Experiences of family therapists working with parents after the forced removal of children: What can the contextual model tell us?

This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.Parents whose children have been statutorily removed by child protection services are a vulnerable, hard-to-reach, and under-focused group. Their needs are numerous and complex. The Family Counselling Services in Norway are mandated to prioritize and provide emotional support services to this parent group. The study aimed to explore and understand the experiences and needs of family therapists through the lens of the Contextual Model (Wampold, 2015). A national sample of 21 therapists currently providing services to this parent group participated in the study. Data were collected using focus-group interviews. The main categories of the initial bond, the personal relationship, expectations, and therapy-specific ingredients provided a framework to assess what therapists already know and need in the future to provide services to the parent group. Therapists showed great awareness and strength in building a personal relationship with the client. However, they felt that sharpening their generalist knowledge with therapy-specific models would make them more effective therapists. The contextual model provided new concepts and vocabulary that can enrich research and clinical efforts and lift it to a broader audience.publishedVersio

Psychological correlates to dysfunctional eating patterns among morbidly obese patients accepted for bariatric surgery

Objective: To examine the relationships between dysfunctional eating patterns, personality, anxiety and depression in morbidly obese patients accepted for bariatric surgery. Design: The study used cross-sectional data collected in running a randomized controlled trial (http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01403558). Subjects: A total of 102 patients (69 women, 33 men) with a mean (SD) age of 42.6 (9.8) years and a mean BMI 43.5 (4.4) kg/m2 participated. Measurements: Measurements included the NEO PI-R (personality: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness), the TFEQ R-21 (dysfunctional eating: emotional eating (EE), uncontrolled eating (UE) and cognitive restraint of eating (CR) and the HADS (anxiety and depression). Results: The personality traits neuroticism and conscientiousness were more strongly correlated with dysfunctional eating compared with anxiety and depression. These differences were most pronounced for emotional and cognitive restraint of eating. Emotional eating occurred more often in female than male patients, a finding that was partially mediated by neuroticism but not by anxiety and depression. Conclusion: Personality traits may be important to address in the clinical management of morbidly obese patients seeking bariatric surgery as neuroticism is particularly salient in female patients displaying an emotional eating behaviour

Experiences of family therapists working with parents after the forced removal of children: What can the contextual model tell us?

Parents whose children have been statutorily removed by child protection services are a vulnerable, hard-to-reach, and under-focused group. Their needs are numerous and complex. The Family Counselling Services in Norway are mandated to prioritize and provide emotional support services to this parent group. The study aimed to explore and understand the experiences and needs of family therapists through the lens of the Contextual Model (Wampold, 2015). A national sample of 21 therapists currently providing services to this parent group participated in the study. Data were collected using focus-group interviews. The main categories of the initial bond, the personal relationship, expectations, and therapy-specific ingredients provided a framework to assess what therapists already know and need in the future to provide services to the parent group. Therapists showed great awareness and strength in building a personal relationship with the client. However, they felt that sharpening their generalist knowledge with therapy-specific models would make them more effective therapists. The contextual model provided new concepts and vocabulary that can enrich research and clinical efforts and lift it to a broader audience.publishedVersio

GoIFISH: a system for the quantification of single cell heterogeneity from IFISH images.

Molecular analysis has revealed extensive intra-tumor heterogeneity in human cancer samples, but cannot identify cell-to-cell variations within the tissue microenvironment. In contrast, in situ analysis can identify genetic aberrations in phenotypically defined cell subpopulations while preserving tissue-context specificity. GoIFISHGoIFISH is a widely applicable, user-friendly system tailored for the objective and semi-automated visualization, detection and quantification of genomic alterations and protein expression obtained from fluorescence in situ analysis. In a sample set of HER2-positive breast cancers GoIFISHGoIFISH is highly robust in visual analysis and its accuracy compares favorably to other leading image analysis methods. GoIFISHGoIFISH is freely available at www.sourceforge.net/projects/goifish/.This is the final published version. It is also available from Genome Biology at http://genomebiology.com/2014/15/8/442

Cooperation between geriatricians and general practitioners for improved pharmacotherapy in home-dwelling elderly people receiving polypharmacy - the COOP Study : study protocol for a cluster randomised controlled trial

