The Immune System in Stroke

Stroke represents an unresolved challenge for both developed and developing countries and has a huge socio-economic impact. Although considerable effort has been made to limit stroke incidence and improve outcome, strategies aimed at protecting injured neurons in the brain have all failed. This failure is likely to be due to both the incompleteness of modelling the disease and its causes in experimental research, and also the lack of understanding of how systemic mechanisms lead to an acute cerebrovascular event or contribute to outcome. Inflammation has been implicated in all forms of brain injury and it is now clear that immune mechanisms profoundly influence (and are responsible for the development of) risk and causation of stroke, and the outcome following the onset of cerebral ischemia. Until very recently, systemic inflammatory mechanisms, with respect to common comorbidities in stroke, have largely been ignored in experimental studies. The main aim is therefore to understand interactions between the immune system and brain injury in order to develop novel therapeutic approaches. Recent data from clinical and experimental research clearly show that systemic inflammatory diseases -such as atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes or infection - similar to stress and advanced age, are associated with dysregulated immune responses which can profoundly contribute to cerebrovascular inflammation and injury in the central nervous system. In this review, we summarize recent advances in the field of inflammation and stroke, focusing on the challenges of translation between pre-clinical and clinical studies, and potential anti-inflammatory/immunomodulatory therapeutic approaches

Attitudes to AIDS: A comparative analysis of a new and negative stereotype

Two propositions about attitudes, which have previously been supported with respect to the mentally ill [18, 21], were examined with respect to AIDS patients. The first, that people attach a stigma to the AIDS patient, was strongly supported, and two quite independent components of the stigma were found. One of these components identified as dependence, was closely related to the attributes of typical cancer patients and coronary heart patients, while the other, identified as low moral worth, clearly distinguished the AIDS patient from the other two groups of patients. The second proposition, that attitudes to AIDS are not strongly related to age, sex and occupational background, was largely supported. However there was some evidence that males rated AIDS patients lower on moral worth than did females.AIDS attitudes semantic differential

Community attitudes to mental illness in New Zealand twenty-two years on

Three propositions about attitudes to mental illness derived from Nunnally [11] (Popular Conceptions of Mental Health. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1961) were examined with the semantic differential technique as it was used originally by Olmsted and Ordway [5] (Final Report to National Institutes of Mental Health, 1963). Attitudes were compared between several studies using the same measures, that ranged over 22 years from 1962 to 1984. The results were remarkably consistent across all studies, indicating that the community had persistently negative attitudes towards the mentally ill and was no more likely today to want to play a major role in the care of the mentally ill than was the case more than 20 years ago. As a consequence it appears that there will need to be substantial and permanent attitude change, of a kind fleetingly observed over the period of the study, before the professional care of the mentally ill in the community may be expected to have maximum impact.community attitudes mental health New Zealand