[Association between the violence in the community and the aggressive behaviors of psychotics during their hospitalizations]. / Relation entre la violence intra-hospitalière des patients avec psychoses et la violence dans la communauté.

BACKGROUND: Violence is a common issue in psychiatry and has multiple determiners. The aim of this study is to assess the psychotic inpatients' violence in association with the violence of the neighborhood from which the patients are drawn and to estimate the impact of this environmental factor with regard to other factors. METHOD: A prospective multicenter study was led in nine French cities. Eligible patients were psychotic involuntary patients hospitalized in the cities' psychiatric wards. During their treatments, any kind of aggressive behavior by the patients has been reported by the Overt Aggression Scale (OAS). RESULTS: From June 2010 to May 2011, 95 patients have been included. Seventy-nine per cent of the patients were violent during their hospitalizations. In a bivariate analysis, inpatient violence was significantly associated with different factors: male gender, patient violence history, substance abuse, manic or mixed disorder, the symptoms severity measured by the BPRS, the insight degree and the city crime rate. In a multivariate analysis, the only significant factors associated with the patients' violence were substance abuse, the symptoms severity and the crime rates from the different patients' cities. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that violence within the psychotic patients' neighborhood could represent a risk of violence during their treatments.

Rapid molecular genetic assay for direct identification of Bordetella from patients specimens.

Biological diagnosis of whooping cough is increasingly necessary to confirm respiratory tract infection. Indeed, clinical symptoms are variable especially in adolescents and adults who contaminate newborns too young to be vaccinated. The PCR assay was proven highly sensitive for the diagnosis of pertussis. In this study, we reported the use of a new test (GenoQuick Bordetella [GQB], Hain Life Science, Germany) which permits the fast molecular genetic identification of Bordetella pertussis and parapertussis directly from patients specimens, i.e. swabs from nose or throat. The test was performed over a three months period on 40 specimens from patients (1 month to 65 years old), most of them were young children admitted in paediatric emergency with paroxysmal cough or prolonged cough.