RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Methamphetamine (meth) is a stimulant used illegally around the world, including in Iran. Cardiomyopathy and cardiac failure may occur following chronic meth use and may cause the patients referred to the emergency department. CASE REPORTS: A 28-year old man and two women, ages 29 and 31-year-old, with a history of meth use, were admitted to the emergency department with severe dyspnea at rest. Each had sinus tachycardia with tachypnea and an echocardiogram that showed severe systolic dysfunction consistent with heart failure. Additional evaluation in the hospital revealed cardiomyopathy with no other etiology other than the meth use. CONCLUSION: There are several reports that show an increase in frequency of meth use, suggesting that cardiomyopathy and acute heart failure may be a new medical concern.
RESUMO
Spirometry is the most common pulmonary function test. It provides useful information for early detection of respiratory system abnormalities. While decision support systems use normally calculated parameters such as FEV1, FVC, and FEV1% to diagnose the pattern of respiratory system diseases, expert physicians pay close attention to the pattern of the flow-volume curve as well. Fisher discriminant analysis shows that coefficients of a simple polynomial function fitted to the curve, can capture the information about the disease patterns much better than the familiar single point parameters. A neural network then can classify the abnormality pattern as restrictive, obstructive, mixed, or normal. Using the data from 205 adult volunteers, total accuracy, sensitivity and specificity for four categories are 97.6%, 97.5% and 98.8% respectively.
