149 research outputs found
Acute effects of a session of electroconvulsive therapy on brain-derived neurotrophic factor plasma levels
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and nerve growth factor (NGF) are neurotrophins that play critical roles in brain neuronal function. Previous studies have established the association between BDNF and NGF signaling and severe mental disorders, but changes in BDNF plasma levels and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) response are controversial. The aim of his study was to explore the acute effects of a single session of ECT on these neurotrophins signaling. Plasma levels of BDNF and NGF and their tyrosine kinase-type receptors expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were determined before and two hours after a single ECT session in 30 subjects with a severe mental disorder. Two hours after an ECT session we found a statistically significant decrease of BDNF plasma levels (p=0.007). We did not find significant acute effects on NGF plasma levels or receptors expression in PBMCs. We found a significant inverse correlation between the time of convulsion and BDNF plasma levels decrease (r=-0.041, p=0.024). We have identified a decrease in BDNF plasma levels after 2h of a single ECT session. These results indicate the interest for future research in the role of neurotrophins in the response and safety of ECT
The two-point correlation function covariance with fewer mocks
We present FITCOV an approach for accurate estimation of the covariance of two-point correlation functions that requires fewer mocks than the standard mock-based covariance. This can be achieved by dividing a set of mocks into jackknife regions and fitting the correction term first introduced in Mohammad & Percival (2022), such that the mean of the jackknife covariances corresponds to the one from the mocks. This extends the model beyond the shot-noise limited regime, allowing it to be used for denser samples of galaxies. We test the performance of our fitted jackknife approach, both in terms of accuracy and precision, using lognormal mocks with varying densities and approximate EZmocks mimicking the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument LRG and ELG samples in the redshift range of z = [0.8, 1.1]. We find that the Mohammad–Percival correction produces a bias in the two-point correlation function covariance matrix that grows with number density and that our fitted jackknife approach does not. We also study the effect of the covariance on the uncertainty of cosmological parameters by performing a full-shape analysis. We demonstrate that our fitted jackknife approach based on 25 mocks can recover unbiased and as precise cosmological parameters as the ones obtained from a covariance matrix based on 1000 or 1500 mocks, while the Mohammad–Percival correction produces uncertainties that are twice as large. The number of mocks required to obtain an accurate estimation of the covariance for the two-point correlation function is therefore reduced by a factor of 40–60. The FITCOV code that accompanies this paper is available at this GitHub repository
A framework to measure the properties of intergalactic metal systems with two-point flux statistics
The abundance, temperature, and clustering of metals in the intergalactic
medium are important parameters for understanding their cosmic evolution and
quantifying their impact on cosmological analysis with the Ly forest.
The properties of these systems are typically measured from individual quasar
spectra redward of the quasar's Ly emission line, yet that approach
may provide biased results due to selection effects. We present an alternative
approach to measure these properties in an unbiased manner with the two-point
statistics commonly employed to quantify large-scale structure. Our model
treats the observed flux of a large sample of quasar spectra as a continuous
field and describes the one-dimensional, two-point statistics of this field
with three parameters per ion: the abundance (column density distribution),
temperature (Doppler parameter) and clustering (cloud-cloud correlation
function). We demonstrate this approach on multiple ions (e.g., C IV, Si IV, Mg
II) with early data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and
high-resolution spectra from the literature. Our initial results show some
evidence that the C IV abundance is higher than previous measurements and
evidence for abundance evolution over time. The first full year of DESI
observations will have over an order of magnitude more quasar spectra than this
study. In a future paper we will use those data to measure the growth of
clustering and its impact on the Ly forest, as well as test other DESI
analysis infrastructure such as the pipeline noise estimates and the resolution
matrix.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figure
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