Differential Therapeutic Outcomes of Community-Based Group Interventions for Women and Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Two community-based group therapies, emotion focused versus goal oriented, are compared among women exposed to intimate partner violence (n = 46) and their children ( n = 48) aged between 6 and 12 years. A series of repeated measures analyses are employed to evaluate the effects of time from baseline to postintervention following random assignment. Main and treatment effects for women provide support for the relative effectiveness in increasing quality of social support in the emotion-focused intervention and in the reduction of both family conflict and alcohol use for the goal-oriented intervention.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Academic freedom: in justification of a universal ideal

This paper examines the justification for, and benefits of, academic freedom to academics, students, universities and the world at large. The paper surveys the development of the concept of academic freedom within Europe, more especially the impact of the reforms at the University of Berlin instigated by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Following from this, the paper examines the reasons why the various facets of academic freedom are important and why the principle should continue to be supported

Effects of sleep deprivation on neural functioning: an integrative review

Sleep deprivation has a broad variety of effects on human performance and neural functioning that manifest themselves at different levels of description. On a macroscopic level, sleep deprivation mainly affects executive functions, especially in novel tasks. Macroscopic and mesoscopic effects of sleep deprivation on brain activity include reduced cortical responsiveness to incoming stimuli, reflecting reduced attention. On a microscopic level, sleep deprivation is associated with increased levels of adenosine, a neuromodulator that has a general inhibitory effect on neural activity. The inhibition of cholinergic nuclei appears particularly relevant, as the associated decrease in cortical acetylcholine seems to cause effects of sleep deprivation on macroscopic brain activity. In general, however, the relationships between the neural effects of sleep deprivation across observation scales are poorly understood and uncovering these relationships should be a primary target in future research

The Influence of Age and Sex on Genetic Associations with Adult Body Size and Shape : A Large-Scale Genome-Wide Interaction Study

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 100 genetic variants contributing to BMI, a measure of body size, or waist-to-hip ratio (adjusted for BMI, WHRadjBMI), a measure of body shape. Body size and shape change as people grow older and these changes differ substantially between men and women. To systematically screen for age-and/or sex-specific effects of genetic variants on BMI and WHRadjBMI, we performed meta-analyses of 114 studies (up to 320,485 individuals of European descent) with genome-wide chip and/or Metabochip data by the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) Consortium. Each study tested the association of up to similar to 2.8M SNPs with BMI and WHRadjBMI in four strata (men 50y, women 50y) and summary statistics were combined in stratum-specific meta-analyses. We then screened for variants that showed age-specific effects (G x AGE), sex-specific effects (G x SEX) or age-specific effects that differed between men and women (G x AGE x SEX). For BMI, we identified 15 loci (11 previously established for main effects, four novel) that showed significant (FDR= 50y). No sex-dependent effects were identified for BMI. For WHRadjBMI, we identified 44 loci (27 previously established for main effects, 17 novel) with sex-specific effects, of which 28 showed larger effects in women than in men, five showed larger effects in men than in women, and 11 showed opposite effects between sexes. No age-dependent effects were identified for WHRadjBMI. This is the first genome-wide interaction meta-analysis to report convincing evidence of age-dependent genetic effects on BMI. In addition, we confirm the sex-specificity of genetic effects on WHRadjBMI. These results may providefurther insights into the biology that underlies weight change with age or the sexually dimorphism of body shape.Peer reviewe

Assessing UK Drug Policy from a Crime Control Perspective.

Over the entire last quarter of the 20th century the British drug problem worsened, despite the implementation of a variety of approaches and commitment of substantial criminal justice and other resources. The link between chronic use of expensive drugs and property crime makes this experience important for understanding trends in crime and justice in Britain. The worsening of the problem can be seen in the growing number of new heroin users each year over almost the entire period 1975–2000, on top of which was layered, starting in the late 1990s, the first major outbreak of chronic cocaine use. This was not the common pattern in Western Europe over that time and by 2000 the UK had Western Europe’s most serious drug problem. The response initially took the form of increasing enforcement against drug markets; in just the decade 1994–2005 the number of prison cell years handed out in annual sentences has tripled. Even with this expansion we estimate that the annual probability of incarceration for a class A drug dealer is only approximately 6 per cent. Since 2000 there has also been a massive increase in treatment resources linked to the criminal justice system. The number of treatment assessments in recent years has been as large as 58 per cent of the number of persons estimated to be problematic users of Class A drugs. The government believes that drug policy has contributed to the decline in crime in the UK since 2000. Using what is known about treatment outcomes, we argue that despite impressive evidence of effect on individual level offending, the effect of treatment expansion in reducing overall crime rates is likely to have been limited