The acute mania of King George III: A computational linguistic analysis.

We used a computational linguistic approach, exploiting machine learning techniques, to examine the letters written by King George III during mentally healthy and apparently mentally ill periods of his life. The aims of the study were: first, to establish the existence of alterations in the King's written language at the onset of his first manic episode; and secondly to identify salient sources of variation contributing to the changes. Effects on language were sought in two control conditions (politically stressful vs. politically tranquil periods and seasonal variation). We found clear differences in the letter corpus, across a range of different features, in association with the onset of mental derangement, which were driven by a combination of linguistic and information theory features that appeared to be specific to the contrast between acute mania and mental stability. The paucity of existing data relevant to changes in written language in the presence of acute mania suggests that lexical, syntactic and stylometric descriptions of written discourse produced by a cohort of patients with a diagnosis of acute mania will be necessary to support the diagnosis independently and to look for other periods of mental illness of the course of the King's life, and in other historically significant figures with similarly large archives of handwritten documents

The incidence of smoking and risk factors for smoking initiation in medical faculty students: cohort study

BACKGROUND: Medical education requires detailed investigation because it is a period during which the attitudes and behaviors of physicians develop. The purpose of this study was to calculate the yearly smoking prevalence and incidence rates of medical faculty students and to identify the risk factors for adopting smoking behaviour. METHODS: This is a cohort study in which every student was asked about their smoking habits at the time of first registration to the medical faculty, and was monitored every year. Smoking prevalence, yearly incidence of initiation of smoking and average years of smoking were calculated in analysis. RESULTS: At the time of registration, 21.8% of the students smoked. At the end of six years, males had smoked for an average of 2.6 ± 3.0 years and females for 1.0 ± 1.8 years (p < 0.05). Of the 93 medical students who were not smokers at the time of registration, 30 (32.3%) were smokers at the end of the 6 years of the course. CONCLUSION: The first 3 years of medical education are the most risky period for initiation of smoking. We found that factors such as being male, having a smoking friend in the same environment and having a high trait anxiety score were related to the initiation of smoking. Targeted smoking training should be mandatory for students in the Medical Faculty