Cognitive Flexibility Predicts PTSD Symptoms: Observational and Interventional Studies

Introduction: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a prevalent, severe and tenacious psychopathological consequence of traumatic events. Neurobehavioral mechanisms underlying PTSD pathogenesis have been identified, and may serve as risk-resilience factors during the early aftermath of trauma exposure. Longitudinally documenting the neurobehavioral dimensions of early responses to trauma may help characterize survivors at risk and inform mechanism-based interventions. We present two independent longitudinal studies that repeatedly probed clinical symptoms and neurocognitive domains in recent trauma survivors. We hypothesized that better neurocognitive functioning shortly after trauma will be associated with less severe PTSD symptoms a year later, and that an early neurocognitive intervention will improve cognitive functioning and reduce PTSD symptoms.Methods: Participants in both studies were adult survivors of traumatic events admitted to two general hospitals’ emergency departments (EDs) in Israel. The studies used identical clinical and neurocognitive tools, which included assessment of PTSD symptoms and diagnosis, and a battery of neurocognitive tests. The first study evaluated 181 trauma-exposed individuals one-, six-, and 14 months following trauma exposure. The second study evaluated 97 trauma survivors 1 month after trauma exposure, randomly allocated to 30 days of web-based neurocognitive intervention (n = 50) or control tasks (n = 47), and re-evaluated all subjects three- and 6 months after trauma exposure.Results: In the first study, individuals with better cognitive flexibility at 1 month post-trauma showed significantly less severe PTSD symptoms after 13 months (p = 0.002). In the second study, the neurocognitive training group showed more improvement in cognitive flexibility post-intervention (p = 0.019), and lower PTSD symptoms 6 months post-trauma (p = 0.017), compared with controls. Intervention- induced improvement in cognitive flexibility positively correlated with clinical improvement (p = 0.002).Discussion: Cognitive flexibility, shortly after trauma exposure, emerged as a significant predictor of PTSD symptom severity. It was also ameliorated by a neurocognitive intervention and associated with a better treatment outcome. These findings support further research into the implementation of mechanism-driven neurocognitive preventive interventions for PTSD

Higher order dielectrophoretic force characterisation of non-spherical particles

A numerical method is presented for determination of higher-order dielectrophoretic forces on non-spherical particles. The method is applied to ellipsoidal particles of different dimensions subjected to electric fields with different degrees of non-uniformity. The results are compared against net force calculations using the Maxwell stress tensor method. The contribution from higher-order forces is shown to exceed the dielectrophoretic force based only on the dipole approximation when particle dimensions are comparable to the length scale of electric field non-uniformity. It is also shown that individual contributions from quadrupolar and octupolar dielectrophoretic forces strongly depend on particle aspect ratio

Higher-order dielectrophoresis of nonspherical particles

Higher-order terms of dielectrophoretic (DEP) force are commonly ignored by invoking the simplifying dipole approximation. Concurrently, the trend towards micro- and nano-electrode structures in DEP design is bringing about an increasing number of instances where the approximation is expected to lose reliability. The case is severe for nonspherical particles (the shape of many biological particles) due to the shape-dependent nature of dielectric polarization. However, there is a lack of analytical means to determine multipole moments of nonspherical particles, numerical calculations of the same are regarded as unreliable, and there is a prevalence for higher-order force considerations to be ignored. As a result, the dipole approximation is used and/or nonspherical particles are approximated as spheres. This work proves the inefficacy of current qualitative criteria for the reliability of the dipole approximation and presents a quantitative substitute, with verified accuracy, that enables precise determination of the extent to which the dipole approximation would be reliable, and if found unreliable, corrects the approximation by adding second- and third-order terms of the DEP force. The effects of field nonuniformity, electrode design, and particle shape and aspect ratio on the significance of higher-order DEP forces is quantitatively analyzed. The results show that higher-order DEP forces are indeed of substantially increased significance for nonspherical particles; in the cases examined in this work, multipolar terms are seen to constitute more than 40% of the total force on ellipsoidal and cylindrical particles. It is further shown that approximating nonspherical particles as spheres of similar dimensions is subject to substantial error. Last, the substantial importance of the electrode design in influencing higher-order forces is shown