Depression and diabetes mellitus

O diabetes mellitus possui elevada prevalência, acometendo cerca de 7% da população brasileira. Em torno de 20% a 30% dos pacientes com diabetes apresentam depressão. A depressão pode atuar como um fator de risco para o desenvolvimento do diabetes, piorar seus sintomas e interferir com o autocuidado dos pacientes. Quando não tratada adequadamente, a depressão nesses pacientes tende a evoluir com elevada taxa de recorrência. Entre os tratamentos disponíveis, encontramos na literatura um benefício da psicoterapia, cognitiva ou cognitivo-comportamental, para melhora dos sintomas depressivos, mas sem evidência de um benefício no controle glicêmico. Os antidepressivos tricíclicos, em especial os com maior ação noradrenérgica, e os inibidores da monoaminoxidase (IMAOs) tendem a aumentar os níveis glicêmicos. A bupropiona não interfere na glicemia e há evidências de que os inibidores seletivos de recaptura de serotonina (ISRS) melhoram os níveis glicêmicos e podem reduzir a taxa de recaídas, mostrando-se boas opções de tratamento farmacológico. A eletroconvulsoterapia também é uma estratégia interessante para esses pacientes, recomendando-se, no entanto, monitorização da glicemia. Não foram encontrados estudos significativos sobre os demais antidepressivos disponíveis para comercialização.Diabetes mellitus has an estimated prevalence of 7% among Brazilian population. Around 20% to 30% of these patients have a depressive disorder. Depression can work as risk factor to the development of diabetes, can worse its symptoms and interfere with self-care. When not adequately treated, depressive disorder in these patients tends to have high rates of recurrence. Among the available treatments literature shows a benefit of psychotherapy, mainly cognitive or cognitive-behavioral, in ameliorating depressive symptoms, but without impact on glycaemic control. Tryciclic antidepressants, especially those with more noradrenergic profile, and monoamino oxidase inhibitors are associated with worsening of glycaemic control. Bupropion shows no action on glucose blood levels and there are evidences that serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors may improve the glycaemic levels and reduce the recurrence, being good choices to treat these patients. Electroconvulsive therapy is an interesting treatment to these patients, but monitoring of blood glucose is recommended. We did not find data about other antidepressants

Emotion regulation in the classroom:A network approach to model relations among emotion regulation difficulties, engagement to learn, and relationships with peers and teachers

Emotion regulation is theorized to shape students’ engagement in learning activities, but the specific pathways via which this occurs remain unclear. This study examined how emotion regulation mechanisms are related to behavioral and emotional engagement as well as relations with peers and teachers. The sample included 136 secondary school students (59,7% girls; Mage = 14.93, SDage = 1.02, range: 13–18 years). Psychometric network models revealed that difficulties in emotional awareness, emotional clarity, and access to emotion regulation strategies were differentially related to behavioral and emotional engagement, establishing an indirect link with teacher and/or peer relations. Nonacceptance of emotional responses, emotional awareness, and impulse control difficulties were uniquely related to teacher and/or peer relations, establishing an indirect link with student engagement. Causal discovery analysis suggested that student emotional engagement is an empirically-plausible direct cause of increased access to emotion regulation strategies. These findings uncover potential pathways through which emotion regulation hampers or facilitates learning at school, providing information useful for the design of school curricula and teacher training programs

Interaction data are identifiable even across long periods of time

Fine-grained records of people’s interactions, both offline and online, are collected at large scale. These data contain sensitive information about whom we meet, talk to, and when. We demonstrate here how people’s interaction behavior is stable over long periods of time and can be used to identify individuals in anonymous datasets. Our attack learns the profile of an individual using geometric deep learning and triplet loss optimization. In a mobile phone metadata dataset of more than 40k people, it correctly identifies 52% of individuals based on their 2-hop interaction graph. We further show that the profiles learned by our method are stable over time and that 24% of people are still identifiable after 20 weeks. Our results suggest that people with well-balanced interaction graphs are more identifiable. Applying our attack to Bluetooth close-proximity networks, we show that even 1-hop interaction graphs are enough to identify people more than 26% of the time. Our results provide strong evidence that disconnected and even re-pseudonymized interaction data can be linked together making them personal data under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation

Abnormal Visuo-vestibular Interactions in Vestibular Migraine: a Cross Sectional Study

Vestibular migraine is amongst the commonest causes of episodic vertigo. Chronically, patients with vestibular migraine develop abnormal responsiveness to both vestibular and visual stimuli characterised by heightened self-motion sensitivity and visually-induced dizziness. Yet, the neural mechanisms mediating such symptoms remain unknown. We postulate that such symptoms are attributable to impaired visuo-vestibular cortical interactions, which in-turn disrupts normal vestibular function. To assess this, we investigated whether prolonged, full-field visual motion exposure, which has previously been shown to modulate visual cortical excitability in both healthy individuals and avestibular patients, could disrupt vestibular ocular reflex (VOR) and vestibular-perceptual thresholds of self-motion during rotations. Our findings reveal that vestibular migraine patients exhibited abnormally elevated reflexive and perceptual vestibular thresholds at baseline. Following visual motion exposure, both reflex and perceptual thresholds were significantly further increased in vestibular migraine patients relative to healthy controls, migraineurs without vestibular symptoms and patients with episodic vertigo due to a peripheral inner-ear disorder. Our results provide support for the notion of altered visuo-vestibular cortical interactions in vestibular migraine, as evidenced by vestibular threshold elevation following visual motion exposure

