Anti-Inflammatory activity of a polyphenolic extract from Arabidopsis thaliana in in vitro and in vivo models of Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder and the primary form of dementia in the elderly. One of the main features of AD is the increase in amyloid-beta (Aβ) peptide production and aggregation, leading to oxidative stress, neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. Polyphenols are well known for their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects and have been proposed as possible therapeutic agents against AD. Here, we investigated the effects of a polyphenolic extract of Arabidopsis thaliana (a plant belonging to the Brassicaceae family) on inflammatory response induced by Aβ. BV2 murine microglia cells treated with both Aβ25⁻35 peptide and extract showed a lower pro-inflammatory (IL-6, IL-1β, TNF-α) and a higher anti-inflammatory (IL-4, IL-10, IL-13) cytokine production compared to cells treated with Aβ only. The activation of the Nrf2-antioxidant response element signaling pathway in treated cells resulted in the upregulation of heme oxygenase-1 mRNA and in an increase of NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase 1 activity. To establish whether the extract is also effective against Aβ-induced neurotoxicity in vivo, we evaluated its effect on the impaired climbing ability of AD Drosophila flies expressing human Aβ1⁻42. Arabidopsis extract significantly restored the locomotor activity of these flies, thus confirming its neuroprotective effects also in vivo. These results point to a protective effect of the Arabidopsis extract in AD, and prompt its use as a model in studying the impact of complex mixtures derived from plant-based food on neurodegenerative diseases

A new tool to assess the occurrence of personality traits: the Phenomenological Personality Factor questionnaire

Personality traits are patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions that are usually assessed by means of psychometric questionnaires. In the present study we described the Phenomenological Personality Factor (PPF), a short questionnaire assessing the personality traits, taking into account the different interpretative models of personality

Computational Methods in Psychotherapy: A Scoping Review

The study of complex systems, such as the psychotherapeutic encounter, transcends the mechanistic and reductionist methods for describing linear processes and needs suitable approaches to describe probabilistic and scarcely predictable phenomena

Exploring the Question: “Does Empathy Work in the Same Way in Online and In-Person Therapeutic Settings?”

Providing remote psychotherapy using technology is a growing practice, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if in numerous studies video conferencing psychotherapy (VCP) was found to be clinically effective, some doubts continue to exist about how the psychotherapeutic alliance works in the online setting, and the characteristics of the empathic process are still poorly understood. This is an exploratory study aimed at analyzing the degree of empathy between the psychotherapist and client pair, and the degree of support perceived by the client who shall be referred to as the patient interchangeably in this study, comparing the sessions in person with those online, during the current pandemic, in order to discriminate the impact of empathy in the digital setting. The sample analyzed was composed of 23 patients with different severity of pathology engaged in online and in-person therapeutic sessions with five psychotherapists of different theoretical leanings. The scores of the support and empathy scale, obtained by both members of the psychotherapeutic couple in the two settings, were analyzed and compared. The test used belongs to an Italian adaptation of the Empathic Understanding (EU) of the Relationship Inventory. What emerged from comparing the scores was interesting: Unlike the psychotherapists, the patients perceived their therapists as significantly more empathic and supportive in the remote setting. These are rather important data, because the literature documents that client empathic perception measures represent a more accurate measure of the empathic relationship and, in general, can predict a good treatment outcome. Although these results need further investigation, they represent an important contribution in filling the scientific gap in the understanding of digital empathy. Also, this study provides new insights for future research on the characteristics and impact empathy has on the practice of remote psychotherapy

Sorcin is an early marker of neurodegeneration, Ca2+ dysregulation and endoplasmic reticulum stress associated to neurodegenerative diseases

