Welcome to the website of the
Prof. Dr. Anton J.M. Loonen
Foundation
This is my second Blog for antonloonen.nl to update everyone on the current state of affairs.
I would like to point everyone to the www.sadimod.nl site. Also found there is an adaptation of the widely used Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale (AIMS) to measure dyskinesias in clinical trials. A while ago, there was hope that after the discovery of atypical antipsychotics, the occurrence of tardive dyskinesia in antipsychotic users would become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, that expectation has not been fulfilled. Therefore, it remains necessary for clinical trials to properly assess the occurrence of this undesirable clinical phenomenon. Traditionally, the AIMS is used for this purpose, but this scale has some serious limitations that severely reduce the reliability of the measurements after a relatively short period of time. One of the problems is how to deal with the differences in severity of the dyskinesia at activity and at rest. In the SADIMoD adaptation of the AIMS, only the first 7 items of this scale are included (1-4 for orofacial and 5-7 for peripheral dyskinesia) and dyskinesia at rest and at activity are scored separately. The measurement can then be retrospectively incorporated into the final AIMS score. These modifications greatly increase the reliability of the adapted AIMS scores.
In the years 2013 to 2017, educational courses on the neurobiological backgrounds of depression, psychosis, addiction, bipolar disorder and anxiety were conducted in Tomsk, Kemerovo and Novosibirsk under the auspices of the CINP. I had the honor of teaching a class each time during these courses for MSc and PhD students in neuroscience and research psychiatrists and have now put the handout of the presentations on this site. I have provided notes on the various dias on the notes page. The text has sometimes been edited a bit, but the content has been changed as little as possible.