Lessons Learned from a Decade of Sudden Oak Death in California: Evaluating Local Management

Sudden Oak Death has been impacting California’s coastal forests for more than a decade. In that time, and in the absence of a centrally organized and coordinated set of mandatory management actions for this disease in California’s wildlands and open spaces, many local communities have initiated their own management programs. We present five case studies to explore how local-level management has attempted to control this disease. From these case studies, we glean three lessons: connections count, scale matters, and building capacity is crucial. These lessons may help management, research, and education planning for future pest and disease outbreaks

Re-examination of the Controversial Coexistence of Traumatic Brain Injury and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Misdiagnosis and Self-Report Measures

The coexistence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) remains a controversial issue in the literature. To address this controversy, we focused primarily on the civilian-related literature of TBI and PTSD. Some investigators have argued that individuals who had been rendered unconscious or suffered amnesia due to a TBI are unable to develop PTSD because they would be unable to consciously experience the symptoms of fear, helplessness, and horror associated with the development of PTSD. Other investigators have reported that individuals who sustain TBI, regardless of its severity, can develop PTSD even in the context of prolonged unconsciousness. A careful review of the methodologies employed in these studies reveals that investigators who relied on clinical interviews of TBI patients to diagnose PTSD found little or no evidence of PTSD. In contrast, investigators who relied on PTSD questionnaires to diagnose PTSD found considerable evidence of PTSD. Further analysis revealed that many of the TBI patients who were initially diagnosed with PTSD according to self-report questionnaires did not meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD upon completion of a clinical interview. In particular, patients with severe TBI were often misdiagnosed with PTSD. A number of investigators found that many of the severe TBI patients failed to follow the questionnaire instructions and erroneously endorsed PTSD symptoms because of their cognitive difficulties. Because PTSD questionnaires are not designed to discriminate between PTSD and TBI symptoms or determine whether a patient's responses are accurate or exaggerated, studies that rely on self-report questionnaires to evaluate PTSD in TBI patients are at risk of misdiagnosing PTSD. Further research should evaluate the degree to which misdiagnosis of PTSD occurs in individuals who have sustained mild TBI

Enriched Environment Experience Overcomes Learning Deficits and Depressive-Like Behavior Induced by Juvenile Stress

Mood disorders affect the lives and functioning of millions each year. Epidemiological studies indicate that childhood trauma is predominantly associated with higher rates of both mood and anxiety disorders. Exposure of rats to stress during juvenility (JS) (27–29 days of age) has comparable effects and was suggested as a model of induced predisposition for these disorders. The importance of the environment in the regulation of brain, behavior and physiology has long been recognized in biological, social and medical sciences. Here, we studied the effects of JS on emotional and cognitive aspects of depressive-like behavior in adulthood, on Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis reactivity and on the expression of cell adhesion molecule L1 (L1-CAM). Furthermore, we combined it with the examination of potential reversibility by enriched environment (EE) of JS – induced disturbances of emotional and cognitive aspects of behavior in adulthood. Three groups were tested: Juvenile Stress –subjected to Juvenile stress; Enriched Environment – subjected to Juvenile stress and then, from day 30 on to EE; and Naïves. In adulthood, coping and stress responses were examined using the elevated plus-maze, open field, novel setting exploration and two way shuttle avoidance learning. We found that, JS rats showed anxiety- and depressive-like behaviors in adulthood, altered HPA axis activity and altered L1-CAM expression. Increased expression of L1-CAM was evident among JS rats in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and Thalamus (TL). Furthermore, we found that EE could reverse most of the effects of Juvenile stress, both at the behavioral, endocrine and at the biochemical levels. The interaction between JS and EE resulted in an increased expression of L1-CAM in dorsal cornu ammonis (CA) area 1 (dCA1)