Dysregulation of calcium signaling is emerging as a key feature in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and Huntington's disease (HD), and targeting this process may be therapeutically beneficial. Under this perspective, it is important to study proteins that regulate calcium homeostasis in the cell. Sorcin is one of the most expressed calcium-binding proteins in the human brain; its overexpression increases endoplasmic reticulum (ER) calcium concentration and decreases ER stress in the heart and in other cellular types. Sorcin has been hypothesized to be involved in neurodegenerative diseases, since it may counteract the increased cytosolic calcium levels associated with neurodegeneration. In the present work, we show that Sorcin expression levels are strongly increased in cellular, animal, and human models of AD, PD, and HD, vs. normal cells. Sorcin partially colocalizes with RyRs in neurons and microglia cells; functional experiments with microsomes containing high amounts of RyR2 and RyR3, respectively, show that Sorcin is able to regulate these ER calcium channels. The molecular basis of the interaction of Sorcin with RyR2 and RyR3 is demonstrated by SPR. Sorcin also interacts with other ER proteins as SERCA2 and Sigma-1 receptor in a calcium-dependent fashion. We also show that Sorcin regulates ER calcium transients: Sorcin increases the velocity of ER calcium uptake (increasing SERCA activity). The data presented here demonstrate that Sorcin may represent both a novel early marker of neurodegenerative diseases and a response to cellular stress dependent on neurodegeneration

Dyspraxia: an impairment of the structure and functions of the individual mind. A new study perspective and intervention

The term dyspraxia defines an inability to perform a pragmatically oriented action. The term doesn’t yet have a precise nosographic location. According to embodied cognition model, dyspraxia can be understood in a wider spectrum of pathological processes that significantly compromise the functions and development of an individual's mind. With the aim to identify early and to support pupils with possible motor difficulties, this study wants to propose a computational analysis model of the dyspraxic movement of children and to define which are the basic criteria for the construction of a technologically assisted diagnostic system for dyspraxia, thanks to the use of an ecological observation grid (GEO-DE). The observation tool was applied in a sample of 525 subjects, aged between 48 and 72 months in order to identify the groups of motor tasks predictive of dyspraxic phenomena. The analysis of the normalized importance of the independent variables showed that the AL group is the most important group for the forecast of praxic deficits, it was followed in descending order by the AP, GTI, EC. In future developments, the model described in this study intends to identify the precise connections between evolutions of the motor process and the forms of self-experience

The Nodes of Treatment: A Pilot Study of the Patient-Therapist Relationship Through the Theory of Complex Systems

Psychotherapy, unanimously described as a particular organized and systematic relationship between a patient and a therapist, is a real complex system. The interaction between the numerous variables belonging to the patient, the therapist and the context in which the therapeutic couple is inserted, presents auto-poietic characteristics and generates emergent qualities that, at the current state of psychotherapy research, have not been effectively addressed. The methods of machine learning are suitable for analyzing complex systems and in our opinion, at the moment, they are the most appropriate for studying the therapeutic relationship, understood as a quality emerging from patient-therapist interaction. In fact, through the use of artificial intelligence methods it is possible to construct a model of interaction between therapist and patient by integrating in it the non-linearity of information exchanges between the components of the system. The humanistic therapies vision of the patient-therapist relationship as a complex and organized interaction between the parts of a system is comparable to the networks of cellular chemical reactions described by Varela and Maturana. In these networks, which are a complex systems, what is important for maintaining the cell’s integrity and its functioning it is not the nature of every single chemical reaction but the form and dynamics of their interaction. This research is a pilot study that intends to evaluate the possibility of describing the complexity of therapeutic relationships using the methods of machine learning and complex networks, ordinarily used to study systems composed of numerous interacting variables. From this pilot study emerges that the use of graphs is certainly a valid tool for the analysis of both the psychotherapeutic sessions and the evolution of the care relationship over time. Numerous suggestions on the dynamics within the patient-therapist system emerge from the construction of a complex network useful for describing the trend of psychotherapy, which in this way can be described without losing the value of the wealth of each individual experience

