Upon the Symptomatic Treatment of Paralysis Agitans:

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A manual low-cost protein-crystallization plate jig for in situ diffraction in the home laboratory

A prototype jig to attach a protein crystallization plate to a standard X-ray goniometer has been designed and constructed. This allows a low-cost implementation of in situ diffraction using the available home-laboratory X-ray source

Do we have any solid evidence of clinical utility about the pathophysiology of schizophrenia?

A diagnosis of schizophrenia, as in most of psychiatric practice, is made largely by eliciting symptoms with reference to subjective, albeit operationalized, criteria. This diagnosis then provides some rationale for management. Objective diagnostic and therapeutic tests are much more desirable, provided they are reliably measured and interpreted. Definite advances have been made in our understanding of schizophrenia in recent decades, but there has been little consideration of how this information could be used in clinical practice. We review here the potential utility of the strongest and best replicated risk factors for and manifestations of schizophrenia within clinical, epidemiological, cognitive, blood biomarker and neuroimaging domains. We place particular emphasis on the sensitivity, specificity and predictive power of pathophysiological indices for making a diagnosis, establishing an early diagnosis or predicting treatment response in schizophrenia. We conclude that a number of measures currently available have the potential to increase the rigour of clinical assessments in schizophrenia. We propose that the time has come to more fully evaluate these and other well replicated abnormalities as objective potential diagnostic and prognostic guides, and to steer future clinical, therapeutic and nosological research in this direction

The NEWMEDS rodent touchscreen test battery for cognition relevant to schizophrenia.

RATIONALE: The NEWMEDS initiative (Novel Methods leading to New Medications in Depression and Schizophrenia, http://www.newmeds-europe.com ) is a large industrial-academic collaborative project aimed at developing new methods for drug discovery for schizophrenia. As part of this project, Work package 2 (WP02) has developed and validated a comprehensive battery of novel touchscreen tasks for rats and mice for assessing cognitive domains relevant to schizophrenia. OBJECTIVES: This article provides a review of the touchscreen battery of tasks for rats and mice for assessing cognitive domains relevant to schizophrenia and highlights validation data presented in several primary articles in this issue and elsewhere. METHODS: The battery consists of the five-choice serial reaction time task and a novel rodent continuous performance task for measuring attention, a three-stimulus visual reversal and the serial visual reversal task for measuring cognitive flexibility, novel non-matching to sample-based tasks for measuring spatial working memory and paired-associates learning for measuring long-term memory. RESULTS: The rodent (i.e. both rats and mice) touchscreen operant chamber and battery has high translational value across species due to its emphasis on construct as well as face validity. In addition, it offers cognitive profiling of models of diseases with cognitive symptoms (not limited to schizophrenia) through a battery approach, whereby multiple cognitive constructs can be measured using the same apparatus, enabling comparisons of performance across tasks. CONCLUSION: This battery of tests constitutes an extensive tool package for both model characterisation and pre-clinical drug discovery.This work was supported by the Innovative Medicine Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement no. 115008 of which resources are composed of EFPIA in-kind contribution and financial contribution from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013). The authors thank Charlotte Oomen for valuable comments on the manuscript.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00213-015-4007-

Aqua­(2,2′-diamino-4,4′-bi-1,3-thia­zole-κ2 N 3,N 3′)(thio­diacetato-κ3 O,S,O′)nickel(II) monohydrate

In the title compound, [Ni(C4H4O4S)(C6H6N4S2)(H2O)]·H2O, the NiII cation assumes a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry formed by a diamino­bithia­zole (DABT) ligand, a thio­diacetate (TDA) dianion and a coordinated water mol­ecule. The tridentate TDA chelates to the Ni cation in a facial configuration, and both chelating rings display the envelope conformations. The two thia­zole rings of the DABT ligand are twisted with respect to each other, making a dihedral angle of 9.96 (9)°. Extensive O—H⋯O, N—H⋯O and weak C—H⋯O hydrogen bonding is present in the crystal structure

