Modeling the Effects of Attentional Cueing on Meditators

Training in meditation has been shown to affect functioning of several attentional subsystems, most prominently conflict monitoring, and to some extent orienting. These previous findings described the effects of cueing and manipulating stimulus congruency on response times and accuracies. However, changes in accuracy and response times can arise from several factors. Computational process models can be used to distinguish different factors underlying changes in accuracy and response times. When decomposed by means of the drift diffusion model, a general process model of decision making that has been widely used, both the congruency and cueing effects, is subserved by a change in decision thresholds. Meditators showed a modest overall increase in their decision threshold, which may reflect an ability to wait longer and collect more information before responding

Recent trends in two-dimensional liquid chromatography

Multi-dimensional liquid chromatography (MD-LC) continues to gain in popularity for applications where conventional one-dimensional liquid chromatography is insufficient to solve the analytical problem at hand. In this review we have focused on articles published in the years 2019 to early 2023 and look for trends using our previous review published in 2018 as a baseline. We have also explored usage patterns related to involvement of industrial laboratories in the published research. The two major areas of technical development have been continued work on modulation strategies that help mitigate problems associated with mobile phase mismatch when coupling complementary separation mechanisms, and development of computer-aided method development strategies. Progress in these areas is making 2D-LC easier to use, and it appears that this is translating to a shift toward more involvement by industrial laboratories. Indeed, over 34% of the more than 200 publications on 2D-LC in the last four years have had at least one-industry affiliated author. A recent inter-laboratory comparison study focused on the performance of a sophisticated multi-stage, multi-dimensional separation for therapeutic protein characterization is an exemplary indication of the increasing investment of industrial laboratories to MD-LC, and we expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future

Societal burden and quality of life in patients with Lisfranc Injuries

Background: The incidence of Lisfranc fractures is rising, along with the incidence of foot fractures in general. These injuries can lead to long-term healthcare use and societal costs. Current economic evaluation studies are scarce in Lisfranc fracture research, and only investigate the healthcare costs. The aim of the present study was to accurately measure the monetary societal burden of disease and quality of life in the first 6 months after the injury in patients with Lisfranc fractures in the Netherlands. Materials and methods: This study used a prevalence-based, bottom-up approach. Patients were included through thirteen medical centres in the Netherlands. Both stable and unstable injuries were included. The societal perspective was used. The costs were measured at baseline, 12 weeks and 6 months using the iMTA MCQ and PCQ questionnaires. Reference prices were used for valuation. Quality-of-life was measured using the EQ-5D-5 L and VAS scores. Results: 214 patients were included. The mean age was 45.9 years, and 24.3% of patients had comorbidities. The baseline questionnaires yielded approximately €2023 as the total societal costs in the 3 months prior to injury. The follow-up questionnaires and surgery costs assessment yielded approximately €17,083 as the total costs in the first 6 months after injury. Of these costs, approximately two thirds could be attributed to productivity losses. The EQ-5D-5 L found a mean index value of 0.449 at baseline and an index value of 0.737 at the 6-month follow-up. Conclusion: The total monetary societal costs in the first 6 months after injury are approximately €17,083. Approximately two thirds of these costs can be attributed to productivity losses. These costs appear to be somewhat higher than those found in other studies. However, these studies only included the healthcare costs. Furthermore, the baseline costs indicate relatively low healthcare usage before the injury compared to the average Dutch patient. The mean QoL index was 0.462 at baseline and 0.737 at 6 months, indicating a rise in QoL after treatment as well as a long-lasting impact on QoL. To our knowledge, this is only the first study investigating the societal costs of Lisfranc injuries, so more research is needed.</p