Mood Disorder Due to a General Medical Condition with Manic Features

This case report describes a patient with manic and psychotic symptoms who had a history of neurocysticercosis and presented with an episode of hypertensive hydrocephalus in 2003. Despite her history, she was initially treated for primary psychiatric disease

A False Case of Clozapine-Resistant Schizophrenia

One of the subjects that most concerns physicians is treatment-resistance. About 30%–60% of schizophrenia patients do not respond adequately to antipsychotic treatment and are known as refractory schizophrenia patients. Clozapine has been the drug of choice in such cases. However, approximately 30% of them do not respond to clozapine either. Here, we describe a patient with an initial diagnosis of refractory schizophrenia who had a history of dramatic aggressiveness. However, in this case, “refractoriness” was a wrong diagnosis. A case of psychosis secondary to epilepsy had been treated as schizophrenia for almost 20 years. Reports like this one are important because they remind us of how a thorough investigation can lead to the correct diagnosis and improve the patient's prognosis

The Recruitment Agent in Internationalized Higher Education: Commercial Broker and Cultural Mediator

The internationalization and marketization of higher education has resulted in U.K. universities’ increasing reliance on recruitment agents to boost international student numbers. This places agents and agencies in a position of considerable influence with regard to the educational choices that students make. These institutional and individual relationships have been investigated from a marketing perspective, contributing knowledge about the influence of recruitment agents on student decision making. However, this approach has limitations with regard to understanding the impact of agents on an international student’s subsequent experience in U.K. higher education. The article suggests that theoretical work on mobility, migration, and ethnographies of communication, including the geopolitics of text production, can provide useful lenses for analyzing how agents help international students navigate the journey into and through U.K. higher education. The notion of “cultural mediator” is introduced to analyze the role played by agents alongside that of commercial broker. We argue that future research, shaped by these alternative theoretical perspectives, may help to bridge the apparent gap in understanding between those working in international offices and those involved in teaching in an internationalized university

Breakdown of the Giant Spin Model in the Magnetic Relaxation of the Mn6 Nanomagnets

We study the spin dynamics in two variants of the high-anisotropy Mn-6 nanomagnet by inelastic neutron scattering, magnetic resonance spectroscopy and magnetometry. We show that a giant-spin picture is completely inadequate for these systems and that excited S multiplets play a key role in determining the effective energy barrier for the magnetization reversal. Moreover, we demonstrate the occurrence of tunneling processes involving pair of states having different total spin

Reassessing China’s Higher Education Development: A Focus on Academic Culture

During the past three and a half decades, China has been progressing in higher education in a surprisingly dramatic manner, evidenced especially by scientific publications and sheer numbers of graduates. Such a fact has national, regional and global implications. China’s higher education development and its future directions are now placed highly on the research agendas of many from various parts of the world. Unlike the general acknowledgment of China’s achievements, assessment of the future development of China’s higher education is wide open to question. To some, Chinese universities are on a trajectory to become “world-class” and China’s high-fliers challenge Western supremacy. To others, China’s notion of “world-class” status has been largely imitative. Pumping resources into universities will only lead to diminishing returns as Chinese culture and practices will act as a brake to the pursuit of academic excellence. An increasing deal of attention has been paid to where China will be located in a global higher education landscape and in what shape. Based on the author’s long-standing professional observation and recent empirical studies, this article assesses China’s higher education development, with a particular focus on the challenges brought forward by academic culture. It interrogates China’s pride of the idea that Chinese universities are not willing to assume that Western models define excellence, and asks how far Chinese universities could move within their current development model.postprin

How do men in the United Kingdom decide to dispose of banked sperm following cancer treatment?

Current policy in the UK recommends that men bank sperm prior to cancer treatment, but very few return to use it for reproductive purposes or agree to elective disposal even when their fertility recovers and their families are complete. We assessed the demographic, medical and psychological variables that influence the decision to dispose by contacting men (n = 499) who banked sperm more than five years previously, and asked them to complete questionnaires about their views on sperm banking, fertility and disposal. From 193 responses (38.7% response rate), 19 men (9.8%) requested disposal within four months of completing the questionnaire. Compared with men who wanted their sperm to remain in storage, they were significantly more confident that their fertility had recovered (OR = 1.78, 95% CI = 1.05-3.03, p = 0.034), saw fertility monitoring (semen analysis) as less important (OR = 0.61, 95% CI = 0.39-0.94, p = 0.026), held more positive attitudes to disposal (OR = 5.71, 95% CI = 2.89-11.27, p < 0.001), were more likely to have experienced adverse treatment side-effects (OR = 4.37, CI = 1.61-11.85, p = 0.004) and had less desire for children in the future (OR = 0.41, 95% CI = 0.26-0.64, p < 0.001). Information about men's reasons to dispose of banked sperm may be helpful in devising new strategies to encourage men to engage with sperm banking clinics and make timely decisions about the fate of their samples