Comportamentos agressivos em crianças e adolescentes com risco para esquizofrenia: diferenças entre gêneros

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate whether differences in aggression-related behavioral problems occur between boys and girls at high risk for schizophrenia living in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. METHOD: Using the Child Behavior Checklist, we compared the prevalence of behavioral problems between genders for the offspring (6-18 years) of mothers with diagnosis of schizophrenia and a comparison group of children born to women with no severe mental disorders recruited at the gynecology outpatient clinic of the same hospital. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders, Patient Edition was applied for the evaluation of diagnostic status of mothers. RESULTS: Male children of women with schizophrenia had a lower prevalence of aggressive behavior compared to females (4% vs. 36%; p = 0.005), whereas no gender differences regarding aggression were detected in the comparison group (24% vs. 32%; p = 0.53). Logistic regression analyses showed that male gender and being a child of women with schizophrenia interacted so as to favor lower prevalence of aggressive behavior (p = 0.03). CONCLUSION: These findings reinforce the notion that behavioral gender differences related to schizophrenia are already detectable in childhood.OBJETIVO: Investigar diferenças da ocorrência de comportamentos agressivos entre crianças e adolescentes do sexo masculino e feminino com risco genético para desenvolver esquizofrenia. MÉTODO: A prevalência de comportamentos agressivos foi medida utilizando o inventário de comportamentos para crianças e adolescentes, Child Behavior Checklist, e comparada entre os gêneros para o grupo de crianças filhas de mulheres com esquizofrenia e para um grupo de crianças filhas de mulheres atendidas no serviço de ginecologia do mesmo hospital. A entrevista clínica estruturada para DSM-IV (The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders Patient Edition) foi utilizada para confirmar o diagnóstico materno. RESULTADOS: Os filhos de mulheres com esquizofrenia do sexo masculino apresentaram prevalência menor de comportamentos agressivos quando comparados às meninas (4% x 36%; p = 0,005), o que não ocorreu para o grupo comparativo (24% x 32%; p = 0,53). A análise de regressão logística mostrou que pertencer ao sexo masculino e ser filho de mulher com esquizofrenia interagiram de forma a favorecer menor prevalência de comportamentos agressivos (p = 0,03). CONCLUSÃO: Esses achados corroboram para a noção que as diferenças comportamentais entre os gêneros na esquizofrenia podem ser detectadas precocemente durante a infância

Tetra­aqua­(2,2′-diamino-4,4′-bi-1,3-thia­zole-κ2 N 3,N 3′)nickel(II) bis­(pyridine-2,6-dicarboxyl­ato-κ3 O 2,N,O 6)nickel(II) trihydrate

The crystal structure of the title compound, [Ni(C6H6N4S2)(H2O)4][Ni(C7H3NO4)2]·3H2O, consists of NiII complex cations, NiII complex anions and lattice water mol­ecules. The NiII ions in both the complex cation and anion assume a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry. O—H⋯O, N—H⋯O and C—H⋯S hydrogen bonds occur in the crystal structure

Tris(4,4′-bi-1,3-thia­zole-κ2 N,N′)iron(II) tetra­bromidoferrate(III) bromide

In the [Fe(4,4′-bit)3]2+ (4,4′-bit is 4,4′-bi-1,3-thia­zole) cation of the title compound, [Fe(C6H4N2S2)3][FeBr4]Br, the FeII atom (3 symmetry) is six-coordinated in a distorted octa­hedral geometry by six N atoms from three 4,4′-bit ligands. In the [FeBr4]− anion, the FeIII atom (3 symmetry) is four-coordinated in a distorted tetra­hedral geometry. In the crystal, inter­molecular C—H⋯Br hydrogen bonds and Br⋯π inter­actions [Br⋯centroid distances = 3.562 (3) and 3.765 (2) Å] link the cations and anions, stabilizing the structure