Benzodiazepine overdose has various clinical manifestation, mainly regarding the central nervous system (CNS), cardiac and respiratory side effects, but rarely results in significant morbidity and mortality. Acute benzodiazepine poisoning results in dizziness, ataxia, nystagmus, dysarthria, hypoxia, hypothermia, bradycardia, hypotension, apnea, pulmonary aspiration, respiratory depression, coma, cardiopulmonary arrest and death. Anyway, deep nonresponsive coma should be investigated for additional etiologies. On the other hand, human transmissible prion disease has a fatal outcome with no specific treatment.
A successful ossiculoplasty (reconstruction of the ossicular chain of the middle ear), even now, almost a hundred years after the first attempts and countless tested materials, remains a challenge through the complexity of the surgical act and through the repeated attempts to find the most adequate prosthesis to re-establish, in the long term, the sound conductive mechanism. In this article, we present a review of the main implanted materials, including the biotechnological aspects of ossicular chain reconstruction with an emphasis on the Romanian contribution to this field of study.
