The Impact of Attending Online Mindfulness Drop-In Sessions on Depression, Anxiety, Distress and Wellbeing in the General Population

Objectives: There is a lack of research into online mindfulness drop-in sessions (OMDIS) that have been offered freely to the public, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. These sessions offer more flexibility than standard mindfulness-based interventions that run for a set number of sessions, as individuals can ‘drop in’ to as many sessions as and when they like. This research aimed to explore the impact of attending group facilitated OMDIS on psychological outcomes in the general population. Methods: A quantitative cross-sectional retrospective design was adopted in this study. Participants (n=112) were recruited online through OMDIS providers in the UK and internationally. Attendees were asked to complete an online survey with measures of depression, anxiety, distress and wellbeing, both for their current state and retrospectively for their state before attending any OMDIS. They also reported the number, duration and frequency of sessions attended, as well as their ease and accuracy of retrospective recall. Results: Paired T-tests and two-way repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted. Findings indicated that: OMDIS were efficacious in improving depression, anxiety, distress and wellbeing; attending more sessions, more frequently, for longer durations was not required to attain these benefits; and being on a psychology waitlist or having prior mindfulness experience did not lead to greater benefits, whereas having depression prior to attending OMDIS did lead to greater improvements in psychological outcomes. Conclusions: The current study is the first to explore and provide evidence for the efficacy of OMDIS on psychological outcomes. OMDIS are cost-effective and readily available and therefore could be offered to those on waiting lists for psychological interventions, who often wait prolonged periods without any support. Further research is needed to understand other factors that may impact efficacy in order to maximise the utility of OMDIS. Keywords: Online, mindfulness, drop-in, mental health, depression, anxiet

Association of Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) identified SNPs and risk of breast cancer in an Indian population

To date, no studies have investigated the association of the GWAS-identified SNPs with BC risk in Indian population. We investigated the association of 30 previously reported and replicated BC susceptibility SNPs in 1,204 cases and 1,212 controls from a hospital based case-control study conducted at the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai. As a measure of total susceptibility burden, the polygenic risk score (PRS) for each individual was defined by the weighted sum of genotypes from 21 independent SNPs with weights derived from previously published estimates of association odds-ratios. Logistic regression models were used to assess risk associated with individual SNPs and overall PRS, and stratified by menopausal and receptor status. A total of 11 SNPs from eight genomic regions (FGFR2, 9q31.2, MAP3K, CCND1, ZM1Z1, RAD51L11, ESR1 and UST) showed statistically significant (p-value = 0.05) evidence of association, either overall or when stratified by menopausal status or hormone receptor status. BC SNPs previously identified in Caucasian population showed evidence of replication in the Indian population mainly with respect to risk of postmenopausal and hormone receptor positive BC. © 2017 The Author(s)

Longitudinal association of inflammatory markers with markers of glycaemia and insulin resistance in European children

Purpose: Subclinical systemic inflammation may lead to development of type 2 diabetes, but there has been no investigation into its relationship with early progression of glycaemic deterioration and insulin resistance, especially in younger population. In this study we assessed longitudinal associations of pro- and anti-inflammatory markers with markers that evaluate glycaemia and insulin resistance. Methods: This study includes 6537 initially nondiabetic children (mean age at baseline = 6.2 years) with repeated measurements from the IDEFICS/I.Family cohort study (mean follow-up = 5.3 years) from eight European countries. Markers of inflammation were used as independent variables and markers of glycaemia/insulin resistance as dependent variables. Associations were examined using two-level growth model. Models were adjusted for sex, age, major lifestyle, metabolic risk factors, early life markers, and other inflammatory markers in final model. Results: Children with 6 years of follow-up showed that a one-unit increase in z-score of leptin level was associated with 0.38 (95% CI = 0.32 to 0.44) unit increase in HOMA-IR z-scores. Leptin continued to be associated with HOMA-IR even when analysis was limited to children with no overall obesity, no abdominal obesity, and low to normal triglyceride levels. An inverse association was observed between IL-15 and HOMA-IR (ß = -0.11, 95% CI = -0.15 to -0.07). Conclusions: IL-15 should be evaluated further in the prevention or treatment of prediabetes whereas leptin may prove to be useful in early detection of prediabetes via their association with markers of insulin resistance in European children