A sample of italian psychotherapists express their perception and opinions of online psychotherapy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Il lockdown causato dalla covid-19 ha costretto gli psicoterapeuti a ricorrere alla psicoterapia in videoconferenza (VCP). Si di- spone di poca letteratura sulla relazione tra VCP e l’orientamento teorico dello psicoterapeuta. Lo scopo del nostro lavoro di ricerca è esplo- rare fino a che punto i terapisti italiani hanno utilizzato la VCP e come hanno vissuto il cambiamento di setting durante il lockdown. Un cam- pione di psicoterapeuti ha compilato un questionario online includendo dati su eventuali precedenti esperienze di lavoro a distanza, informa- zioni sui cambiamenti nel setting durante il lockdown e le loro opinioni su questa esperienza. Nella seconda fase, è stata eseguita un’analisi sta- tistica dei dati raccolti con SPSS. Gli orientamenti teorici più rappresentati sono psicoanalitico, gestaltico, sistemico-relazionale e psicodina- mico. La quasi totalità degli intervistati aveva scelto di cambiare impostazione, optando per il lavoro a distanza tramite videochiamata, senza differenze in termini di orientamento teorico e fascia di età. L’orientamento psicoterapeutico sembra influenzare il tipo di difficoltà incontra- te. La letteratura scientifica sulla psicoterapia a distanza (VCP) finora non la correla con alcun modello teorico-clinico specifico. Il nostro la- voro di ricerca offre alcune ipotesi preliminari sulle potenziali correlazioni tra le variazioni di setting con i modelli teorico-clinici.The covid-19 lockdown forced psychotherapists to use videoconferencing psychotherapy (VCP). There is little literature on the relationship between VCP and the theoretical orientation of the psychotherapist. The aim of our research work is to explore to what extent the Italian therapists used VCP and how they experienced the change in setting during lockdown. A sample of psychotherapists completed an on-line questionnaire including data about any previous experience of remote work, information on changes in setting during lockdown and their opinions on this experience. In the second phase, a statistical analysis of the data collected was performed with SPSS. The most rep- resented theoretical orientations are psychoanalytic, Gestalt, systemic-relational and psychodynamic. Almost all the respondents had chosen to change the setting, opting for remote work via video calls, with no differences in terms of theoretical orientation and age group. Psy- chotherapeutic orientation seems to affect the type of difficulties encountered. The scientific literature on remote psychotherapy (VCP) so far does not correlate it with any specific theoretical-clinical model. Our research work offers some preliminary hypotheses about potential correlations between setting variations with the theoretical-clinical models

Exploring the Question: “Does Empathy Work in the Same Way in Online and In-Person Therapeutic Settings?”

Providing remote psychotherapy using technology is a growing practice, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if in numerous studies video conferencing psychotherapy (VCP) was found to be clinically effective, some doubts continue to exist about how the psychotherapeutic alliance works in the online setting, and the characteristics of the empathic process are still poorly understood. This is an exploratory study aimed at analyzing the degree of empathy between the psychotherapist and client pair, and the degree of support perceived by the client who shall be referred to as the patient interchangeably in this study, comparing the sessions in person with those online, during the current pandemic, in order to discriminate the impact of empathy in the digital setting. The sample analyzed was composed of 23 patients with different severity of pathology engaged in online and in-person therapeutic sessions with five psychotherapists of different theoretical leanings. The scores of the support and empathy scale, obtained by both members of the psychotherapeutic couple in the two settings, were analyzed and compared. The test used belongs to an Italian adaptation of the Empathic Understanding (EU) of the Relationship Inventory. What emerged from comparing the scores was interesting: Unlike the psychotherapists, the patients perceived their therapists as significantly more empathic and supportive in the remote setting. These are rather important data, because the literature documents that client empathic perception measures represent a more accurate measure of the empathic relationship and, in general, can predict a good treatment outcome. Although these results need further investigation, they represent an important contribution in filling the scientific gap in the understanding of digital empathy. Also, this study provides new insights for future research on the characteristics and impact empathy has on the practice of remote psychotherapy