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P Lalonde

Publications and source records attributed to P Lalonde.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Burden of care of families not living with young schizophrenic relatives.

A program that provides comprehensive support services to young schizophrenic adults and their families in Montreal was evaluated after one year to assess the needs of families, especially single-parent families, after the young adult patient left home. Results of the evaluation, which employed a case-control design, showed that compared with families receiving the usual services, families in the program reported feeling less burdened by the patients' personal problems. They also received more services and had more contact with professionals. Patients living away from home spent more than 18 hours a week in face-to-face contact with their families. Single parents of mentally ill young adults spent much less time with their offspring and expressed more need for services and a greater burden of care than married parents.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed1992

Clozapine in the treatment of refractory schizophrenia: Canadian policies and clinical guidelines.

Clozapine is an atypical neuroleptic agent that has recently become available in Canada with potential clinical efficacy in the treatment of refractory schizophrenia, and in patients with schizophrenia neurologically intolerant to conventional neuroleptics. Although it causes few extra-pyramidal symptoms, the drug has a number of other adverse effects including a risk of agranulocytosis in one to two percent of all patients. Because of this, the use of the drug is permitted only if the white blood count is monitored weekly. The monitoring system, outlined in this article, requires a coordinated effort between clinical staff, pharmacy, laboratory and the Clozaril Support and Assistance Network. Clinical guidelines are proposed, detailing the indications and contraindications for treatment and the pharmacokinetics, dosing, adverse effects, and drug interactions with clozapine. In addition, the economics, government policies and implications for future research are considered. Although there are administrative and clinical difficulties associated with its use, clozapine represents an advance in therapeutic research. Patients and family members will be inquiring about the drug and may deserve a trial. This article aims to inform Canadian mental health professionals about the safe and beneficial use of clozapine.

Clozapine↗
PubMed1992

Lower incidence and increased male:female ratio in schizophrenia.

Patients with an ICD-9 diagnosis of psychotic disorder were assessed for DSM-III-R schizophrenia. Rates of schizophrenia were found to be higher in males (39.8 per 100,000) than females (22.4 per 100,000). The DSM-III-R incidence supports recent studies which suggest a decrease in rates of schizophrenia across time, and also suggests that men suffer from both more schizophrenia and a more severe form of the disease.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Application of exact ODDS for partial agreements of names in record linkage.

Automated methods for linking records pertaining to the same individuals have in the past made only crude use of the name information. A perceptive filing clerk is more sophisticated because humans retain a lifetime memory of instances in which variant forms of names were employed interchangeably, and of synonyms that sometimes did not even resemble one another. This limitation of the machine can be rectified, but the body of knowledge required to serve as its memory must be large. The needed data have now been brought together on a suitable scale, from many past searches of Canada's Mortality Data Base. Described here are the development and use of the resulting tables of essentially exact discriminating powers (or ODDS) to do with comparisons of male given names. The aim is to reduce the proportion of ambiguously linked pairs of records requiring labor intensive clerical resolution. The tables are intended for general use in this country, and as a model for similar facilities appropriate to other populations.

Canada↗
PubMed1989

Discriminating powers of partial agreements of names for linking personal records. Part I: The logical basis.

Machines have difficulty when using people's names to link medical and other records pertaining to the same individuals because of nicknames, ethnic synonyms, truncations, misspellings and typographical errors. Present algorithms used to compute the discriminating powers (or ODDS) associated with partial agreements of names are based, inappropriately, on the degrees of outward similarity alone. They are particularly ineffective in dealing with names that look alike but are unrelated, and with related names that have little apparent similarity. A fundamentally different rationale is, therefore, proposed which, like the human mind, assesses the relatedness of two alternative forms of a name in terms of how often they are used, interchangeably in practice. This must be taken into account if the associated discriminating powers (ODDS) are to be correctly computed. A way of implementing this more precise approach is described and illustrated, using the given names on linked records from an earlier epidemiological study. This first study of two describes the logical basis for record linkage, a second one the empirical test.

Humans↗
PubMed1989

Discriminating powers of partial agreements of names for linking personal records. Part II: The empirical test.

The preceeding paper examined the logical basis of an exact way of calculating the discriminating powers of people's names when they only partially agree. The method has application to automated file searching and record linkage. The present account describes an empirical test of the approach. Use is made of some 2000 comparison pairs of male given names, obtained as a byproduct from an earlier linkage study. The test shows that exact value-specific ODDS can indeed be calculated for common names when compared with their accepted synonyms (e.g. JOSEPH versus JOE). Moreover, the use can be extended to include rare variants, by arranging these into groups defined in value-specific terms (e.g. as selected blocks in an alphabetically sequenced listing, or combinations of such blocks). A majority of all name comparisons may be handled in this manner. The added precision serves to reduce the numbers of records that are ambiguously linked and require labour intensive clerical resolution.

Humans↗
PubMed1988

[Treatment of schizophrenia: a new synthesis of the literature].

One can say that a new approach of long-term treatment of schizophrenia is born. In the last years many authors developed a psychoeducational point of view based on the concept of expressed emotions. These works are quite unknown by the French psychiatrists. However, this new way of treating schizophrenics is a very complete pattern. It includes and integrates many datas from psychophysiology to family functioning and seems very promising. The main studies are presented and discussed here.

Emotions↗
PubMed1985

Teaching therapeutic skills of a psychological nature to future physicians.

The majority of patients suffering from emotional problems are treated by non psychiatric physicians. In this context, the improvement of health services to those patients requires the involvement of general practitioners trained in appropriate therapeutic skills. At the present, general practitioners often feel unprepared to treat those patients with non-pharmacologic methods and tend to overuse psychotropic medication. The psychological therapeutic skills expected to be acquired by physicians, are often described in very general terms and remain under evaluated in medical schools. The improvement of these aspects of medical training requires them to be evaluated systematically, similar to the more traditional medical skills and biological knowledge. Such an evaluation is facilitated if the learning objectives are specified. This paper proposes specific learning objectives describing the psychological therapeutic skills expected from medical students at the end of their studies on the one hand, and from family physicians at the end of their family medicine training on the other. The authors' goals are to faciliate the discussion of this complex matter between the many medical (psychiatric or not) groups concerned and, in this manner, to clarify this issue which is fundamental to the teaching and implementation of the biopsychosocial model in clinical practice.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