Assessment of therapeutic responses to gametocytocidal drugs in Plasmodium falciparum malaria.

Indirect clinical measures assessing anti-malarial drug transmission-blocking activity in falciparum malaria include measurement of the duration of gametocytaemia, the rate of gametocyte clearance or the area under the gametocytaemia-time curve (AUC). These may provide useful comparative information, but they underestimate dose-response relationships for transmission-blocking activity. Following 8-aminoquinoline administration P. falciparum gametocytes are sterilized within hours, whereas clearance from blood takes days. Gametocytaemia AUC and clearance times are determined predominantly by the more numerous female gametocytes, which are generally less drug sensitive than the minority male gametocytes, whereas transmission-blocking activity and thus infectivity is determined by the more sensitive male forms. In choosing doses of transmission-blocking drugs there is no substitute yet for mosquito-feeding studies

Youth Participation, Movement Politics, and Skills: A Study of Youth Activism in Italy

none1noStudies of youth participation in social movement organizations (SMOs) have largely focused on the influence of upbringing on the development of activism. Other analyses have considered how young people use competencies acquired through their involvement in SMOs in their wider political activities in more institutional political settings, as well as in their private lives. While young activists’ paths “toward” and “after” movement politics have been considered within political socialization and civic education studies, there is a need for deeper analyses on young people’s paths “in” SMOs. The chapter intends to contribute to this debate by analyzing the specific skills a young individual is required to have to be recognized as a “promising” activist and progress in the SMOs’ hierarchies. The chapter surveys existing literature and, drawing on data collected through an ethnography conducted on one Italian radical-left SMO, analyzes the importance of hard and character skills in young people’s trajectories within movement politics.mixedPitti, IlariaPitti, Ilari

Microcircuits and their interactions in epilepsy: is the focus out of focus?

Epileptic seizures represent dysfunctional neural networks dominated by excessive and/or hypersynchronous activity. Recent progress in the field has outlined two concepts regarding mechanisms of seizure generation or ictogenesis. First, all seizures, even those associated with what have historically been thought of as “primary generalized” epilepsies appear to originate within local microcircuits and then propagate from that initial ictogenic zone. Second, seizures propagate through cerebral networks and engage microcircuits in distal nodes—a process that can be weakened or even interrupted by suppressing activity in such nodes. Here, we describe various microcircuit motifs, with a special emphasis on one broadly implicated in several epilepsies - feed-forward inhibition. Further, we discuss how, in the dynamic network in which seizures propagate, focusing on circuit “choke points” remote from the initiation site might be as important as that of the initial dysfunction—the seizure “focus.

Prefrontal/Amygdalar System Determines Stress Coping Behavior Through 5-HT/GABA Connection

Coping is defined as the behavioral and physiological effort made to master stressful situations. The ability to cope with stress leads either to healthy or to pathogenic outcomes. The medial prefrontal cortex (mpFC) and amygdala are acknowledged as having a major role in stress-related behaviors, and mpFC has a critical role in the regulation of amygdala-mediated arousal in response to emotionally salient stimuli. Prefrontal cortical serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT)) is involved in corticolimbic circuitry, and GABA has a major role in amygdala functioning. Here, using mice, it was assessed whether amygdalar GABA regulation by prefrontal 5-HT is involved in processing stressful experiences and in determining coping outcomes. First (experiment 1), bilateral selective 5-HT depletion in mpFC of mice reduced GABA release induced by stress in basolateral amygdala (BLA) and passive coping in the Forced Swimming Test (FST) (experiment 2). Moreover, prefrontal-amygdala disconnection procedure that combined a selective unilateral 5-HT depletion of mpFC and infusion of an inhibitor of GABA synthesis into the contralateral BLA, thereby to disrupt prefrontal-amygdalar serial connectivity bilaterally, showed that disconnection selectively decreases immobility in the FST. These results point to prefrontal/amygdala connectivity mediated by 5-HT and GABA transmission as a critical neural mechanism in stress-induced behavior

Identity Styles, Positive Youth Development, and Civic Engagement in Adolescence

Identity formation is a core developmental task of adolescence. Adolescents can rely on different social-cognitive styles to seek, process, and encode self-relevant information: information-oriented, normative, and diffuse-avoidant identity styles. The reliance on different styles might impact adolescents' adjustment and their active involvement in the society. The purpose of this study was to examine whether adolescents with different identity styles report differences in positive youth development (analyzed with the Five Cs-Competence, Confidence, Character, Connection, and Caring-model) and in various forms of civic engagement (i.e., involvement in school self-government activities, volunteering activities, youth political organizations, and youth non-political organizations). The participants were 1,633 (54.1 % female) 14-19 years old adolescents (Mage = 16.56, SDage = 1.22). The findings indicated that adolescents with different identity styles differed significantly on all the Five Cs and on two (i.e., involvement in volunteering activities and in youth non-political organizations) forms of civic engagement. Briefly, adolescents with an information-oriented style reported high levels of both the Five Cs and civic engagement; participants with a normative style reported moderate to high scores on the Five Cs but low rates of civic engagement; diffuse-avoidant respondents scored low both on the Five Cs and on civic engagement. These findings suggest that the information-oriented style, contrary to the diffuse-avoidant one, has beneficial effects for both the individual and the community, while the normative style has quite beneficial effects for the individual but not for his/her community. Concluding, adolescents with different identity styles display meaningful differences in positive youth development and in rates of civic engagement