Ontwikkeling van natuur in de Nederlandse steden

Analayse van stedelijke ecologie; inventarisatie voor het Natuurplanburea

Cortisol exposure, cognition and clinical course of bipolar disorder

In this dissertation, we aimed to identify the influence of cortisol exposure and cognitive performance on the clinical course of bipolar disorder. Data regarding sociodemographics, disease characteristics and genetic analysis of the cortisol receptors, were collected of 366 patients with bipolar disorder (BD). Part of this cohort participated in the longitudinal study, including the Test for Attentional Performance, prospectively registration of mood, and the collection of hair samples to assess long term cortisol. The main findings are as follows: 1) Several Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR) gene polymorphisms, in particular the 9β polymorphism (rs6198), relate with clinical characteristics of BD. The most important relations were with the number of (hypo)manic episodes, and second, with seasonal patterns of mood episodes, especially hypomania. 2) Higher long term cortisol exposure is associated with more psychiatric co morbidity in BD patients., and with an older age at onset, indicating a subgroup of patients. 3) Medication as potential confounder on cognitive performance, appeared to relate with the type (mainly antipsychotics) and the number of different types of medication used. Summarizing, cortisol exposure is associated with several clinically relevant phenomena defining course of BD and give insight in possible subgroups of patients with higher cortisol exposure.LEI Universiteit LeidenFonds Nuts Ohra; Parnassia Groep; PsyQFSW - Self-regulation models for health behavior and psychopathology - ou

Special boundedness properties in numerical initial value problems

For Runge-Kutta methods, linear multistep methods and other classes of general linear methods much attention has been paid in the literature to important nonlinear stability properties known as total-variation-diminishing (TVD), strong stability preserving (SSP) and monotonicity. Stepsize conditions guaranteeing these properties were studied by Shu \& Osher (1988) and in numerous subsequent papers. Unfortunately, for many useful methods it has turned out that these properties do not hold. For this reason attention has been paid in the recent literature to the related and more general properties called total-variation-bounded (TVB) and boundedness. In the present paper we focus on stepsize conditions guaranteeing boundedness properties of a special type. These boundedness properties are optimal, and distinguish themselves also from earlier boundedness results by being relevant to sublinear functionals, discrete maximum principles and preservation of nonnegativity. Moreover, the corresponding stepsize conditions are more easily verified in practical situations than the conditions for general boundedness given thus far in the literature. The theoretical results are illustrated by application to the two-step Adams-Bashforth method and a class of two-stage multistep methods

Stepsize Restrictions for Boundedness and Monotonicity of Multistep Methods

In this paper nonlinear monotonicity and boundedness properties are analyzed for linear multistep methods. We focus on methods which satisfy a weaker boundedness condition than strict monotonicity for arbitrary starting values. In this way, many linear multistep methods of practical interest are included in the theory. Moreover, it will be shown that for such methods monotonicity can still be valid with suitable Runge-Kutta starting procedures. Restrictions on the stepsizes are derived that are not only sufficient but also necessary for these boundedness and monotonicity properties

A distantly supervised dataset for automated data extraction from diagnostic studies

International audienceSystematic reviews are important in evidencebased medicine, but are expensive to produce.Automating or semi-automating the data extractionof index test, target condition, and referencestandard from articles has the potentialto decrease the cost of conducting systematicreviews of diagnostic test accuracy, but relevanttraining data is not available. We create adistantly supervised dataset of approximately90,000 sentences, and let two experts manuallyannotate a small subset of around 1,000sentences for evaluation. We evaluate the performanceof BioBERT and logistic regressionfor ranking the sentences, and compare theperformance for distant and direct supervision.Our results suggest that distant supervision canwork as well as, or better than direct supervisionon this problem, and that distantly trainedmodels can perform as well as, or better thanhuman annotators

Focus group interviews reveal reasons for differences in the perception of disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis

Objective: Doctors frequently see patients who have difficulties coping with their disease and rate their disease activity high, despite the fact that according to the doctors, the disease activity is low. This study explored the patients’ perspectives on this discordance that may help to understand why for some patients, usual care seems to be insufficient. Methods: In our qualitative study we conducted focus group interviews where questions were used as a guideline. Transcripts were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Findings: Twenty-nine patients participated in four focus groups. Participants could not put their finger exactly on why doctors estimated that their disease activity was low, while they experienced high levels of disease activity. During the in-depth focus interviews, seven themes emerged that appeared related to high experienced disease activity: (1) perceived stress, (2) balancing activities and rest, (3) medication intake, (4) social stress, (5) relationship with professionals, (6) comorbidity, and (7) physical fitness. Conclusion: When patients were asked why their view of their disease activity was different from that of their physician, seven themes emerged. The way participants coped with these themes seemed to be the predominant concept. Specific interventions that focus on one or more of the reported themes and on coping may improve not only the quality of life of these patients but also the satisfaction with the patient–doctor relationship for both parties