The Use of Herbal Medications and Dietary Supplements by People with Mental Illness

This study examined the relationship between herbal medication and dietary supplement (HMDS) use and mental health characteristics. Data are drawn from a national household survey of the United States’ civilian, non-institutionalized population (N = 9,585). Psychiatric medication and HMDS use, psychiatric diagnoses and treatment needs, utilization and satisfaction were assessed. Compared to non-users, HMDS users were more likely to perceive themselves as having mental health needs, to have received mental health and primary care treatment, and to be dissatisfied with their overall healthcare. Psychiatric medication use was not related to HMDS use, and in multivariate analyses, HMDS use was associated with perceived mental health needs. Differences in use of specific HMDS between those with and without a psychiatric disorder were also examined. The use of HMDS warrants particular attention in persons with perceived mental health problems as these individuals may be turning to HMDS use for treatment of their symptoms

Widespread sex differences in gene expression and splicing in the adult human brain

There is strong evidence to show that men and women differ in terms of neurodevelopment, neurochemistry and susceptibility to neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disease. The molecular basis of these differences remains unclear. Progress in this field has been hampered by the lack of genome-wide information on sex differences in gene expression and in particular splicing in the human brain. Here we address this issue by using post-mortem adult human brain and spinal cord samples originating from 137 neuropathologically confirmed control individuals to study whole-genome gene expression and splicing in 12 CNS regions. We show that sex differences in gene expression and splicing are widespread in adult human brain, being detectable in all major brain regions and involving 2.5% of all expressed genes. We give examples of genes where sex-biased expression is both disease-relevant and likely to have functional consequences, and provide evidence suggesting that sex biases in expression may reflect sex-biased gene regulatory structures

Telepresence and the Role of the Senses

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses

The role of mothers-in-law in antenatal care decision-making in Nepal: a qualitative study

Background Antenatal care (ANC) has been recognised as a way to improve health outcomes for pregnant women and their babies. However, only 29% of pregnant women receive the recommended four antenatal visits in Nepal but reasons for such low utilisation are poorly understood. As in many countries of South Asia, mothers-in-law play a crucial role in the decisions around accessing health care facilities and providers. This paper aims to explore the mother-in-law’s role in (a) her daughter-in-law’s ANC uptake; and (b) the decision-making process about using ANC services in Nepal. Methods In-depth interviews were conducted with 30 purposively selected antenatal or postnatal mothers (half users, half non-users of ANC), 10 husbands and 10 mothers-in-law in two different (urban and rural) communities. Results Our findings suggest that mothers-in-law sometime have a positive influence, for example when encouraging women to seek ANC, but more often it is negative. Like many rural women of their generation, all mothers-in-law in this study were illiterate and most had not used ANC themselves. The main factors leading mothers-in-law not to support/ encourage ANC check ups were expectations regarding pregnant women fulfilling their household duties, perceptions that ANC was not beneficial based largely on their own past experiences, the scarcity of resources under their control and power relations between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. Individual knowledge and social class of the mothers-in-law of users and non-users differed significantly, which is likely to have had an effect on their perceptions of the benefits of ANC. Conclusion Mothers-in-law have a strong influence on the uptake of ANC in Nepal. Understanding their role is important if we are to design and target effective community-based health promotion interventions. Health promotion and educational interventions to improve the use of ANC should target women, husbands and family members, particularly mothers-in-law where they control access to family resources

Bedside Interactions from the Other Side of the Bedrail

To assess the importance to patients of various aspects of bedside interactions with physician teams. Design : Cross-sectional survey. Setting : VA hospital. Patients : Ninety-seven medical inpatients. Intervention : Survey of 44 questions including short answer, multiple choice, and Likert-type questions. Measurements and Main Results : Data analysis included descriptive statistics. The sample was predominantly male, with a mean age of 62. Overall satisfaction with the hospital experience and with the team of doctors were both high (95% and 96% reported being very or mostly satisfied, respectively). Patients reported learning about several issues during their interactions with the teams; the 3 most highly rated areas were new problems, tests that will be done, and treatments that will be done. Most patients (76%) felt that their teams cared about them very much. Patients were made comfortable when the team showed that they cared, listened, and appeared relaxed (reported by 63%, 57%, and 54%, respectively). Patients were made uncomfortable by the team using language they did not understand (22%) and when several people examined them at once (13%). Many (58%) patients felt personally involved in teaching. The majority of patients liked having medical students and residents involved in their care (69% and 64%, respectively). Conclusions : Patients have much to teach about what is important about interacting with physician teams. Although patients' reactions to team interactions are generally positive, patients are different with respect to what makes them comfortable and uncomfortable. Taking their preferences into account could improve the experience of being in a teaching hospital.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75456/1/j.1525-1497.2005.40192.x.pd

Assessment of examiner leniency and stringency ('hawk-dove effect') in the MRCP(UK) clinical examination (PACES) using multi-facet Rasch modelling

