Situational awareness and reversal learning in patients with obsessive- compulsive disorder and their first-degree relatives: An endophenotype study

Endofenotipler, poligenetik hastalıklar için genetik riski temsil ettiği varsayılan objektif, kalıtsal ve ölçülebilir biyolojik belirteçlerdir. Hastalığın endofenotip modellerinin, obsesif-kompulsif bozukluk(OKB) gibi heterojen beyin hastalıklarının etiyolojisinin anlaşılmasında yarar sağlayacağı öne sürülmektedir. OKB’deki endofenotipleri araştırmak için, biz bu çalışmada 67 OKB hastası, 50 sağlıklı birinci derece akraba ve 41 eşleştirilmiş kontrolün durumsal farkındalık(DF) ve olasılıklı tersine öğrenme test performanslarını karşılaştırarak, OKB hastalarının nörokognitif test performansları ile içgörü, biriktiricilik, şizotipi ve dürtüsellik gibi klinik değişkenler arasındaki ilişkiyi inceledik. Sonuçta, akrabalar DF 1 ve DF 2 aşamalarında hastalar ile kontroller arasında bir test performansı gösterdiler. OKB hastaları DF 1 aşamasının hedef ve uyaran odaklı blokların da kontrollerden anlamlı olarak daha kötü performans sergilerlerken, hastalar ile akrabalar arasında durumsal farkındalığın hiç bir aşamasında doğruluk açısından anlamlı bir farklılık saptanmadı. Ek olarak, OKB hastalarında DF 1 performansı ile şizotipi skorlarının korelasyon gösterdiği bulundu. Bununla birlikte, olasılıklı tersine öğrenme testinde OKB hastaları hem akrabalardan hem de kontrollerden daha kötü performans gösterdiler. Diğer gruplarla karşılaştırıldığında, hasta grubunda anlamlı olarak daha yüksek sayıda deneme sayısı ve kural değişimi sonrası artmış hata oranı saptandı. Akrabalarla kontroller arasında ise tekrarlayıcı hata oranları açısından anlamlı bir farklılık saptanmadı. Bu sonuçlar, durumsal farkındalığın OKB için aday bir enfenotip olabileceğinin ilk kanıtları olup, OKB için genetik bir riske aracılık ediyor olabileceğini düşündürmektedir. Diğer yandan, OKB hastalarında olasılıklı tersine öğrenmenin bozulduğu saptanmış olmakla birlikte çalışmamızın bulguları tersine öğrenmenin OKB için bir endofenotip olabileceği görüşünü desteklememektedir.Endophenotypes are objective, heritable, quantitative biologic markers hypothesized to represent genetic risk for polygenic disorders. It is theorized that endophenotype models of disease will help to understanding etiological of heterogeneous brain disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD). To investigate endophenotypes in OCD, we measured task performance on a situational awareness(SA) and a probabilistic reversal learning task in 67 OCD patients, 50 of their unaffected first-degree relatives, and 41 matched controls. And we tested the relationship between neurocognitive task performance of patients with OCD and clinical variables such as insight, hoarding, schizotypy and impulsivity. Eventually, relatives showed a task performance between patients with OCD and controls on both SA 1 and SA 2 tasks. Patients with OCD performed significantly worse than controls on SA1 single and dual tasks, but there were no significant differences between relatives and patients for accuracy of any SA assessments. In addition, there were significant correlations between SA 1 task performance and schizotypy scores in OCD group. Also, patients with OCD performed worse than both relatives and controls on probabilistic reversal learning task. The OCD group displayed significantly higher average number of trials in addition to increased error ratings per reversal compared with the relatives and control groups. No significant differences overall in number of trials or error rates were found between relatives and controls. Results suggest that situational awareness may mediate genetic risk for OCD, representing the first evidence for a candidate endophenotype for OCD. On the other hand, patients with OCD showed impaired probabilistic reversal learning but our findings did not support that reversal learning appears to be a vulnerability marker for OCD

Situation awareness in obsessive compulsive disorder and their relatives: An endophenotype study

Introduction: It has been theorized that endophenotype models will help to understand the etiology of heterogeneous brain disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In this study, it was aimed to determine whether “situational awareness” impairments which can be defined as partially naturalistic working memory deficits, are an endofenotype for OCD. Methods: In this study, situational awareness (SA) task performances of 67 OCD patients, 50 their unaffected first-degree relatives, and 41 healthy controls who matched with regard to sex, age and years of education were measured to investigate endophenotypes in OCD. For this purpose, a visuospatial working memory test was used. Results: As a result, the relatives showed a task performance between patients with OCD and control group in both SA1 and SA2 tasks. Patients with OCD performed significantly worse than control group on SA1 single and dual task. On the other hand, there were no significant differences between relatives and patients of any SA assessment. Conclusion: These results indicated that poor situational awareness may be a candidate endophenotype for OCD. Early perceptual dysfunctions such as poor performance on SA1 task can mediate the genetic risk for OCD. © 2017 by Turkish Association of Neuropsychiatry

Reversal learning in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and their unaffected relatives: Is orbitofrontal dysfunction an endophenotype of OCD?

