Psychosocial impact on learning, memory, and creativity in populations at risk for dopamine network dysfunction

Studying dopamine-dependent functions such as memory and creativity can help us understand and improve quality of life in populations at risk for dopaminergic network dysfunction. I examined memory and creativity in a series of studies in different at-risk populations. The first study investigated marijuana initiation and learning in 119 inner-city youth, some with prenatal substance exposures, including to cocaine. I hypothesized that earlier-onset marijuana use would predict poorer developmental learning trajectories, and non-use the most positive. Results suggested that initiation’s effects on learning may reflect psychosocial factors rather than prenatal substance exposure status or time of marijuana initiation. The potential importance of the dopamine-related personality factor “openness to experience” motivated additional studies. One hypothesized and found different neurocognitive outcomes in young-adult substance users (n=41) based on maladaptive or adaptive substance use motives. The other studies examined Parkinson’s disease (PD), a disorder characterized by the degeneration of brain dopaminergic networks. Participants were individuals with PD without dementia (33-42 “PDs”/study), age-matched normal control adults (26-28 “NCs”/study), and younger control adults (37-41 “YCs”/study). The first PD study examined neuropsychological and personality correlates of learning and memory. I hypothesized that in each group, openness would explain a significant amount of the variance in learning, and higher openness would be associated with better learning and memory, particularly in PDs. Results supported this hypothesis in PDs only. The second PD study examined creativity—specifically, divergent thinking, which correlates with openness and shares dopaminergic neural substrates. Based on research demonstrating that brief walking improves divergent thinking in young adults, and that exercise changes dopamine transmission, I hypothesized that brief walking would improve divergent thinking in PDs, NCs, and YCs. In PDs, I expected higher disease severity (more compromised dopamine function) to correlate with less improvement after walking. None of the hypotheses were supported, potentially due to the low intensity of the intervention, but openness appeared protective of creativity in YCs and PDs. Taken together, the results of the studies demonstrate the importance of psychosocial factors in dopamine-dependent cognition. In at-risk populations, openness’s benefits may surpass effects of moderate substance use, and they may offer neuroprotection in PD

Dual tasking in Parkinson's disease: cognitive consequences while walking

Published in final edited form as: Neuropsychology. 2017 September; 31(6): 613–623. doi:10.1037/neu0000331.OBJECTIVE: Cognitive deficits are common in Parkinson's disease (PD) and exacerbate the functional limitations imposed by PD's hallmark motor symptoms, including impairments in walking. Though much research has addressed the effect of dual cognitive-locomotor tasks on walking, less is known about their effect on cognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relation between gait and executive function, with the hypothesis that dual tasking would exacerbate cognitive vulnerabilities in PD as well as being associated with gait disturbances. METHOD: Nineteen individuals with mild-moderate PD without dementia and 13 age- and education-matched normal control adults (NC) participated. Executive function (set-shifting) and walking were assessed singly and during dual tasking. RESULTS: Dual tasking had a significant effect on cognition (reduced set-shifting) and on walking (speed, stride length) for both PD and NC, and also on stride frequency for PD only. The impact of dual tasking on walking speed and stride frequency was significantly greater for PD than NC. Though the group by condition interaction was not significant, PD had fewer set-shifts than NC on dual task. Further, relative to NC, PD showed significantly greater variability in cognitive performance under dual tasking, whereas variability in motor performance remained unaffected by dual tasking. CONCLUSIONS: Dual tasking had a significantly greater effect in PD than in NC on cognition as well as on walking. The results suggest that assessment and treatment of PD should consider the cognitive as well as the gait components of PD-related deficits under dual-task conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record)

