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Introduction: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been associated with nighttime headaches (HAs), nightmares (NMs), and difficulty falling or staying asleep (sleep disturbances [SD]). The authors of the current study evaluated the correlative elements of using a removable mandibular neuroprosthesis (RMN) and the reduction of these symptoms in participants diagnosed with PTSD or mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI)/PTSD. The RMN device is a form of specialized dental splint that has a potential to reduce the painful stimuli of bruxing and potential upregulation of threat response systems that may occur during sleep., Method: A sample of 32 individuals was selected through random assignment from a volunteer base of 200 volunteers for examination by self-report according to an A-B-A-B design. The sample included 25 men and 7 women between the ages of 21 and 65; 21 had military experience and 11 were civilians. Participants were asked to rate the frequency and intensity of their HAs, NMs, and SD during each phase. Their responses were scored using a custom survey (equivalent forms reliability) that provides ratio-scaled results for symptom frequency and intensity. The original number of participants was 35 with three participants dropping out before the conclusion of the study., Results: Survey scores for PTSD-related sleep symptoms were relatively high at baseline (x̄=0.52) and significantly lower in the first experimental phase (x̄=0.20). Scores in the second experimental phase were likewise lower (x̄=0.38). Significant reductions in symptoms were reported across all three dimensions., Discussion: All participants reported some improvement in symptoms while using the device. No participants reported worsening of any symptoms as a result of using the RMN. Participants commonly reported that improvements in symptoms were immediate and did not diminish over time. Data indicate that there is a negative correlation between the use of an RMN and the reduction of HAs, NMs, and SD in persons diagnosed with PTSD or mTBI/PTSD., (2014.)

Summary: We describe libSBMLReactionFinder, a C library for retrieving specific biochemical reactions from the curated systems biology markup language models contained in the BioModels database. The library leverages semantic annotations in the database to associate reactions with human-readable descriptions, making the reactions retrievable through simple string searches. Our goal is to provide a useful tool for quantitative modelers who seek to accelerate modeling efforts through the reuse of previously published representations of specific chemical reactions., Availability and Implementation: The library is open-source and dual licensed under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 and GNU General Public License Version 2.0. Project source code, downloads and documentation are available at http://code.google.com/p/lib-sbml-reaction-finder.