Psychiatry's Turbid Solution

Psychiatry?s generic concept of disorder has long served an important legitimizing function for the broad array of conditions for which individuals seek mental health treatment, regardless of their presumed causes. Wakefield?s proposal to restrict the mental disorder concept to only a subset of these conditions has given rise to concerns about the uncertain consequences of classifying others as non-disorders. In Bergner?s recent counterproposal, this concern is masked in the form of a conspicuously overinclusive definition of mental disorder. Bergner?s resistance to Wakefield?s classification objective underscores an important, unmet, and often unacknowledged need within the clinical treatment community. The challenge ahead lies in finding ways to address this need without compromising the integrity of efforts to develop a more coherent concept of mental disorder

The Abduction of Disorder in Psychiatry

The evolutionary cornerstone of J. C. Wakefield's (1999) harmful dysfunction thesis is a faulty assumption of comparability between mental and biological processes that overlooks the unique plasticity and openness of the brain?s functioning design. This omission leads Wakefield to an idealized concept of natural mental functions, illusory interpretations of mental disorders as harmful dysfunctions, and exaggerated claims for the validity of his explanatory and stipulative proposals. The authors argue that there are numerous ways in which evolutionarily intact mental and psychological processes, combined with striking discontinuities within and between evolutionary and contemporary social/cultural environments, may cause non-dysfunction variants of many widely accepted major mental disorders. These examples undermine many of Wakefield's arguments for adopting a harmful dysfunction concept of mental disorder

Ultraviolet irradiation accelerates apoptosis in human polymorphonuclear leukocytes: protection by LPS and GM‐CSF

Polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) play a central role in host response to injury and infection. Understanding factors that regulate PMN survival may therefore have a major influence on the development of novel treatment strategies for controlling life‐threatening infections, as well as local and systemic inflammatory responses. Unfortunately, the presently utilized in vitro culture model of PMN apoptosis makes the examination of early biochemical events surrounding PMN apoptosis very difficult. This study demonstrates that a short course of UV irradiation (15 min) can be used to induce rapid progression of PMN through the apoptotic process with 70–90% of PMN displaying features of apoptosis by 4 h after UV exposure. Bacterial lipopolysaccharide and granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor, which are known to prolong PMN survival during in vitro culture, also protected PMN from UV‐accelerated apoptosis. The UV‐accelerated model of PMN apoptosis provides another valuable tool for the investigation of early signaling pathways associated with inducing or delaying PMN apoptosis. J. Leukoc. Biol. 62: 517–523; 1997.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142305/1/jlb0517.pd

An estimate of the local ISW signal, and its impact on CMB anomalies

We estimate the local density field in redshift shells to a maximum redshift of z=0.3, using photometric redshifts for the 2MASS galaxy catalogue, matched to optical data from the SuperCOSMOS galaxy catalogue. This density-field map is used to predict the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) CMB anisotropies that originate within the volume at z<0.3. We investigate the impact of this estimated ISW foreground signal on large-scale anomalies in the WMAP CMB data. We find that removal of the foreground ISW signal from WMAP data reduces the significance of a number of reported large-scale anomalies in the CMB, including the low quadrupole power and the apparent alignment between the CMB quadrupole and octopole.Comment: 8 pages. MNRAS in press. Final minor updates to text and references to match published versio

DNA repair targeted therapy: The past or future of cancer treatment?

The repair of DNA damage is a complex process that relies on particular pathways to remedy specific types of damage to DNA. The range of insults to DNA includes small, modest changes in structure including mismatched bases and simple methylation events to oxidized bases, intra- and interstrand DNA crosslinks, DNA double strand breaks and protein-DNA adducts. Pathways required for the repair of these lesions include mismatch repair, base excision repair, nucleotide excision repair, and the homology directed repair/Fanconi anemia pathway. Each of these pathways contributes to genetic stability, and mutations in genes encoding proteins involved in these pathways have been demonstrated to promote genetic instability and cancer. In fact, it has been suggested that all cancers display defects in DNA repair. It has also been demonstrated that the ability of cancer cells to repair therapeutically induced DNA damage impacts therapeutic efficacy. This has led to targeting DNA repair pathways and proteins to develop anti-cancer agents that will increase sensitivity to traditional chemotherapeutics. While initial studies languished and were plagued by a lack of specificity and a defined mechanism of action, more recent approaches to exploit synthetic lethal interaction and develop high affinity chemical inhibitors have proven considerably more effective. In this review we will highlight recent advances and discuss previous failures in targeting DNA repair to pave the way for future DNA repair targeted agents and their use in cancer therapy

The Galactic Magnetic Field's Effect in Star-Forming Region

We investigate the effect of the Milky Way's magnetic field in star forming regions using archived 350 micron polarization data on 52 Galactic star formation regions from the Hertz polarimeter module. The polarization angles and percentages for individual telescope beams were combined in order to produce a large-scale average for each source and for complexes of sources. In more than 80% of the sources, we find a meaningful mean magnetic field direction, implying the existence of an ordered magnetic field component at the scale of these sources. The average polarization angles were analyzed with respect to the Galactic coordinates in order to test for correlations between polarization percentage, polarization angle, intensity, and Galactic location. No correlation was found, which suggests that the magnetic field in dense molecular clouds is decoupled from the large-scale Galactic magnetic field. Finally, we show that the magnetic field directions in the complexes are consistent with a random distribution on the sky