BACKGROUND: A potential problem of clinical examinations is known as the hawk-dove problem, some examiners being more stringent and requiring a higher performance than other examiners who are more lenient. Although the problem has been known qualitatively for at least a century, we know of no previous statistical estimation of the size of the effect in a large-scale, high-stakes examination. Here we use FACETS to carry out a multi-facet Rasch modelling of the paired judgements made by examiners in the clinical examination (PACES) of MRCP(UK), where identical candidates were assessed in identical situations, allowing calculation of examiner stringency. METHODS: Data were analysed from the first nine diets of PACES, which were taken between June 2001 and March 2004 by 10,145 candidates. Each candidate was assessed by two examiners on each of seven separate tasks. with the candidates assessed by a total of 1,259 examiners, resulting in a total of 142,030 marks. Examiner demographics were described in terms of age, sex, ethnicity, and total number of candidates examined. RESULTS: FACETS suggested that about 87% of main effect variance was due to candidate differences, 1% due to station differences, and 12% due to differences between examiners in leniency-stringency. Multiple regression suggested that greater examiner stringency was associated with greater examiner experience and being from an ethnic minority. Male and female examiners showed no overall difference in stringency. Examination scores were adjusted for examiner stringency and it was shown that for the present pass mark, the outcome for 95.9% of candidates would be unchanged using adjusted marks, whereas 2.6% of candidates would have passed, even though they had failed on the basis of raw marks, and 1.5% of candidates would have failed, despite passing on the basis of raw marks. CONCLUSION: Examiners do differ in their leniency or stringency, and the effect can be estimated using Rasch modelling. The reasons for differences are not clear, but there are some demographic correlates, and the effects appear to be reliable across time. Account can be taken of differences, either by adjusting marks or, perhaps more effectively and more justifiably, by pairing high and low stringency examiners, so that raw marks can be used in the determination of pass and fail

Vertical Binocular Disparity is Encoded Implicitly within a Model Neuronal Population Tuned to Horizontal Disparity and Orientation

Primary visual cortex is often viewed as a “cyclopean retina”, performing the initial encoding of binocular disparities between left and right images. Because the eyes are set apart horizontally in the head, binocular disparities are predominantly horizontal. Yet, especially in the visual periphery, a range of non-zero vertical disparities do occur and can influence perception. It has therefore been assumed that primary visual cortex must contain neurons tuned to a range of vertical disparities. Here, I show that this is not necessarily the case. Many disparity-selective neurons are most sensitive to changes in disparity orthogonal to their preferred orientation. That is, the disparity tuning surfaces, mapping their response to different two-dimensional (2D) disparities, are elongated along the cell's preferred orientation. Because of this, even if a neuron's optimal 2D disparity has zero vertical component, the neuron will still respond best to a non-zero vertical disparity when probed with a sub-optimal horizontal disparity. This property can be used to decode 2D disparity, even allowing for realistic levels of neuronal noise. Even if all V1 neurons at a particular retinotopic location are tuned to the expected vertical disparity there (for example, zero at the fovea), the brain could still decode the magnitude and sign of departures from that expected value. This provides an intriguing counter-example to the common wisdom that, in order for a neuronal population to encode a quantity, its members must be tuned to a range of values of that quantity. It demonstrates that populations of disparity-selective neurons encode much richer information than previously appreciated. It suggests a possible strategy for the brain to extract rarely-occurring stimulus values, while concentrating neuronal resources on the most commonly-occurring situations

Suppression of charged particle production at large transverse momentum in central Pb-Pb collisions at sNN=2.76\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76 TeV

Inclusive transverse momentum spectra of primary charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{\rm NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV have been measured by the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC. The data are presented for central and peripheral collisions, corresponding to 0-5% and 70-80% of the hadronic Pb-Pb cross section. The measured charged particle spectra in $|\eta|<0.8$ and $0.3 < p_T < 20$ GeV/$c$ are compared to the expectation in pp collisions at the same $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$, scaled by the number of underlying nucleon-nucleon collisions. The comparison is expressed in terms of the nuclear modification factor $R_{\rm AA}$. The result indicates only weak medium effects ($R_{\rm AA} \approx$ 0.7) in peripheral collisions. In central collisions, $R_{\rm AA}$ reaches a minimum of about 0.14 at $p_{\rm T}=6$-7GeV/$c$ and increases significantly at larger $p_{\rm T}$. The measured suppression of high-$p_{\rm T}$ particles is stronger than that observed at lower collision energies, indicating that a very dense medium is formed in central Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages, 5 captioned figures, 3 tables, authors from page 10, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/98

Two-pion Bose-Einstein correlations in central Pb-Pb collisions at sNN\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76 TeV

The first measurement of two-pion Bose-Einstein correlations in central Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76$ TeV at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. We observe a growing trend with energy now not only for the longitudinal and the outward but also for the sideward pion source radius. The pion homogeneity volume and the decoupling time are significantly larger than those measured at RHIC.Comment: 17 pages, 5 captioned figures, 1 table, authors from page 12, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/388