Intake of Anti-Epileptic Drugs and their Influences on Sexual Dysfunctions

Epilepsy which is also called seizures disorder is an uncontrolled action of the central nervous system. It is not a single disease but a set of neurological disorders. Actually in this situation, the brain does not receive a precise signal and as a result an abnormal condition is produced that is usually involuntary in action. In this review, we aimed to focus on the relationship of anti-epileptic drugs with sexual dysfunction and adaptation of better remedies that improve a patient’s family life. Sexual dysfunction is a common comorbidity in people with epilepsy which badly affects their quality of life. Sexual dysfunction is caused by different factors like psychiatric problems, anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) and social factors etc. Sexual dysfunctions include ejaculatory failure, lessen libido, penile erection in men and irregular menstrual cycle in women. Common drugs such as Topiramate, Gabapentin (GBP), Valproate (VA), Carbamazepine (CBZ), Olanzapine (OL) and Risperidone (RTG) that are in practice to treat epilepsy usually produced adverse effect on sexual dysfunction. Even though a lot of studies have been carried out to control sexual dysfunction in epilepsy’s patient, but still research is going on. Medicine such as Cyproheptadine, Mianserin, Buspirone, Yohimbine were found better to treat epilepsy with minimum side effects of sexual dysfunction. Moreover, it is also seen that certain vasodilators,  folate , and vitamin supplements are effective in improving the quality of life.

Semantic Question Answering in Biomedical Domain

The exponential growth of biomedical literature makes it challenging for end users to find short and precise information quickly. Biomedical search engines, such as Pubmed and Quertle, are unable to retrieve the exact information so, a paradigm shift to question answering systems (QA) is required to find short and crisp answers to users’ questions. A biomedical question answering system usu ally comprises three components: question processing, candidate retrieval, and answer processing. In question processing, the QA system performs query for mulation and lexical answer type (LAT) prediction. Candidate retrieval stage uses a search engine and a document index to retrieve relevant documents and snippets. Finally, answer processing stage performs candidate answer generation and scoring. The biomedical terminology is ever evolving, so it is challenging for the candidate retrieval step to retrieve relevant documents requiring effective query formulation techniques. Secondly, the answers to biomedical questions are labeled with more than one semantic class in the biomedical domain requiring multi-label lexical answer type (LAT) prediction. The study at hand attempts to solve these two components in question processing stage by incorporating semantic information. We use discriminative term-selection query expansion technique with word embedding based semantic filtering during query formulation to improve the performance of biomedical document retrieval. Furthermore, we propose a LAT prediction pipeline for factoid and list type questions by introducing focus-driven semantic features which have significantly enhanced appropriate answer selection during the answer processing stage. We perform the evaluations of our proposed LAT prediction methodology using state-of-the-art Open Architecture for Ques tion Answering (OAQA) system and achieved better performance on 80% of the test batches compared with the performance of state-of-the-art QA systems. Fur thermore, we examine the proposed system performance in comparison with an online biomedical question answering system - EAGLi - and attain the best per formance for factoid and list type questions on Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and F1 measure respectively.