Prenatal stress reduces postnatal neurogenesis in rats selectively bred for high, but not low, anxiety: Possible key role of placental 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2

Prenatal stress (PS) produces persistent abnormalities in anxiety-related behaviors, stress responsivity, susceptibility to psychopathology and hippocampal changes in adult offspring. The hippocampus shows a remarkable degree of structural plasticity, notably in response to stress and glucocorticoids. We hypothesized that PS would differentially affect hippocampal neurogenesis in rats selectively bred for genetic differences in anxiety-related behaviors and stress responsivity. Pregnant dams of high anxiety-related behavior (HAB) and low anxiety-related behavior (LAB) strains were stressed between days 5 and 20 of pregnancy. The survival of newly generated hippocampal cells was found to be significantly lower in 43-day-old HAB than in LAB male offspring of unstressed pregnancies. PS further reduced newly generated cell numbers only in HAB rats, and this was paralleled by a reduction in doublecortin-positive cell numbers, indicative of reduced neurogenesis. As maternal plasma corticosterone levels during PS were similar in both strains, we examined placental 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 (11β-HSD2), which catalyses rapid inactivation of maternal corticosterone to inert 11-dehydrocorticosterone and thus serves as a physiological 'barrier' to maternal glucocorticoids. PS significantly increased placental 11β-HSD2 activity in LAB, but not HAB, rats. We conclude that PS differentially affects the number of surviving newly generated cells and neurogenesis in HAB and LAB rats. The high sensitivity of hippocampal neurogenesis to PS in HAB rats is paralleled by a failure to increase placental 11β-HSD2 activity after stress rather than by different maternal corticosterone responses. Hence, stress-induced placental 11β-HSD2 expression may be critical in protecting the fetal brain from maternal stress-induced effects on adult neurogenesis

Quality and Quantity of Sleep and Factors Associated With Sleep Disturbance in Hospitalized Patients

Item does not contain fulltextImportance: Although inadequate sleep has a proven negative association with health care outcomes, to date, no large-scale studies have examined sleep in general hospital wards. Objectives: To assess the subjective quantity and quality of sleep and to identify the hospital-related factors associated with sleep disturbances in hospitalized patients. Design: For this nationwide, single-day, multicenter, cross-sectional, observational study, which took place on February 22, 2017, all hospitals in the Netherlands were encouraged by word of mouth and conventional and social media to participate in this study. A total of 39 hospitals participated. Included patients were at least 18 years of age, were able to give informed consent, and had spent at least 1 night in a regular-care hospital ward. Exposures: Hospitalization in a regular-care ward. Main Outcomes and Measures: Quantity and quality of last night's sleep in the hospital compared with habitual sleep at home the month before hospitalization. The Consensus Sleep Diary and the Dutch-Flemish Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Sleep Disturbance item bank were used. Complementary questions assessed sleep-disturbing factors. Results: A total of 2005 patients were included (median age, 68 years; interquartile range, 57-77 years; 994 of 1935 [51.4%] were male [70 patients did not identify their sex]). Compared with habitual sleep at home, the total sleep time in the hospital was 83 minutes (95% CI, 75-92 minutes; P < .001) shorter. The mean number of nocturnal awakenings was 2.0 (95% CI, 1.9-2.1) times at home vs 3.3 (95% CI, 3.2-3.5) times during hospitalization (P < .001). Patients woke up 44 minutes (95% CI, 44-45 minutes; P < .001) earlier than their habitual wake-up time at home. A total of 1344 patients (70.4%) reported having been awakened by external causes, which in 718 (35.8%) concerned hospital staff. All aspects of sleep quality measured using PROMIS questions were rated worse during hospitalization than at home. The most reported sleep-disturbing factors were noise of other patients, medical devices, pain, and toilet visits. Conclusions and Relevance: This study demonstrated that the duration and quality of sleep in hospitalized patients were significantly affected and revealed many potentially modifiable hospital-related factors negatively associated with sleep. Raising awareness about the importance of adequate sleep in the vulnerable hospital population and introducing interventions to target sleep-disturbing factors may improve healing

Oxytocin: Coevolution of human and domesticated animals

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) and its homologues are produced in specialized neurons located in Vertebrates exclusively in a deep and evolutionarily old part of the forebrain, the hypothalamus. The axons of OT neurons form the classical hypothalamic-neurohypophyseal tract terminating on blood vessels of the neurohypothysis to release OT into the systemic blood circulation. However, as was recently demonstrated in mammals, collaterals of OT axons concomitantly project to various forebrain regions to modulate the activity of local networks. At the behavioral level, OT facilitates intraspecific social contacts in mammals via various mechanisms ranging from the suppression of neuroendocrine stress responses to the direct OT action on neurons of socially relevant brain regions. Recent reports indicated possible contribution of OT to the formation of the social bond between domesticated mammals (dog, sheep, cattle) and humans. Indeed, social interaction between humans and a domesticated animal resulted in the elevation of peripheral OT levels (in blood, saliva or urine) and, in congruence, exogenous (intranasal) OT application led to more frequent contacts between the owner and the domesticated animal. It has been known for decades that domesticated animals exhibit profound socio-communicative abilities accompanied by suppressed aggression and stress responsiveness. These peculiarities of their behavior and physiology may be influenced by the activity of the central OT system. Therefore, in the present mini-review we focus on the role of OT in the orchestration of distinct forms of social behavior, including the monogamous bond, maternal care, social memory and recognition, aggression, and anxiety. As a conclusion, we propose possible directions for exploration of the OT contribution to empathy between humans and domesticated animals, which was likely established in the course of their co-evolution during last 10.000– 15.000 years

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 science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press