Diverse definitions of the early course of schizophrenia - a targeted literature review

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder and patients experience significant comorbidity, especially cognitive and psychosocial deficits, already at the onset of disease. Previous research suggests that treatment during the earlier stages of disease reduces disease burden, and that a longer time of untreated psychosis has a negative impact on treatment outcomes. A targeted literature review was conducted to gain insight into the definitions currently used to describe patients with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia in the early course of disease ('early' schizophrenia). A total of 483 relevant English-language publications of clinical guidelines and studies were identified for inclusion after searches of MEDLINE, MEDLINE In-Process, relevant clinical trial databases and Google for records published between January 2005 and October 2015. The extracted data revealed a wide variety of terminology and definitions used to describe patients with 'early' or 'recent-onset' schizophrenia, with no apparent consensus. The most commonly used criteria to define patients with early schizophrenia included experience of their first episode of schizophrenia or disease duration of less than 1, 2 or 5 years. These varied definitions likely result in substantial disparities of patient populations between studies and variable population heterogeneity. Better agreement on the definition of early schizophrenia could aid interpretation and comparison of studies in this patient population and consensus on definitions should allow for better identification and management of schizophrenia patients in the early course of their disease

Wiederauffindung von wiederverwendbaren Software-Dokumenten: Repraesentationsmethoden und Suchverfahren

Available from TIB Hannover: RR 8166(95-01) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEBayerische Forschungsstiftung, Muenchen (Germany)DEGerman

Informative Value of Individual and Relational Data Compared Through Business-Oriented Community Detection

Abstract Despites the great interest caused by social networks in Business Science, their analysis is rarely performed in both a global and systematic way in this field. This could be explained by the fact their practical extraction is a difficult and costly task. One may ask if equivalent information could be retrieved from less expensive, individual data (i.e. describing single individuals instead of pairs). In this work, we try to address this question through group detection. We gather both types of data from a population of students, estimate groups separately using individual and relational data, and obtain sets of clusters and communities, respectively. We measure the overlap between clusters and communities, which turns out to be relatively weak. We also define a predictive model, allowing us to identify the most discriminant attributes for the communities, and to reveal the presence of a tenuous link between the relational and individual data. Our results indicate both types of data convey considerably different information in this specific context, and can therefore be considered as complementary. To emphasize the interest of communities for Business Science, we also conduct an analysis based on hobbies and purchased brands.

Beyond Hybridity in Organized Professionalism: A Case Study of Medical Curriculum Change

Hybridity denotes the combination of professional and managerial discourses within roles and individuals. Evolving roles are both symptoms and effects of health system reform, intended to improve care coordination across occupational, disciplinary and organizational boundaries. A central tenet of hybridity is a tension between competing world views; however, the question is increasingly posed as to whether such tensions are not experienced in such a conflicted manner. Moralee and Bailey examine this through a case study of professions in the English National Health Service (NHS), demonstrating the work they undertake in making sense of, internalizing and resolving their “hybridized” conflicts. In considering the conceptual and practical ramifications of being “beyond” hybridity, Moralee and Bailey explore what this might mean for our conventional understanding of power, jurisdiction, resistance and enrolment in professional organizations, which are central to questions of care coordination