The transition from monastic to secular medicine in medieval England

During the Middle Ages, up to the twelfth century, monasteries were the primary source of medical education in Europe and maintained medical facilities such as hospitals and infirmaries.1 By the latter half of the twelfth-century, the location of medical education in medieval England had begun to shift away from the monastic communities to the developing schools and universities in the growing urban areas.2 According to historian David Lindberg, the transition of medical education to secular universities corresponded with the growing trends of professionalization and secularization that were redefining medical practice.3 At present, scholars have yet to study the quality and availability of treatment during this period of English history. This is largely due to an academic void surrounding the issue of health care provision during the late Middle Ages.4 In addressing this gap, this thesis will rely on a combination of primary and secondary source materials as it analyzes the transition from monastic to professionalized secular medicine, the condition of secular and domestic medicine, as well as the altering state of medical education, ethics, and treatment, in order to determine how these changes affected the characteristics and availability of medical care in twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth-century England, ending with the Black Death of 1348

Belief Revision and Delusions: How Do Patients with Schizophrenia Take Advice?

The dominant cognitive model that accounts for the persistence of delusional beliefs in schizophrenia postulates that patients suffer from a general deficit in belief revision. It is generally assumed that this deficit is a consequence of impaired reasoning skills. However, the possibility that such inflexibility affects the entire system of a patient's beliefs has rarely been empirically tested. Using delusion-neutral material in a well-documented advice-taking task, the present study reports that patients with schizophrenia: 1) revise their beliefs, 2) take into account socially provided information to do so, 3) are not overconfident about their judgments, and 4) show less egocentric advice-discounting than controls. This study thus shows that delusional patients' difficulty in revising beliefs is more selective than had been previously assumed. The specificities of the task and the implications for a theory of delusion formation are discussed

Evidence for Sub-Haplogroup H5 of Mitochondrial DNA as a Risk Factor for Late Onset Alzheimer's Disease

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease and the leading cause of dementia among senile subjects. It has been proposed that AD can be caused by defects in mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. Given the fundamental contribution of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) for the respiratory chain, there have been a number of studies investigating the association between mtDNA inherited variants and multifactorial diseases, however no general consensus has been reached yet on the correlation between mtDNA haplogroups and AD. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We applied for the first time a high resolution analysis (sequencing of displacement loop and restriction analysis of specific markers in the coding region of mtDNA) to investigate the possible association between mtDNA-inherited sequence variation and AD in 936 AD patients and 776 cognitively assessed normal controls from central and northern Italy. Among over 40 mtDNA sub-haplogroups analysed, we found that sub-haplogroup H5 is a risk factor for AD (OR=1.85, 95% CI:1.04-3.23) in particular for females (OR=2.19, 95% CI:1.06-4.51) and independently from the APOE genotype. Multivariate logistic regression revealed an interaction between H5 and age. When the whole sample is considered, the H5a subgroup of molecules, harboring the 4336 transition in the tRNAGln gene, already associated to AD in early studies, was about threefold more represented in AD patients than in controls (2.0% vs 0.8%; p=0.031), and it might account for the increased frequency of H5 in AD patients (4.2% vs 2.3%). The complete re-sequencing of the 56 mtDNAs belonging to H5 revealed that AD patients showed a trend towards a higher number (p=0.052) of sporadic mutations in tRNA and rRNA genes when compared with controls. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that high resolution analysis of inherited mtDNA sequence variation can help in identifying both ancient polymorphisms defining sub-haplogroups and the accumulation of sporadic mutations associated with complex traits such as AD

Design concepts for the Cherenkov Telescope Array CTA: an advanced facility for ground-based high-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has had a major breakthrough with the impressive results obtained using systems of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has a huge potential in astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology. CTA is an international initiative to build the next generation instrument, with a factor of 5-10 improvement in sensitivity in the 100 GeV-10 TeV range and the extension to energies well below 100 GeV and above 100 TeV. CTA will consist of two arrays (one in the north, one in the south) for full sky coverage and will be operated as open observatory. The design of CTA is based on currently available technology. This document reports on the status and presents the major design concepts of CTA

Mitochondrial superclusters influence age of onset of Parkinson’s disease in a gender specific manner in the Cypriot population: A case-control study

Despite evidence supporting an involvement of mitochondrial dysfunction in the pathogenesis of some neurodegenerative disorders, there are inconsistent findings concerning mitochondrial haplogroups and their association to neurodegenerative disorders, including idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD).To test this hypothesis for the Greek-Cypriot population, a cohort of 230 PD patients and 457 healthy matched controls were recruited. Mitochondrial haplogroup distributions for cases and controls were determined. Association tests were carried out between mitochondrial haplogroups and PD.Mitochondrial haplogroup U was associated with a reduced PD risk in the Cypriot population. After pooling mitochondrial haplogroups together into haplogroup clusters and superclusters, association tests demonstrated a significantly protective effect of mitochondrial haplogroup cluster N (xR) and supercluster LMN for PD risk only in females. In addition, for female PD cases belonging to UKJT and R (xH, xUKJT) haplogroup, the odds of having a later age of onset of PD were 13 and 15 times respectively higher than the odds for female cases with an H haplogroup.Statistically significant associations regarding PD risk and PD age of onset were mostly detected for females thus suggesting that gender is a risk modifier between mitochondrial haplogroups and PD status / PD age of onset. The biological mechanisms behind this gender specificity remain to be determined

Prevalence, dimensionality and clinical relevance of self-disturbances and psychotic-like experiences in Polish young adults: a latent class analysis approach.

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to investigate latent classes of psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) and self-disturbances (SD) and to explore mutual overlapping between derived subgroups. Further, our goal was to investigate class membership relationship with an exposure to childhood trauma and different psychopathological factors such as cognitive biases, depression, insomnia, psychiatric diagnosis and lifetime suicidality. METHODS: Participants consist of 3167 non-clinical adults. We performed two latent class analyses (LCA), for PLEs and SD separately, to identify subgroups of individuals with different profiles on PLEs and SD. Associations between psychopathological factors and latent class membership were examined using multinomial logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: LCA produced 5 classes within SD and 3 classes within PLEs. Class of the highest endorsement of SD showed 53% overlap with class of the highest endorsement of PLEs. The highest risk of belonging to High Class for both SD and PLEs was associated in particular with depression, cognitive biases and insomnia. Trauma emerged as a significant predictor only for PLEs classes. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings confirm that high PLEs and SD co-occur and are concentrated in a relatively small number of individuals, at least in the general population. Their combination may capture the highest risk of psychosis in the general population