Is intimate partner violence more common in pregnant women with severe mental illness? A retrospective study

Objective: To examine the risk of past and current experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) in women with severe mental illness (SMI) in pregnancy. Methods: We examined past and current experiences of IPV in women with SMI in pregnancy. The data of 304 women with SMI including schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders and Bipolar Disorder meeting International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification (ICD-10-AM) criteria were extracted from hospital records at King Edward Memorial Hospital, Western Australia. Comparisons were made between our study data and the Australian population data reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which included data on pregnant women in Western Australia. Additional measures included reported demographics, substance use and pregnancy variables. Results: Around 48% of pregnant women with SMI had experienced IPV and were three times the risk when compared with the general pregnant population in Australia. There was no difference in rates of IPV in those women with psychotic disorders when compared with bipolar disorder. Furthermore, the rates of smoking and illicit substance use were significantly higher in pregnant women with SMI who experienced IPV compared with those who have not experienced IPV. Conclusion: These findings suggest women with SMI in pregnancy are at significantly higher risk of having experienced or experiencing IPV. In addition, IPV in pregnant women with SMI may increase the risk of smoking and illicit substance use. Together this suggests that maternity and mental health services should ensure there are both screening and support pathways for IPV that are developed and evaluated specifically for pregnant women with SMI

The role of trauma and partner support in perinatal depression and parenting stress: An Australian pregnancy cohort study

Background: Improving our understanding of the relationship between maternal depression and parenting stress is likely to lie in the range of additional factors that are associated with vulnerability to depression and also to parenting stress. Objectives: To examine the role of trauma and partner support, in understanding the relationship between perinatal depression and parenting stress. Methods: This study utilises data from 246 women in a pregnancy cohort study that followed women from early pregnancy until their infant was 12 months. Included were both women with a diagnosis of depression and those without depression. The measures included Structured Clinical Interview for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, Social Support Effectiveness Questionnaire and the Parenting Stress Index. Results: We found women with depression were more likely to report a history of childhood trauma. Depressive symptoms were positively associated with parenting stress while partner support was negatively associated with parenting stress. The protective role of partner support for parenting distress was observed in those with no history of childhood abuse and low depressive symptoms, but not in those with a trauma history and high depressive symptoms. Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of early trauma in understanding the protective role of support on the relationship between parenting and depression. These findings can inform future studies and the refinement of future interventions aimed at both perinatal depression and parenting

Depression across pregnancy and the postpartum, antidepressant use and the association with female sexual function

Background: There is an established relationship between depression and sexual functioning in women. However, there is limited research examining the relationship between perinatal depression and sexual functioning. Methods: This study draws on the Mercy Pregnancy and Emotional Wellbeing Study and reports on 211 women recruited in early pregnancy and followed to 12 months postpartum. Women were assessed for depression using the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-IV, repeated measurement of depressive symptoms using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and sexual functioning using the Female Sexual Functioning Inventory. Data were also collected on antidepressant use, mode of delivery, history of childhood trauma, breastfeeding and partner support. Results: Women showed a decline in sexual functioning over pregnancy and the first 6 months postpartum, which recovered by 12 months. For women with depression, sexual functioning was lower throughout pregnancy and continued to be lower at 6 months postpartum than those without depression. Ongoing depressive symptoms at 12 months were also associated with lower sexual functioning. Sexual functioning was not predicted by mode of delivery, antidepressant use or childhood trauma. Breastfeeding predicted lower sexual functioning only at 6 months. Higher partner support predicted higher female sexual functioning. Conclusions: Pregnancy and the postpartum are a time of reduced sexual functioning for women; however, women with depression are more likely to have lower levels of sexual functioning and this was not predicted by antidepressant use. In women with perinatal depression, consideration of the impact on sexual functioning should be an integral part of care

Antidepressant exposure in pregnancy and child sensorimotor and visuospatial development

Motor development underlies many aspects of education and learning. There has been uncertainty about the impact of exposure of antidepressant medication in pregnancy on child motor outcomes. This paper examines whether exposure to antidepressants in utero increases the risk of poorer motor development in two areas: sensorimotor and visuospatial processing. Data were obtained from 195 women and children across 3 groups: women with untreated depression in pregnancy, women treated with antidepressants and control women. Data were collected across pregnancy, postpartum and until 4 years for mother and child. Maternal depression was established at baseline with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. Antidepressant exposure, including type, dose and timing, was measured through repeated self-report across pregnancy and the postpartum, medical records at delivery and in cord blood samples collected at delivery. Child sensorimotor and visuospatial outcomes were assessed at 4 years of age with four subtests from the NEPSY-II. Our study found for sensorimotor development, visuomotor precision completion time was associated with better performance for antidepressant exposed children compared to those with mothers with untreated depression. Yet another measure of sensorimotor development, motor manual sequences, was poorer in those exposed to antidepressants. One subtest for visuospatial processing, block construction, was associated with poorer performance in antidepressant-exposed children who had poor neonatal adaptation and those exposed to a higher dose of antidepressant. These findings suggest an inconsistent association between sensorimotor development and antidepressant use in pregnancy. However, the findings for visuospatial processing would support further exploration of antidepressant associated poor neonatal adaption and later motor development

On the vulnerability of iris-based systems to a software attack based on a genetic algorithm