Wireless phone use in childhood and adolescence and neuroepithelial brain tumours: Results from the international MOBI-Kids study

In recent decades, the possibility that use of mobile communicating devices, particularly wireless (mobile and cordless) phones, may increase brain tumour risk, has been a concern, particularly given the considerable increase in their use by young people. MOBI-Kids, a 14-country (Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain) case-control study, was conducted to evaluate whether wireless phone use (and particularly resulting exposure to radiofrequency (RF) and extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fields (EMF)) increases risk of brain tumours in young people. Between 2010 and 2015, the study recruited 899 people with brain tumours aged 10 to 24 years old and 1,910 controls (operated for appendicitis) matched to the cases on date of diagnosis, study region and age. Participation rates were 72% for cases and 54% for controls. The mean ages of cases and controls were 16.5 and 16.6 years, respectively; 57% were males. The vast majority of study participants were wireless phones users, even in the youngest age group, and the study included substantial numbers of long-term (over 10 years) users: 22% overall, 51% in the 20-24-year-olds. Most tumours were of the neuroepithelial type (NBT; n = 671), mainly glioma. The odds ratios (OR) of NBT appeared to decrease with increasing time since start of use of wireless phones, cumulative number of calls and cumulative call time, particularly in the 15-19 years old age group. A decreasing trend in ORs was also observed with increasing estimated cumulative RF specific energy and ELF induced current density at the location of the tumour. Further analyses suggest that the large number of ORs below 1 in this study is unlikely to represent an unknown causal preventive effect of mobile phone exposure: they can be at least partially explained by differential recall by proxies and prodromal symptoms affecting phone use before diagnosis of the cases. We cannot rule out, however, residual confounding from sources we did not measure. Overall, our study provides no evidence of a causal association between wireless phone use and brain tumours in young people. However, the sources of bias summarised above prevent us from ruling out a small increased risk

Gamma-radiolysis of some glycoproteins in dilute aqueous solutions

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D39650/82 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Seeing voices and hearing faces: Cross-modal biometric matching

We introduce a seemingly impossible task: given only an audio clip of someone speaking, decide which of two face images is the speaker. In this paper we study this, and a number of related cross-modal tasks, aimed at answering the question: how much can we infer from the voice about the face and vice versa? We study this task “in the wild”, employing the datasets that are now publicly available for face recognition from static images (VGGFace) and speaker identification from audio (VoxCeleb). These provide training and testing scenarios for both static and dynamic testing of cross-modal matching. We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce CNN architectures for both binary and multi-way cross-modal face and audio matching; (ii) we compare dynamic testing (where video information is available, but the audio is not from the same video) with static testing (where only a single still image is available); and (iii) we use human testing as a baseline to calibrate the difficulty of the task. We show that a CNN can indeed be trained to solve this task in both the static and dynamic scenarios, and is even well above chance on 10-way classification of the face given the voice. The CNN matches human performance on easy examples (e.g. different gender across faces) but exceeds human performance on more challenging examples (e.g. faces with the same gender, age and nationality).</p

Histopathological Variants of Cutaneous Neurofibroma: A Compendious Review

The first description of histopathological variants of neurofibroma dates back to 1994. Over the years, many individual case reports elucidating unusual histologic features in neurofibroma have been added to the literature, some of which have defined criteria, with the others falling under the roof of benign neural neoplasms. These unusual features, which sometimes may lead to pauses in identifying a common benign tumor such as neurofibroma. Awareness of these variants may help dermatopathologists avoid misinterpretation. Thus, this review aims to summarize all novel and unusual histopathological variants of cutaneous neurofibroma reported to date, in addition to any unusual variants that we encountered in our practice