Increased plasticity of the bodily self in eating disorders

Background: The rubber hand illusion (RHI) has been widely used to investigate the bodily self in healthy individuals. The aim of the present study was to extend the use of the RHI to examine the bodily self in eating disorders. Methods: The RHI and self-report measures of eating disorder psychopathology (EDI-3 subscales of Drive for Thinness, Bulimia, Body Dissatisfaction, Interoceptive Deficits, and Emotional Dysregulation; DASS-21; and the Self-Objectification Questionnaire) were administered to 78 individuals with an eating disorder and 61 healthy controls. Results: Individuals with an eating disorder experienced the RHI significantly more strongly than healthy controls on both perceptual (i.e., proprioceptive drift) and subjective (self-report questionnaire) measures. Furthermore, both the subjective experience of the RHI and associated proprioceptive biases were correlated with eating disorder psychopathology. Approximately 20% of the variance for embodiment of the fake hand was accounted for by eating disorder psychopathology, with interoceptive deficits and self-objectification significant predictors of embodiment. Conclusions: These results indicate that the bodily self is more plastic in people with an eating disorder. These findings may shed light on both aetiological and maintenance factors involved in eating disorders, particularly visual processing of the body, interoceptive deficits, and self-objectification

Airway status in civilian maxillofacial gunshot Injuries in Johannesburg, South Africa

Background. Airway management of the maxillofacial gunshot injury constitutes a critical decision and an area that requires review in the context of civilian injuries. Most of our knowledge is extrapolated from military experience, which constitutes a different trauma patient group. This paper reports a retrospective survey of airway status in relation to maxillofacial gunshot injuries. The objective is to correlate clinical findings with treatment decisions. Methods. A survey was done of 11 622 archived maxillofacial surgery records (1987- 1992) in the three academic hospitals in Johannesburg. Results. There were 211 maxillofacial gunshot injuries, for which 92 patient records had sufficient detail for inclusion in the analysis. The typical patient was a black male aged 20 – 29 years, shot with a low-velocity bullet of 0.38 calibre, admitted to hospital the day of the injury, operated on within 4 days, and discharged 4 days later. The airway was threatened in 20/92 cases at admission; 12/20 cases were treated with oro-or nasotracheal intubation, and 9/12 later had elective tracheostomies; 8/20 needed immediate surgical airways, 5 tracheostomies and 3 cricothyroidotomies (all later converted to tracheostomies). Three of thirty-seven patients with normal airways on admission later required emergency tracheostomy.Conclusions. An abnormal airway was significantly more likely after a high-velocity injury, and when the tongue, floor of mouth, midline or bilateral facial skeletal bones were involved

Fundamental progress in investigating drug resistance with electronic multidrug compliance monitoring (e-MCM)

Current definitions of drug resistance are shaped by the pharmacotherapeutic fields they occurred in. They usually mention various contributing factors and refer either to the clinical or the biomarker level. Particular attention has been attracted by antiplatelet resistance, a phenomenon with clinical, cellular and pharmacogenetical contributors. However, the impact of every single factor to antiplatelet resistance in outpatients under prescribed antiplatelet therapy has not been comprehensively evaluated so far, neither has the temporal pattern of drug intake been studied as a possible contributor

A Gamification Engine Architecture for Enhancing Behavioral Change Support Systems

This paper presents a gamified framework designed to offer behavioural change support and treatment adherence services to people living with Dementia (PLWD), their caregivers and medical/social professionals

Giant half-cycle attosecond pulses

Half-cycle picosecond pulses have been produced from thin photo-conductors, when applying an electric field across the surface and switching on conduction by a short laser pulse. Then the transverse current in the wafer plane emits half-cycle pulses in normal direction, and pulses of 500 fs duration and 1e6 V/m peak electric field have been observed. Here we show that single half-cycle pulses of 50 as duration and up to 1e13 V/m can be produced when irradiating a double foil target by intense few-cycle laser pulses. Focused onto an ultra-thin foil, all electrons are blown out, forming a uniform sheet of relativistic electrons. A second layer, placed at some distance behind, reflects the drive beam, but lets electrons pass straight. Under oblique incidence, beam reflection provides the transverse current, which emits intense half-cycle pulses. Such a pulse may completely ionize even heavier atoms. New types of attosecond pump-probe experiments will become possible.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be presented at LEI2011-Light at Extreme Intensities and China-Germany Symposium on Laser Acceleratio

Neural divergence and convergence for attention to and detection of interoceptive and somatosensory stimuli

Body awareness is constructed by signals originating from within and outside the body. How do these apparently divergent signals converge? We developed a signal detection task to study the neural convergence and divergence of interoceptive and somatosensory signals. Participants focused on either cardiac or tactile events and reported their presence or absence. Beyond some evidence of divergence, we observed a robust overlap in the pattern of activation evoked across both conditions in frontal areas including the insular cortex, as well as parietal and occipital areas, and for both attention and detection of these signals. Psycho-physiological interaction analysis revealed that right insular cortex connectivity was modulated by the conscious detection of cardiac compared to somatosensory sensations, with greater connectivity to occipito-parietal regions when attending to cardiac signals. Our findings speak in favour of the inherent convergence of bodily-related signals and move beyond the apparent antagonism between exteroception and interoception

Using the third state of matter: high harmonic generation from liquid targets

High harmonic generation on solid and gaseous targets has been proven to be a powerful platform for the generation of attosecond pulses. Here we demonstrate a novel technique for the XUV generation on a smooth liquid surface target in vacuum, which circumvents the problem of low repetition rate and limited shot numbers associated with solid targets, while it maintains some of its merits. We employed atomically smooth, continuous liquid jets of water, aqueous salt solutions and ethanol that allow uninterrupted high harmonic generation due to the coherent wake emission mechanism for over 8 h. It has been found that the mechanism of plasma generation is very similar to that for smooth solid target surfaces. The vapor pressure around the liquid target in our setup has been found to be very low such that the presence of the gas phase around the liquid jet could be neglected

Opacity calculation for target physics using the ABAKO/RAPCAL code

Radiative properties of hot dense plasmas remain a subject of current interest since they play an important role in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research, as well as in studies on stellar physics. In particular, the understanding of ICF plasmas requires emissivities and opacities for both hydro-simulations and diagnostics. Nevertheless, the accurate calculation of these properties is still an open question and continuous efforts are being made to develop new models and numerical codes that can facilitate the evaluation of such properties. In this work the set of atomic models ABAKO/RAPCAL is presented, as well as a series of results for carbon and aluminum to show its capability for modeling the population kinetics of plasmas in both LTE and NLTE regimes. Also, the spectroscopic diagnostics of a laser-produced aluminum plasma using ABAKO/RAPCAL is discussed. Additionally, as an interesting application of these codes, fitting analytical formulas for Rosseland and Planck mean opacities for carbon plasmas are reported. These formulas are useful as input data in hydrodynamic simulation of targets where the computation task is so hard that in line computation with sophisticated opacity codes is prohibitive