Eye movement control during visual pursuit in Parkinson's disease

BACKGROUND: Prior studies of oculomotor function in Parkinson’s disease (PD) have either focused on saccades without considering smooth pursuit, or tested smooth pursuit while excluding saccades. The present study investigated the control of saccadic eye movements during pursuit tasksand assessed the quality of binocular coordinationas potential sensitive markers of PD. METHODS: Observers fixated on a central cross while a target moved toward it. Once the target reached the fixation cross, observers began to pursue the moving target. To further investigate binocular coordination, the moving target was presented on both eyes (binocular condition), or on one eye only (dichoptic condition). RESULTS: The PD group made more saccades than age-matched normal control adults (NC) both during fixation and pursuit. The difference between left and right gaze positions increased over time during the pursuit period for PD but not for NC. The findings were not related to age, as NC and young-adult control group (YC) performed similarly on most of the eye movement measures, and were not correlated with classical measures of PD severity (e.g., Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) score). DISCUSSION: Our results suggest that PD may be associated with impairment not only in saccade inhibition, but also in binocular coordination during pursuit, and these aspects of dysfunction may be useful in PD diagnosis or tracking of disease course.This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF SBE-0354378 to Arash Yazdanbakhsh and Bo Cao) and Office of Naval Research (ONR N00014-11-1-0535 to Bo Cao, Chia-Chien Wu, and Arash Yazdanbakhsh). There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. (SBE-0354378 - National Science Foundation (NSF); ONR N00014-11-1-0535 - Office of Naval Research)Published versio

032: Thirty months outcomes after PCI of unprotected left main coronary artery according to the SYNTAX score

AimsTo assess middle term outcomes according to SYNTAX score and rates of delayed surgical/bleeding events after unprotected left main (LM) coronary artery (ULMCA) PCI in an unselected patients population.MethodsConsecutive patients treated by PCI for ULMCA were included among a single center 3508 PCI database within 36 months. Syntax scores were calculated, post discharge extracardiac surgery or hemorrhage were recorded during follow-up as clinical outcomes (Death, TVR, MACCE=cardiovascular death+MI+stroke+TLR).Results102 (3.6%) patients underwent PCI of the LM, including 21 protected LM. Among the 81 patients with PCI of ULMCA, mean age was 65±13, 27% had urgent PCI for AMI or cardiogenic shock, 61% had DES.SYNTAX score was 28±14 in mean and ≤22 in 30 (37%), 23 to 32 in 22 (27%) and ≥33 in 29 (36%) patients.At 30±11 months follow up (98% of the patients), death occurred in 24 patients (30%), TVR in 16 (20%) and MACCE in 35 (43%). Clinical events according to the SYNTAX score are shown in figure. No cardiovascular death occurred in patients with syntax ≤22. MACCE rates were significantly lower when DES were used (24% vs. 64%, p<0.05) and in case of non-urgent PCI (36% vs. 71%, p<0.05).During follow-up, 20 (25%) and 12 (15%) patients underwent unplanned extracardiac surgery and/or hemorrhage, leading to antiplatelet withdrawal in 31% of the cases.ConclusionsIn unselected patients treated by PCI of ULMCA with Syntax score ≤22, outcomes were found to be excellent with no cardiovascular death observed at 30 months. DES and non-urgent PCI were associated with a better prognosis. One patient out of three underwent unplanned extracardiac surgery or hemorrhage during follow up.Figure: 30-months outcomes according to SYNTAX scor

