Seasonal patterns of oral antihistamine and intranasal corticosteroid purchases from Australian community pharmacies : a retrospective observational study

Acknowledgments The abstract of this paper was presented at the Respiratory Effectiveness Group 2016 Annual Summit as a poster presentation with interim findings. The poster’s abstract was published in “Poster Abstracts” in The Journal of Thoracic Disease (Vol. 8, Supplement 5, 5 July 2016). http://jtd.amegroups.com/article/view/8504.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Investigation of attentional bias in obsessive compulsive disorder with and without depression in visual search

Copyright: © 2013 Morein-Zamir et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedWhether Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is associated with an increased attentional bias to emotive stimuli remains controversial. Additionally, it is unclear whether comorbid depression modulates abnormal emotional processing in OCD. This study examined attentional bias to OC-relevant scenes using a visual search task. Controls, non-depressed and depressed OCD patients searched for their personally selected positive images amongst their negative distractors, and vice versa. Whilst the OCD groups were slower than healthy individuals in rating the images, there were no group differences in the magnitude of negative bias to concern-related scenes. A second experiment employing a common set of images replicated the results on an additional sample of OCD patients. Although there was a larger bias to negative OC-related images without pre-exposure overall, no group differences in attentional bias were observed. However, OCD patients subsequently rated the images more slowly and more negatively, again suggesting post-attentional processing abnormalities. The results argue against a robust attentional bias in OCD patients, regardless of their depression status and speak to generalized difficulties disengaging from negative valence stimuli. Rather, post-attentional processing abnormalities may account for differences in emotional processing in OCD.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Cortical and subcortical glutathione levels in adults with autism spectrum disorder

The causes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are uncertain and there are no pharmacological treatments for core symptoms of this condition. However, new evidence suggests that the brain cells in people with ASD may be poorly defended against harmful by-products, called ‘reactive oxygen species’ or ROS. The anti-oxidant Glutathione (GSH) produced by our cells helps protect against the damage caused by ROS. Some studies have shown that the amount of GSH in blood is lower in people with ASD. However, it is not clear whether this is also true inside the brain. Here we compared GSH levels in the brain of adult men with and without ASD using a safe and painless scanning technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). We found no differences in GSH between the people with ASD and those without; nor were GSH levels related to symptom severity in ASD. These findings suggest that brain antioxidant defences are not, in fact, weakened in this particular group of adult men with ASD