Posterior pituitary neurohormonal disturbances in schizophrenia and role of oxytocin in treatment – need for more short- and long-term studies

Owais Gul,1 Saqib Gul,2 Abdul Aziz Godil3 1Department of Medicine, Dow Medical College, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan; 2Department of Medicine, Hamdard University, Karachi, Pakistan; 3Department of Medicine, Jinnah Medical and Dental College, Karachi, PakistanWe read with great interest the recently published article “Atrial natriuretic peptide and posterior pituitary neurohormone changes in patients with acute schizophrenia” by Guzel et al.1 The study results are vital in understanding the variations among the levels of posterior pituitary neurohormones in patients with acute schizophrenia and seem to be of great value for future therapeutic modifications of the disease.View the original paper by Guzel and colleagues

Silicon photonics: beating the bottleneck

The use of cascaded nonlinear silicon waveguides that function as 'time lenses' is providing new opportunities for generating and measuring ultrafast optical waveforms

The Influence of CO₂ Admixtures on the Product Composition in a Nitrogen-Methane Atmospheric Glow Discharge Used as a Prebiotic Atmosphere Mimic

This work extends our previous experimental studies of the chemistry of Titan’s atmosphere by atmospheric glow discharge. The Titan’s atmosphere seems to be similarly to early Earth atmospheric composition. The exploration of Titan atmosphere was initiated by the exciting results of the Cassini-Huygens mission and obtained results increased the interest about prebiotic atmospheres. Present work is devoted to the role of CO2 in the prebiotic atmosphere chemistry. Most of the laboratory studies of such atmosphere were focused on the chemistry of N2 + CH4 mixtures. The present work is devoted to the study of the oxygenated volatile species in prebiotic atmosphere, specifically CO2 reactivity. CO2 was introduced to the standard N2 + CH4 mixture at different mixing ratio up to 5 % CH4 and 3 % CO2. The reaction products were characterized by FTIR spectroscopy. This work shows that CO2 modifies the composition of the gas phase with the detection of oxygenated compounds: CO and others oxides. There is a strong influence of CO2 on increasing concentration other products as cyanide (HCN) and ammonia (NH3)