Depressão e diabetes mellitus

Diabetes mellitus has an estimated prevalence of 7% among Brazilian population. Around 20% to 30% of these patients have a depressive disorder. Depression can work as risk factor to the development of diabetes, can worse its symptoms and interfere with self-care. When not adequately treated, depressive disorder in these patients tends to have high rates of recurrence. Among the available treatments literature shows a benefit of psychotherapy, mainly cognitive or cognitive-behavioral, in ameliorating depressive symptoms, but without impact on glycaemic control. Tryciclic antidepressants, especially those with more noradrenergic profile, and monoamino oxidase inhibitors are associated with worsening of glycaemic control. Bupropion shows no action on glucose blood levels and there are evidences that serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors may improve the glycaemic levels and reduce the recurrence, being good choices to treat these patients. Electroconvulsive therapy is an interesting treatment to these patients, but monitoring of blood glucose is recommended. We did not find data about other antidepressants.O diabetes mellitus possui elevada prevalência, acometendo cerca de 7% da população brasileira. Em torno de 20% a 30% dos pacientes com diabetes apresentam depressão. A depressão pode atuar como um fator de risco para o desenvolvimento do diabetes, piorar seus sintomas e interferir com o autocuidado dos pacientes. Quando não tratada adequadamente, a depressão nesses pacientes tende a evoluir com elevada taxa de recorrência. Entre os tratamentos disponíveis, encontramos na literatura um benefício da psicoterapia, cognitiva ou cognitivo-comportamental, para melhora dos sintomas depressivos, mas sem evidência de um benefício no controle glicêmico. Os antidepressivos tricíclicos, em especial os com maior ação noradrenérgica, e os inibidores da monoaminoxidase (IMAOs) tendem a aumentar os níveis glicêmicos. A bupropiona não interfere na glicemia e há evidências de que os inibidores seletivos de recaptura de serotonina (ISRS) melhoram os níveis glicêmicos e podem reduzir a taxa de recaídas, mostrando-se boas opções de tratamento farmacológico. A eletroconvulsoterapia também é uma estratégia interessante para esses pacientes, recomendando-se, no entanto, monitorização da glicemia. Não foram encontrados estudos significativos sobre os demais antidepressivos disponíveis para comercialização

Multiplus: a modular high-performance multiprocessor

The MULTIPLUS project is currently under development at NCE/UFRJ, Brazil, aims at the study of parallel processing problems in MIMD environments. The project includes the development of a parallel shared-memory architecture and a UNIX-like operating operating system called MULTIPLIX. The MULTIPLUS achitecture uses an inverted n-cube multistage network to interconnect clusters of processing nodes designed around a double-bus system. As a consequence, the architecture is partitionable and modular. It cas easily and efficiently supportconfigurations ranging from workstations to powerful parallel supercomputers with up to 2048 processing nodes. The MULTIPLix operating system provides MULTIPLUS with an efficient computing environment for parallel scientific applications. MULTIPLIX uses the concept of thread, implements busy-waiting synchronization primitives very efficiently and carefully considers data locality and scientific processing requirements in the policies adopted for memory management and thread scheduling.O projeto MULTIPLUS, que está atualmente em desenvolvimento no NCE/UFRJ, objetiva o estudo de problemas de processamento paralelo em ambiente MIMD. O projeto inclui o desenvolvimento de uma arquitetura paralela com memória compartilhada e um sistema operacional tipo UNIX chamado MULTIPLIX. A arquitetura do MULTIPLUS usa uma rede de interconexão multiestágio do tipo n-cubo invertido para interligar clusters de nós de processamento projetados em torno de um sistema de barramento duplo. Como consequência a arquitetura é patrocinável e modular. Ela pode suportar eficientemente configurações cobrindo um espectro que vai desde estações de trabalho até poderosos supercomputadores contendo 2048 nós de processamento trabalhando em paralelo. O sistema operacional MULTIPLIX provê o MULTIPLUS com um ambiente eficiente de computação para aplicações científicas paralelas.O MULTIPLIX usa o conceito de "thread", implementa primitivas de sincronização de espera ocupara muito eficientemente e considera fortemente aspectos de localidade dos dados e requisitos de processamento científico nas políticas adotadas para gerenciamento de memória e escalonamento de "threads"

Moral enhancement: do means matter morally?

One of the reasons why moral enhancement may be controversial, is because the advantages of moral enhancement may fall upon society rather than on those who are enhanced. If directed at individuals with certain counter-moral traits it may have direct societal benefits by lowering immoral behavior and increasing public safety, but it is not directly clear if this also benefits the individual in question. In this paper, we will discuss what we consider to be moral enhancement, how different means may be used to achieve it and whether the means we employ to reach moral enhancement matter morally. Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement wrong in themselves? Are certain means to achieve moral enhancement better than others, and if so, why? More specifically, we will investigate whether the difference between direct and indirect moral enhancement matters morally. Is it the case that indirect means are morally preferable to direct means of moral enhancement and can we indeed pinpoint relevant intrinsic, moral differences between both? We argue that the distinction between direct and indirect means is indeed morally relevant, but only insofar as it tracks an underlying distinction between active and passive interventions. Although passive interventions can be ethical provided specific safeguards are put in place, these interventions exhibit a greater potential to compromise autonomy and disrupt identity