential reactivity to drug therapy of its two component parts, anxiety neurosis was divided in two distinct entities. The term Panic attack-for reasons given in detail by the paper-was proposed for the acute anxiety attack, whereas the state of moderate and permanent anxiety, considered as a completely independent disorder, received the name of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The concept, with its corresponding nomenclature, was adopted initially in the United States by the RDC (1975), then by the DSM-III (1980). It is accepted today and has been the source of a large number of investigations about its semiological, nosological, epidemiological, etio-pathogenic and therapeutic aspects which fall outside of the scope of this paper.

Harvey Cushing was a man of many talents. He was a skilled, surgeon, scientist, author and bibliophile. In addition, he was an accomplished artist for both medical non-medical subjects. In this paper, we present three surgical drawings of Dr Cushing's that are representative of the nearly one hundred drawings we have thus far found with his operative notes in the Peter Bent Brigham Archives. We will also discuss Cushing's non-medical art, some of the best of which is of the French countryside.

When the six DSM-III (1980) diagnostic criteria are applied to the nine cases reported by Gilles de la Tourette in 1885, six of them are found to be in accordance with the diagnosis of Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome (cases nos 4, 5 and 7 do not involve vocal tics). Gilles de la Tourette deserves credit, not only for having regrouped fragmented observations into one remarkably well described clinical entity which held over time (such as Itard's observations nos 9 and 10 in 1825; the latter is the famous Marquise of D ... seen several times by Charcot and the only one which, along with no 1, appears in Gilles de la Tourette's paper), but also for having described the course of this chronic and fluctuating disease. Why Gilles de la Tourette did not use the term "tic", a term which had been in use for a long time in both veterinary and human medicine, to describe "the motor incoordination" of these patients? Did Charcot take some distance from his student's paper as early as 1885? He viewed tics as the basis of "the disease described by Gilles de la Tourette". In addition to coprolalia and echolalia, he alsa reported the existence of "mental tics". How have French neurologists and psychiatrists been able to perpetuate Brissaud's error who, contrary to Gilles de la Tourette, mentioned that the illness "can be associated with severe mental disorders which often lead to dementia"?(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)