Background: Polypharmacy and inappropriate drug use is associated with negative health outcomes among older people. Various interventions for improving drug treatment have been evaluated, but the majority of studies are limited by the use of surrogate outcomes or suboptimal design. Thus, the potential for clinically significant improvements from different interventions is still unclear. The main objective of this study is therefore to evaluate the effect upon patient-relevant endpoints of a cooperation between geriatricians and general practitioners on complex drug regimens in home-dwelling elderly people. Methods: This is a cluster randomised, single-blind, controlled trial where general practitioners are invited to participate with patients from their lists. The patients must be 70 years or older, use at least seven different medications and have their medications administered by the home nursing service. We plan to recruit 200 patients, with randomisation at physician level. The intervention consists of three main parts: ( 1) clinical geriatric assessment of the patient, combined with a thorough review of their medications; ( 2) a meeting between the geriatrician and general practitioner, where the two physicians combine their competence and knowledge and discuss the drug list systematically; ( 3) clinical follow-up, depending on the medication changes that have been done. The study period is 24 weeks, and the patients are assessed at baseline, 16 and 24 weeks. The primary outcome measure is health-related quality of life according to the 15D instrument. Secondary outcome measures include physical and cognitive functioning, medication appropriateness, falls, carer burden, use of health services ( hospital or nursing home admissions, use of home nursing services) and mortality. Discussion: Our choice of patient-relevant outcome measures will hopefully provide new knowledge on the potential for clinical improvements after performing comprehensive medication reviews in home-dwelling elderly people receiving polypharmacy.Peer reviewe

The impact of neuron morphology on cortical network architecture

The neurons in the cerebral cortex are not randomly interconnected. This specificity in wiring can result from synapse formation mechanisms that connect neurons, depending on their electrical activity and genetically defined identity. Here, we report that the morphological properties of the neurons provide an additional prominent source by which wiring specificity emerges in cortical networks. This morphologically determined wiring specificity reflects similarities between the neurons’ axo-dendritic projections patterns, the packing density, and the cellular diversity of the neuropil. The higher these three factors are, the more recurrent is the topology of the network. Conversely, the lower these factors are, the more feedforward is the network’s topology. These principles predict the empirically observed occurrences of clusters of synapses, cell type-specific connectivity patterns, and nonrandom network motifs. Thus, we demonstrate that wiring specificity emerges in the cerebral cortex at subcellular, cellular, and network scales from the specific morphological properties of its neuronal constituents

Sales of oseltamivir in Norway prior to the emergence of oseltamivir resistant influenza A(H1N1) viruses in 2007–08

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>An unprecedented high proportion of oseltamivir resistant influenza A(H1N1) viruses emerged in the 2007–08 influenza season. In Norway, two thirds of all tested A(H1N1) viruses were resistant to the antiviral drug. In order to see if this emergence could be explained by a drug induced selection pressure, we analysed data on the sales of oseltamivir in Norway for the years 2002–07.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We used data from two sources; the Norwegian Drug Wholesales Statistics Database and the Norwegian Prescription Database (NorPD), for the years 2002–2007. We calculated courses sold of oseltamivir (Tamiflu^®) per 1000 inhabitants per year.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our data showed that, except for the years 2005 and 2006, sales of oseltamivir were low in Norway; courses sold per 1000 inhabitants varied between 0.17–1.64. The higher sales in 2005 and 2006 we believe were caused by private stockpiling in fear of a pandemic, and do not represent actual usage.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A drug induced selection pressure was probably not the cause of the emergence of oseltamivir resistant influenza A(H1N1) viruses in 2007–08 in Norway.</p

former title: A theory for the emergence of neocortical network architecture

Developmental programs that guide neurons and their neurites into specific subvolumes of the mammalian neocortex give rise to lifelong constraints for the formation of synaptic connections. To what degree do these constraints affect cortical wiring diagrams? Here we introduce an inverse modeling approach to show how cortical networks would appear if they were solely due to the spatial distributions of neurons and neurites. We find that neurite packing density and morphological diversity will inevitably translate into non-random pairwise and higher-order connectivity statistics. More importantly, we show that these non-random wiring properties are not arbitrary, but instead reflect the specific structural organization of the underlying neuropil. Our predictions are consistent with the empirically observed wiring specificity from subcellular to network scales. Thus, independent from learning and genetically encoded wiring rules, many of the properties that define the neocortex’ characteristic network architecture may emerge as a result of neuron and neurite development