Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show significant impairment in functioning, particularly in the interpersonal and social domains. Prior reports suggest that clozapine may be effective in the management of BPD. We present the case of a patient with BPD who experienced persistent suicidal ideation and was treated with clozapine at a state psychiatric hospital. After treatment failure with other psychotropic medications, clozapine medication was initiated; not only did suicidal ideation cease, but social and professional functioning also greatly improved to the point of no longer requiring intensive levels of observation or restrictive procedures. Clozapine appears to be efficacious in the management of suicide attempts and self-injurious behavior. Moreover, it appears to be promising as a therapeutic measure for ameliorating the global functioning of patients with severe BPD. Larger, randomized, blinded, and controlled prospective studies are needed to confirm these findings and to determine optimal dosage.
Borderline Personality Disorder* ; Clozapine* ; Hospitals, Psychiatric ; Humans ; Prospective Studies ; Self-Injurious Behavior ; Social Adjustment ; Suicidal Ideation ; Suicide ; Treatment Failure

OBJECTIVE: Unipolar mania is a clinical reality in our daily practice. Many authors suggested that bipolar patients can have only manic episodes without depressions. These findings lead us to explore more this particularity. METHODS: We conduct a retrospective, descriptive and comparative study including 173 patients, followed for bipolar disorder type I, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fifth edition criteria, during the period between January 2008 and December 2015. Two groups were identified. The first one was composed of 98 patients who had presented only manic episodes. The second group contained the rest of the sample. Unipolar mania was defined as the presence of three or more manic states without a depressive episode during the period of the study. RESULTS: One hundred seventy three patients were included in the study. The average age of the sample was 43 years old. The first episode was manic in 129 patients (74.6%). The dominant polarity was manic in 90.8% of the cases. Seasonal characteristic and psychotic symptoms were observed in respectively 11.0% and 53.2% of the sample. Rapid cycling evolution was observed among 2.3% of patients. The unipolar manic profile accounted for 56.6% of the population. This result is equivalent to an annual incidence of 8%. Comparing the two groups, we did not find a significant difference concerning the sociodemographic and clinical variables except for the number of suicide attempts (p=0.014). CONCLUSION: Our study shows that unipolar mania is clinical evidence. More studies should be conducted in order to understand its nosological and psychopathological foundations.
Bipolar Disorder* ; Depression ; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ; Foundations ; Humans ; Incidence ; Retrospective Studies ; Seasons ; Suicide ; Tunisia*

We identified and quantified a variety of mineral elements in 18 tobacco samples purchased from a Tunisian market. In total, 25 mineral elements have been measured in cigarettes, water pipe tobacco, and smokeless tobacco using inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy following microwave-assisted digestion. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSSTM, version 18.0. The lowest concentrations of all studied elements were observed in water pipe tobacco. Significantly higher concentrations of Al, Fe, Mg, Na, Ca, Cr, and Co were found in smokeless tobacco, while cigarettes brands contained the highest concentrations of K, Mn, Ni, Ba, and Sr. There was no significant difference between the mineral contents of local and foreign cigarettes and conventional and light cigarettes. Our findings demonstrated that local smokeless tobacco appears to be the most hazardous tobacco type. The concentration of minerals in light cigarettes was not significantly different from the concentration in conventional cigarettes.
Elements ; Tobacco ; chemistry ; Tobacco, Smokeless ; analysis