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33275-3_14Proceedings of 17th Iberoamerican Congress, CIARP 2012, Buenos Aires, ArgentinaThe vulnerabilities of a standard iris verification system to a novel indirect attack based on a binary genetic algorithm are studied. The experiments are carried out on the iris subcorpus of the publicly available BioSecure DB. The attack has shown a remarkable performance, thus proving the lack of robustness of the tested system to this type of threat. Furthermore, the consistency of the bits of the iris code is analysed, and a second working scenario discarding the fragile bits is then tested as a possible countermeasure against the proposed attack.This work has been partially supported by projects Contexts (S2009/TIC-1485) from CAM, Bio-Challenge (TEC2009-11186) from Spanish MICINN, TABULA RASA (FP7-ICT-257289) and BEAT (FP7-SEC-284989) from EU, and Cátedra UAM-Telefónica

Trans-generational stress regulation: Mother-infant cortisol and maternal mental health across the perinatal period

Understanding maternal mental health and cortisol regulation across pregnancy and the relationship to the development of the offspring’s stress regulation is critical to a range of health outcomes. The aim of this study was to investigate infant and maternal cortisol in women with depression. Data were obtained from 241 pregnant women within the Mercy Pregnancy and Emotional Wellbeing Study (MPEWS), a selected pregnancy cohort study. Depression was measured using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-IV) and repeat Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Repeated measures of antidepressant use, stressful events, anxiety symptoms and maternal hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) and infant cortisol at 12 months postpartum in saliva and hair. Socio-emotional outcomes were measured at 12 months by maternal report on the Brief Infant and Toddler Socio-emotional Assessment (BITSEA). This study found that maternal depression was not associated with maternal HCC. Anxiety, stress and antidepressant use were not associated with maternal HCC. Independently, higher maternal 3rd trimester maternal depressive and anxiety symptoms were associated with lower infant cortisol response at 12 months of age. A higher number of postpartum stressful events was associated with lower infant cortisol response. Lower infant stress reactivity was associated with higher externalizing symptoms at 12 months of age. Future studies are required to understand implications for later mental health

Terahertz Security Image Quality Assessment by No-reference Model Observers

To provide the possibility of developing objective image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms for THz security images, we constructed the THz security image database (THSID) including a total of 181 THz security images with the resolution of 127*380. The main distortion types in THz security images were first analyzed for the design of subjective evaluation criteria to acquire the mean opinion scores. Subsequently, the existing no-reference IQA algorithms, which were 5 opinion-aware approaches viz., NFERM, GMLF, DIIVINE, BRISQUE and BLIINDS2, and 8 opinion-unaware approaches viz., QAC, SISBLIM, NIQE, FISBLIM, CPBD, S3 and Fish_bb, were executed for the evaluation of the THz security image quality. The statistical results demonstrated the superiority of Fish_bb over the other testing IQA approaches for assessing the THz image quality with PLCC (SROCC) values of 0.8925 (-0.8706), and with RMSE value of 0.3993. The linear regression analysis and Bland-Altman plot further verified that the Fish__bb could substitute for the subjective IQA. Nonetheless, for the classification of THz security images, we tended to use S3 as a criterion for ranking THz security image grades because of the relatively low false positive rate in classifying bad THz image quality into acceptable category (24.69%). Interestingly, due to the specific property of THz image, the average pixel intensity gave the best performance than the above complicated IQA algorithms, with the PLCC, SROCC and RMSE of 0.9001, -0.8800 and 0.3857, respectively. This study will help the users such as researchers or security staffs to obtain the THz security images of good quality. Currently, our research group is attempting to make this research more comprehensive.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 4 table

Biometrics beyond the visible spectrum: Imaging technologies and applications

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04391-8_20Proceedings of Joint COST 2101 and 2102 International Conference, BioID_MultiComm 2009, Madrid (Spain)Human body images acquired at visible spectrum have inherent restrictions that hinder the performance of person recognition systems built using that kind of information (e.g. scene artefacts under varying illumination conditions). One promising approach for dealing with those limitations is using images acquired beyond the visible spectrum. This paper reviews some of the existing human body imaging technologies working beyond the visible spectrum (X-ray, Infrared, Millimeter and Submillimeter Wave imaging technologies). The benefits and drawbacks of each technology and their biometric applications are presented.This work has been supported by Terasense (CSD2008-00068) Consolider project of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology

Gridded global surface ozone metrics for atmospheric chemistry model evaluation

The concentration of ozone at the Earth's surface is measured at many locations across the globe for the purposes of air quality monitoring and atmospheric chemistry research. We have brought together all publicly available surface ozone observations from online databases from the modern era to build a consistent data set for the evaluation of chemical transport and chemistry-climate (Earth System) models for projects such as the Chemistry-Climate Model Initiative and Aer-Chem-MIP. From a total data set of approximately 6600 sites and 500 million hourly observations from 1971-2015, approximately 2200 sites and 200 million hourly observations pass screening as high-quality sites in regionally representative locations that are appropriate for use in global model evaluation. There is generally good data volume since the start of air quality monitoring networks in 1990 through 2013. Ozone observations are biased heavily toward North America and Europe with sparse coverage over the rest of the globe. This data set is made available for the purposes of model evaluation as a set of gridded metrics intended to describe the distribution of ozone concentrations on monthly and annual timescales. Metrics include the moments of the distribution, percentiles, maximum daily 8-hour average (MDA8), sum of means over 35 ppb (daily maximum 8-h; SOMO35), accumulated ozone exposure above a threshold of 40 ppbv (AOT40), and metrics related to air quality regulatory thresholds. Gridded data sets are stored as netCDF-4 files and are available to download from the British Atmospheric Data Centre (doi:10.5285/08fbe63d-fa6d-4a7a-b952-5932e3ab0452). We provide recommendations to the ozone measurement community regarding improving metadata reporting to simplify ongoing and future efforts in working with ozone data from disparate networks in a consistent manner