Jovens e associações em Moçambique: motivações e dinâmicas actuais

O presente artigo é uma reflexão sobre dinâmicas associativas de jovens no Moçambique pós colonial. O objectivo desta reflexão foi identificar e analisar as motivações de engajamento dos jovens nesses agrupamentos. Baseando-se em aproximações empíricas feitas a duas associações de jovens - Associação Aro Juvenil e Associação Positiva Juvenil - a análise demonstra que dinamica associativa de jovens mete em evidência relações complexas entre identidade, contexto, o privado, o público e o afectivo. Embora haja múltiplas motivações, a adesão dos jovens em associações associa trajectórias e expectativas individualizadas. A nível discursivo, a entrada na vida associativa representa uma forma de legitimação sóciopolítica em resposta a um discurso que considera os jovens passivos e pouco intervenientes na solução dos problemas que lhes afecta em particular e à sociedade no geral. A nível das práticas associativas quotidianas, os jovens reintrepretam e dão outro sentido às motivações do seu engajamento: para lá dos objectivos formais, pretensamente desenvolvimentistas, altruistas e humanitários, o associativismo é uma estratégia de vida e de realização de projectos individuais. Criar uma associação e/ou nela aderir pode significar maiores possibilidades de aceder e controlar recursos e capitais diversificados como emprego/profissão, dinheiro, trabalho, poder, reconhecimento e prestigio, formações entre outros que de outra forma não seria possível.This article reflects on youth associations dynamics in Postcolonial Mozambique. The aim is to identify and analyze motivations for young people's involvement in such groups. Based on empirical work with two youth associations - namely "Associação Aro Juvenil" and "Associação Positiva Juvenil" - the assessment finds that youth associations dynamics highlights intricate relationships involving identity, context, private, public and affective milieus. Although there are multiple motivations, young people's adherence to associations is combined with individual life stories and expectations. At the discourse level, entrance to the associative life represents a form of socio-political legitimation in response to other narratives that consider young people very passive and less intervening in finding solutions to their own problems, and society's in general. At the level of day-to-day practices, young people re-interpret and give a different sense to their motivations and commitment: beyond formal objectives - arguably development-oriented, altruistic and humanistic - associations are a life strategy for the accomplishment of individual achievements. To create an association and/or take part in one may imply greater possibilities of accessing and controlling diversified resources and capitals, such as a job/occupation, money, work, power, recognition, prestige, and training, among others, which would be otherwise impossible

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Use of micro-dams in potato furrows to reduce erosion and runoff and minimise surface water contamination through pesticides

The use of micro-dams in potato furrows is an interesting technology to reduce erosion and runoff in hilly areas. These phenomena are major sources of surface water contamination by nutrients and plant protection products (Gillijns et al., 2005). In 2011 Bayer CropScience set up a trial in collaboration with the Walloon Agricultural Research Centre (CRA-W) and ULg-Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech in Huldenberg (Belgium) to demonstrate this technique in potatoes. Micro-dams create barriers between furrows in order to encourage rainwater to infiltrate in the soil rather than to run off. The results from the trial over this year confirm that the application of micro-dams is effective in reducing erosion and runoff significantly. The total loss of plant protection products (PPP) to surface water is dramatically reduced and also strongly depends on the physic-chemical characteristics of the active ingredients. In addition, the technique tends to produce a higher yield of potato tubers as an effect of an optimised utilisation of the available rainwater and nutrients

La socio-écologie prise au pied de la lettre : deux fondements éthiques pour l'approche "socio-écologique" confrontées au cas particulier d'un grand LTSER

International audiencePoster scientifique présenté à un colloque de recherche en science et management sur les enjeux socio-écologiques (Garden Route Interface Meeting). Ce poster présente les objectifs, méthodes et résultats principaux du projet de recherche BIBLI-OHM (mars-juillet 2018): une étude de la trajectoire, des influences et des perspectives de la Zone Atelier Bassin du Rhône et de son Observatoire Hommes-Milieux à partir de l'analyse d'un corpus pluriannuel de ses publications

La socio-écologie prise au pied de la lettre : deux fondements éthiques pour l'approche "socio-écologique" confrontées au cas particulier d'un grand LTSER

[Departement_IRSTEA]Eaux [ADD1_IRSTEA]Systèmes aquatiques soumis à des pressions multiplesInternational audiencePoster scientifique présenté à un colloque de recherche en science et management sur les enjeux socio-écologiques (Garden Route Interface Meeting). Ce poster présente les objectifs, méthodes et résultats principaux du projet de recherche BIBLI-OHM (mars-juillet 2018): une étude de la trajectoire, des influences et des perspectives de la Zone Atelier Bassin du Rhône et de son Observatoire Hommes-Milieux à partir de l'analyse d'un corpus pluriannuel de ses publications