It has been suggested that reversal learning deficits might be an endophenotype of OCD. To investigate this hypothesis, we administered a probabilistic reversal learning task (ProbRev) to OCD patients, their unaffected first-degree relatives, and healthy controls. Although the relatives had a performance in between OCDs and controls at the early phase of the ProbRev, their performance was similar to controls and was significantly better than OCD patients at the later stages of the test. Our findings imply that reversal learning impairment might be partly a trait-related feature of OCD but state-related factors can also contribute to observed deficits. © 2017 Elsevier Ireland Lt

Bilateral Cystoid Macular Edema Secondary to Paclitaxel Treatment

Cystoid macular edema is rarely observed secondary to paclitaxel treatment. A 55-year-old female patent was applied five cures of paclitaxel and carboplatin chemotherapy after being diagnosed with metastatic ovarian cancer. The patient had a normal bilateral vision prior to the chemotherapy treatments. After the fifth cure, the patient complained of bilateral vision loss, which was more severe in the left eye. Ophthalmologic examination revealed that right eye vision was 4/10 blurred without glasses and 7/10 blurred with glasses, left eye vision was 1/10 blurred without glasses and 4/10 blurred with glasses. Pathology was not detected during the biomicroscopic examination. Fundus examination of the patient revealed pigment epithelium irregularity, which was found to be less in the right eye, and it was found a decrease in foveal cavity. For fundus examination, the patient underwent fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) and optical coherence tomography (OCT). FFA revealed fluorescein leakage and cystoid appearance particularly more apparent in the left eye. Thickening in the macula and cystoid space was observed particularly more in the left eye in the OCT measurement. In conclusion, we presented our case as a rarely observed cystoid macular edema secondary to paclitaxel treatment

Mixed and multi-precision SpMV for GPUs with row-wise precision selection

Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication (SpMV) is one of the key memory-bound kernels commonly used in industrial and scientific applications. To improve its data movement and benefit from higher compute rates, there are several efforts to utilize mixed precision on SpMV. Most of the prior-art focus on performing the entire SpMV in single-precision within a bigger context of an iterative solver (e.g., CG, GMRES). In this work, we are interested in a more fine-grained mixed-precision SpMV, where the level of precision is decided for each element in the matrix to be used in a single operation. We extend an existing entry-wise precision based approach by deciding precisions per row, motivated by the granularity of parallelism on a GPU where groups of threads process rows in CSR-based matrices. We propose mixed-precision CSR storage methods with row permutations and describe their greater efficiency and load-balancing compared to the existing method. We also consider a multi-precision case where single and double precision copies of the matrix are stored priorly and further extend our mixed-precision SpMV approach to comply with it. As such, we leverage a mixed-precision SpMV to obtain a multi-precision Jacobi method which is faster than yet almost as accurate as double-precision Jacobi implementation, and further evaluate a multi-precision Cardiac modeling algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SpMV methods on an extensive dataset of real-valued large sparse matrices from the SuiteSparse Matrix Collection using an NVIDIA V100 GPU

Comparison of fentanil and remifentanil for coronary artery surgery with low ejection fraction

Introduction: In this study, we evaluated patient response and haemodynamic parameters in patients with low ejection fraction undergoing coronary bypass surgery with either fentanil or remifentanil in conjunction with etomidate.Material and methods: We evaluated 30 cases of coronary artery surgery, which were divided into two treatment groups (n = 15 each). In group F (fentanil group), the following regimen was employed for anaesthesia induction: 1 mg/kg lidocaine, 0.3 mg/kg etomidate, and, following a 1 µg/kg 60 s bolus dose of fentanil, a 0.1 µg/kg/min fentanil infusion was initiated, after which 0.6 mg/kg rocuronium was administered. In group R (remifentanil group), the following regimen was employed for anaesthesia induction: 1 mg/kg lidocaine, 0.3 mg/kg etomidate and, following a 1 µg/kg 60 s bolus dose of remifentanil, a 0.1 µg/kg/min remifentanil infusion was initiated, after which 0.6 mg/kg rocuronium was administered. Systolic artery pressure, diastolic artery pressure, mean arterial pressure, heart rate, SPO2 (saturation), cardiac output, stroke volume variance, central venous pressure, and systemic vascular resistance values were recorded for all study patients at five minutes before anaesthetic induction (T1), immediately following induction (T2), and immediately following intubation (T3).Results: The demographic values obtained for both groups were similar. We found that remifentanil use was associated with decreased cardiac output and increased fluctuations in both heart rate and mean values of arterial pressure.Conclusions: Although many studies have demonstrated remifentanil to be as safe as fentanil when titrated to an appropriate dose, our study suggests that fentanil may be a more appropriate choice during the induction of anaesthesia in patients with a low ejection fraction

