Metabolic alterations in experimental models of depression

Introduction: Major depressive disorder is one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders and is associated with a severe impact on the personal functioning, thus with incurring significant direct and indirect costs. The presence of depression in patients with medical comorbidities increases the risks of myocardial infarction and decreases diabetes control, and adherence to treatment. The mechanism through which these effects are produced is still uncertain. Objectives of this study were to evaluate the metabolic alterations in female Wistar rats with induced depression, with and without administration of Agomelatine. The methods included two experiments. All data were analyzed by comparison with group I (control), and with each other. In the first experiment we induced depression by: exposure to chronic mild stress-group II; olfactory bulbectomy-group III; and exposure to chronic mild stress and hyperlipidic/ hyper caloric diet-group IV. The second experiment was similar with the first but the rats received Agomelatine (0.16mg/ animal): group V (depression induced through exposure to chronic mild stress), VI (depression induced through olfactory bulbectomy) and VII (depression induced through exposure to chronic mild stressing hyperlipidic/ hypercaloric diet). Weight, cholesterol, triglycerides and glycaemia were measured at day 0 and 28, and leptin value was measured at day 28. The results in the 1st experiment revealed significant differences (pconclusion, significant correlations were found between high level of triglycerides and depression induced by chronic stress and olfactory bulbectomy. Agomelatine groups had a lower increase of triglycerides levels

Small Universal Accepting Networks of Evolutionary Processors with Filtered Connections

In this paper, we present some results regarding the size complexity of Accepting Networks of Evolutionary Processors with Filtered Connections (ANEPFCs). We show that there are universal ANEPFCs of size 10, by devising a method for simulating 2-Tag Systems. This result significantly improves the known upper bound for the size of universal ANEPFCs which is 18. We also propose a new, computationally and descriptionally efficient simulation of nondeterministic Turing machines by ANEPFCs. More precisely, we describe (informally, due to space limitations) how ANEPFCs with 16 nodes can simulate in O(f(n)) time any nondeterministic Turing machine of time complexity f(n). Thus the known upper bound for the number of nodes in a network simulating an arbitrary Turing machine is decreased from 26 to 16

Reaction Dynamics for the Systems 7Be,8B + 208Pb at Coulomb Barrier Energies

In this contribution we describe the first results obtained for the investigation of the elastic scattering process in the reactions induced by the Radioactive Ion Beams 7Be and 8B on a 208Pb target at Coulomb barrier energies. The experimental data were analyzed within the framework of the optical model in order to extract the total reaction cross section. The comparison with data available in literature for reactions induced on 208Pb by light ions in the mass range A = 6-8 shows that the loosely-bound 8B has the largest reactivity

Electrochemical oxidation and detection of sodium urate in alkaline media on a copper oxides electrode

Electrochemical behaviour of copper oxides electrode in the presence of sodium urate was investigated. The correlation between the anodic oxidation and the amperometric detection of sodium urate in the alkaline medium on copper oxides electrode was analysed by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements. The intereference from sodium tartrate presence in the aqueous alkaline solution was tested. Copper oxides electrodes can be used successfully for amperometric detection of both sodium urate and mixture of urate and tartrate as a cumulative response, in alkaline media, the target compound did not interfere each other. Journal of Applied Sciences and Environmental Management Vol. 10(1) 2006: 25-3

Pheochromocytoma – clinical manifestations, diagnosis and current perioperative management

Pheochromocytoma is a neuroendocrine tumor characterized by the excessive production of catecholamines (epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine). The diagnosis is suspected due to hypertensive paroxysms, associated with vegetative phenomena, due to the catecholaminergic hypersecretion. Diagnosis involves biochemical tests that reveal elevated levels of catecholamine metabolites (metanephrine and normetanephrine). Functional imaging, such as 123I-metaiodobenzylguanidine scintigraphy (123I-MIBG), has increased specificity in identifying the catecholamine-producing tumor and its metastases. The gold-standard treatment for patients with pheochromocytoma is represented by the surgical removal of the tumor. Before surgical resection, it is important to optimize blood pressure and intravascular volume in order to avoid negative hemodynamic events

„Ich weiß, was Du die letzten zwanzig Jahre gemacht hast!“:eine Makro-, Meso- und Mikroebenenanalyse des rumänischen Transformationsprozesses unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Staatsklasse als Entscheidungsakteur

Das Besondere an der schwierigen Entwicklung des post-kommunistischen Rumäniens ist die Herausbildung einer Staatsklasse und ihre Entwicklung zu einem überparteilichen Netzwerk von Akteuren, die in verschiedenen Gesellschaftsbereichen tätig sind (Politik, Wirtschaft, Verwaltung, Justiz, Medien) und diese ihren Interessen unterordnen. Dafür setzten sie verschiedene Machterhaltungs- und Machterweiterungsmechanismen ein, wie politische Korruption, kontrollierte Privatisierung usw., die die Effektivität des politischen Systems und dessen Teilsysteme untergraben. Die Staatsklasse entwickelt sich somit zu einem wichtigen Entscheidungsakteur im rumänischen Transformationsprozess nach 1989 und bestimmt dessen langfristige Entwicklung

Altercentric bias in preverbal infants memory

Human infants would seem to face a daunting challenge in selecting what they should attend, encode and remember. We investigated whether early in life, infants might use others’ attention as an exploitable source of information filtering, by prioritizing the encoding of events that are co-witnessed with someone else over events witnessed alone. In a series of studies (n=255), we show that infants who can otherwise remember an object’s location, misremembered the object where another agent had seen it, even if infants themselves had subsequently seen the object move somewhere else. With further exploratory analyses, we also found that infants’ attention to the agent rather than the object seems to drive their memory for the object’s location. This series points to an initial encoding bias that likely facilitates information selection but which can, under some circumstances, lead to predictable memory errors