Depression and panic in patients with borderline personality disorder

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25659/1/0000211.pd

Self-reported diurnal mood changes, early morning awakening and the dexamethasone suppression test in endogenous depression

Several authors have suggested that Dexamethasone Suppression Test (DST) non-suppression is related to circadian alternations of hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal function. Two clinical manifestations of altered circadian rhythms in depressed patients are early morning awakening and diurnal variation in mood. To observe whether these clinical symptom patterns were associated with an increased frequency of abnormal DSTs, we examined post-DST plasma cortisol concentrations and matched clinical ratings of early morning awakening and diurnal variation in mood in 49 patients with major depressive disorder, endogenous subtype. We found no significant association between these clinical and laboratory variables.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25785/1/0000346.pd

Chronic caffeine consumption and the dexamethasone suppression test in depression

Acute caffeine administration increases cortisol and converts the dexamethasone suppression test (DST) to nonsuppression in normal humans; data concerning chronic administration as well as effects in depressed patients are minimal. To determine whether caffeine intake influenced DST results in depression, we retrospectively studied the relationship between regular daily caffeine consumption and pretreatment DST status in major depressives. Daily intake was not correlated with either post-DST cortisol levels or symptom ratings. These data suggest that chronic caffeine use is unlikely to be a major factor in dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in depression, perhaps because of the development of tolerance.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/27342/1/0000367.pd

Serial dexamethasone suppression tests in simultaneous panic and depressive disorders

Recent work suggests that the simultaneous occurrence of major depressive disorder (MDD) and panic disorder (PD) may be of relevance for clinical findings, therapeutic outcome, and prognosis. It is of interest to know whether or not this relevance extends to biological findings. We addressed this question through comparison of serial Dexamethasone Suppression Test (DST) results in patients who had either MDD alone or simultaneous MDD and PD. We were unable to describe differences between the groups.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26790/1/0000346.pd

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Advanced Maturation Associated With Centripetal Fat Pattern

The role of maturation in the acquisition of a centripetal fat pattern was studied in a cross-sectional sample of 5,012 white subjects aged 1 to 17 years and 7,974 white females aged 20 to 74 years and derived from the Health and Nutritional Examination Survey I. Based on assessments of bone age and age at menarche, the subjects were classified into early maturing (bone age greater than the 85th age- and sex- specific percentile for bone age or age at menarche) and late maturing (bone age less than the 15th age- and sex-specific percentile for bone age or age at menarche) groups. The present findings indicate that advanced maturation is associated with an accentuation of the centripetal distribution of subcutaneous fat

Age effects in serial hypothalamic - pituitary - adrenal monitoring

To evaluate age effects on hypothalamic - pituitary - adrenal (HPA) regulation in depressives, we studied 65 patients with major depressive disorder, endogenous subtype. With each patient serving as his or her own control, we compared weekly dexamethasone suppression test (DST) results among three age subgroups (N = 18; 40 - 70 years, N = 40; > 70 years, N = 7). The oldest patient group had higher mean post-dexamethasone plasma cortisol concentrations both before and after treatment, and more were DST nonsuppressors. Life table analyses revealed that elderly patients who were DST nonsuppressors had significantly slower patterns of normalization during treatment and that fewer elderly patients ever achieved normal suppression. The results indicate that age effects on HPA function may be confounded with other aspects of depression, such as severity, chronicity and number of previous episodes.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26367/1/0000454.pd