Differential efficacy of lithium and carbamazepine in the prophylaxis of bipolar disorder: Results of the MAP study

In a randomized clinical trial with an observation period of 2.5 years, the differential efficacy of lithium versus carbamazepine was compared in 171 bipolar patients (DSM-IV). In order to investigate the efficacy of the two drugs in clearly defined subsamples, a series of subgroup analyses was carried out. First, patients with a bipolar I disorder (n = 114) were analyzed separately. In these patients, lithium was superior to carbamazepine. In contrast, carbamazepine was at least equally as efficacious as lithium in the subsample of patients with bipolar II disorder or bipolar disorder not otherwise specified (n = 57). In a second analysis on differential efficacy, the whole sample was subdivided into a classical subgroup (bipolar I patients without mood-incongruent delusions and without comorbidity; n = 67) and a nonclassical subgroup including all other patients (n = 104). Classical bipolar patients had a significantly lower hospitalization rate under lithium than under carbamazepine prophylaxis (26 vs. 62%, p = 0.012). For the nonclassical group, a tendency in favor of carbamazepine was found. In a third step, we analyzed the impact of episode sequence on differential efficacy. In a global view, the episode sequence prior to the index episode was not correlated to differential efficacy. Our results might, however, indicate that patients with an episode sequence of mania-depression-free interval responded better to lithium. Besides differential efficacy, suicidal behavior and patients' satisfaction with treatment were investigated. Regarding suicidal behavior, a trend in favor of lithium was found. The data on patients' satisfaction were significantly in favor of carbamazepine. In conclusion, lithium appears to be superior to carbamazepine in classical bipolar cases and might have additional impact on proneness to suicide. The distinctly larger group of patients with nonclassical features might profit more from carbamazepine which seems to be well accepted by the patients. Hence, treatment alternatives to lithium a re desirable for the majority of bipolar patients. Copyright (C) 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel

Knowledge Base Completion: Baselines Strike Back

Many papers have been published on the knowledge base completion task in the past few years. Most of these introduce novel architectures for relation learning that are evaluated on standard datasets such as FB15k and WN18. This paper shows that the accuracy of almost all models published on the FB15k can be outperformed by an appropriately tuned baseline - our reimplementation of the DistMult model. Our findings cast doubt on the claim that the performance improvements of recent models are due to architectural changes as opposed to hyper-parameter tuning or different training objectives. This should prompt future research to re-consider how the performance of models is evaluated and reported

Text Understanding with the Attention Sum Reader Network

Several large cloze-style context-question-answer datasets have been introduced recently: the CNN and Daily Mail news data and the Children's Book Test. Thanks to the size of these datasets, the associated text comprehension task is well suited for deep-learning techniques that currently seem to outperform all alternative approaches. We present a new, simple model that uses attention to directly pick the answer from the context as opposed to computing the answer using a blended representation of words in the document as is usual in similar models. This makes the model particularly suitable for question-answering problems where the answer is a single word from the document. Ensemble of our models sets new state of the art on all evaluated datasets.Comment: Presented at ACL 201

Hydrocarbon-degrading sulfate-reducing bacteria in marine hydrocarbon seep sediments

Microorganisms are key players in our biosphere because of their ability to degrade various organic compounds including a wide range of hydrocarbons. At marine hydrocarbon seeps, more than 90% of sulfate reduction (SR) is potentially coupled to non-methane hydrocarbon oxidation. Several hydrocarbon-degrading sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) were enriched or isolated from marine sediments. However, in situ active SRB remained largely unknown. In the present thesis, the global distribution and abundance of SRB at diverse gas and hydrocarbon seeps was investigated by catalyzed-reporter deposition fluorescence in situ hybridization (CARD-FISH). The majority of Deltaproteobacteria was assigned to specific SRB groups, for instance on average 83% and 61% at gas and hydrocarbon seeps. Members of the Desulfosarcina/Desulfococcus (DSS) clade significantly dominated all sites, suggesting their important role in hydrocarbon degradation processes. Furthermore, butane- and dodecane-degrading SRB were identified from two contrasting marine hydrocarbon seeps using 13C-stable-isotope probing techniques. The identified key players affiliated with four distinct groups, of which three belonged to the DSS clade. Specific groups were, according to their ability to oxidize short-chain alkanes (SCA) or long-chain alkanes (LCA), denoted as SCA-SRB1 and SCA-SRB2 as well as LCA-SRB1 and LCA-SRB2 . Based on the obtained data it is assumed that diverse and highly specialized DSS organisms are involved in hydrocarbon degradation at marine seeps rather than generalists of one dominant subgroup. At marine hydrocarbon seeps, groups SCA-SRB1 and SCA-SRB2 constituted up to 31 and 9% of all Deltaproteobacteria, respectively. In addition, LCA-SRB2 comprised up to 6% of all detected Deltaproteobacteria. Furthermore, activities for these groups were analyzed on the cellular level by Nanometer-scale Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (NanoSIMS). Alkane oxidation rates for specific groups were determined to be on average between 45 and 58 amol butane and 1 amol dodecane per cell and per day. Extrapolated data indicate that specific alkane-degrading SRB groups have the potential to contribute up to 100% of the total SR rates at seeps from the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, alkane-degrading SRB groups may significantly impact sulfur and carbon cycles at marine hydrocarbon seeps. In addition, based on the obtained data, members of the uncultured group SEEP-SRB2 are hypothesized to be involved in hydrocarbon degradation. SEEP-SRB2 were visualized for the first time using CARD-FISH and were detected either in association with methanotrophic archaea (ANME 2/SEEP2 and ANME-1/SEEP2 consortia) or as single cells. Furthermore, the high abundance of SEEP-SRB2 indicates their important ecological role at marine hydrocarbon seeps

Komizm współczesnych filmów rosyjskich na warsztacie tłumacza

The paper concerns linguistic humour as an aesthetic-cultural category which is at the core of comedy. Linguistic material from contemporary Russian movies and their translations into Polish is analysed. The basic linguistic components creating linguistic humour include neologisms, linguistic games, modifications of phraseological units and intertextual references. The aforementioned components cause many problems in movie translations into a foreign language. The paper attempts to provide an overview of ways of translating