EXPRESSION PROFILES OF PTEN AND POGZ GENES IN TURKISH PATIENTS WITH AUTISM

Amaç: Otizm spektrum bozukluğu (OSB), karmaşık davranışsal fenotiplerle karakterize, heterojen bir grup nörogelişimsel bozukluktur. Uzun yıllar boyunca yapılan kapsamlı çalışmalara rağmen, OSB'nin nedenleri hala bilinmemektedir. PTEN ve POGZ genleri, OSB fenotipinden sorumlu olabilecek aday genler olarak gösterilmiştir. Otistik hastalarda PTEN ve POGZ genlerinin ekspresyon düzeylerini araştırmayı amaçladık. Yöntem: OSB tanılı 50 hastada ve yaş-cinsiyet uyumlu 50 sağlıklı kontrolde PTEN ve POGZ gen ekspresyonları araştırıldı. Bu çalışma Erciyes Üniversitesi Genom ve Kök Hücre Merkezi'nde (GENKÖK) yapılmıştır. Bulgular: POGZ geninin hastalarda kontrollere göre daha fazla eksprese olduğu ve otistik erkek hastalarda bu genin ekspresyonunun anlamlı olduğu bulundu. PTEN gen ekspresyonu istatistiksel olarak anlamlı değildi ancak hastalarda kontrollere göre daha düşük bulundu. Bu genlerin ekspresyonu ile bilişsel gerilik arasındaki ilişki ise anlamlı değildi. Sonuç: Daha büyük hasta grupları ile diğer olası aday genlerin araştırılmasını ve sonuçların farklı ek klinik belirtilerle hastalarda karşılaştırılmasını önermekteyiz

Serological Investigation Of Phlebovirus Exposure In Blood Donors From The Mediterranean Province Of Mersin, Turkey

Phleboviruses are enveloped segmented RNA viruses, capable of inducing febrile disease and/or meningoencephalitis in exposed individuals, according to the infecting strain, following transmission via arthropods. Prototype medically-important phlebovirus strains responsible for sandfly fever are sandfly fever Sicilian virus (SFSV) and sandfly fever Naples virus (SFNV), where the SFSV variant sandfly fever Cyprus virus (SFCV) is also detected in individuals with febrile disease. Toscana virus (TOSV) is unique among phleboviruses as the cause of infections involving central nervous system. In this seroepidemiological study, human exposure to selected medically-important phleboviruses was investigated in healthy adult residents of the Mersin province, Mediterranean Anatolia, Turkey, where the current data on phlebovirus epidemiology is scarce. A total of 1 784 healthy individuals (mean age: 34.7 9.6 years; 97.3% were male), accepted as blood donors at the Mersin University Center for Health Research and Application Blood Bank were included in the study after informed consent during a seventeen month period between July 2011 to November 2012. All participants were requested to fill out a questionnaire to reveal risk factors for vector exposure. SFSV, SFNV, SFCV and TOSV IgG antibodies in serum were investigated via a commercial indirect immunofluorescence test (RFT) (Sandfly Fever Virus IgG Mosaic I; Euroimmun, Germany). Sera interpreted as positive or strong positive for TOSV or SFNV+TOSV in IIFT were evaluated via TOSV virus neutralization test (VNT) for specificity confirmation. IIFT seroreactivity for at least one of the tested phleboviruses was present in 66.8% (1192/1784) of the samples. The most frequently-detected phlebovirus strain was SFSV (51.6%; 920/1784), followed by SFNV (46.4%; 827/1784), TOSV (43.7%; 779/1784) and SFCV (47.3%; 843/1784). Among the reactive sera, 6.6% (79/1192) were positive for a single virus serotype, whereas in 39.8% (475/1192) antibodies reacting with all tested virus serotypes were revealed. A total of 187 sera was included in the TOSV VNT and neutralizing antibodies were detected in 13.9%. According to the IIFT reactivity, residing in rural areas was observed as a statistically significant risk factor for exposure in all phleboviruses tested (p values for SFSV, SFNV, TOSV and SFCV were 0.002, 0.001, <0.001 and 0.003, respectively). TOSV exposure is more frequently detected via IIFT in individuals having pets or domestic farm animals around the living quarters (p= 0.005). As a result, frequent exposure to SFSV/SFCV or antigenically similar phlebovirus strains and viruses of the SFNV species were determined in healthy blood donors in Mersin province, located in the Mediterranean region of Turkey. Furthermore, TOSV neutralizing antibodies were detected in selected samples with IIFT reactivity, confirming previous reports suggesting TOSV activity in the region. TOSV and other phleboviruses must be included in the diagnostic work-up in cases with febrile diseases and viral central nervous system infections during the sandfly-active months.Wo