840 research outputs found

    Has analytical flexibility increased in imaging studies of bipolar disorder and major depression?

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    There has been extensive discussion of problems of reproducibility of research. Analytical flexibility may contribute to this, by increasing the likelihood that a reported finding represents a chance result. We explored whether analytical flexibility has increased over time, using human imaging studies of bipolar disorder and major depression. Our results indicate that the number of measures collected per study has increased over time for studies of bipolar disorder, but not for studies of major depression.</jats:p

    The Association of Cigarette Smoking With Depression and Anxiety: A Systematic Review

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    BACKGROUND: Many studies report a positive association between smoking and mental illness. However, the literature remains mixed regarding the direction of this association. We therefore conducted a systematic review evaluating the association of smoking and depression and/or anxiety in longitudinal studies. METHODS: Studies were identified by searching PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science and were included if they: (1) used human participants, (2) were longitudinal, (3) reported primary data, (4) had smoking as an exposure and depression and/or anxiety as an outcome, or (5) had depression and/or anxiety as the exposure and smoking as an outcome. RESULTS: Outcomes from 148 studies were categorized into: smoking onset, smoking status, smoking heaviness, tobacco dependence, and smoking trajectory. The results for each category varied substantially, with evidence for positive associations in both directions (smoking to later mental health and mental health to later smoking) as well as null findings. Overall, nearly half the studies reported that baseline depression/anxiety was associated with some type of later smoking behavior, while over a third found evidence that a smoking exposure was associated with later depression/anxiety. However, there were few studies directly supporting a bidirectional model of smoking and anxiety, and very few studies reporting null results. CONCLUSIONS: The literature on the prospective association between smoking and depression and anxiety is inconsistent in terms of the direction of association most strongly supported. This suggests the need for future studies that employ different methodologies, such as Mendelian randomization (MR), which will allow us to draw stronger causal inferences. Implications: We systematically reviewed longitudinal studies on the association of different aspects of smoking behavior with depression and anxiety. The results varied considerably, with evidence for smoking both associated with subsequent depression and anxiety, and vice versa. Few studies supported a bidirectional relationship, or reported null results, and no clear patterns by gender, ethnicity, clinical status, length to follow-up, or diagnostic test. Suggesting that despite advantages of longitudinal studies, they cannot alone provide strong evidence of causality. Therefore, future studies investigating this association should employ different methods allowing for stronger causal inferences to be made, such as MR

    Does smoking cause poor mental health?

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    Blood and sputum biomarkers in COPD and asthma: a review

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    Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma are lung inflammatory diseases that represent major public health problems. The primary, and often unique, method to evaluate lung function is spirometry, which reflects disease severity rather than disease activity. Moreover, its measurements strictly depend on patient's compliance, physician's expertise and data interpretation. The limitations of clinical history and pulmonary function tests have encouraged focusing on new possible tracers of diseases. The increase of the inflammatory response in the lungs represents an early pathological event, so biological markers related to inflammation may play key roles in earlier diagnosis, evaluation of functional impairment and prognosis. Biomarkers are measurable indicators associated with the presence and/or severity of a biological or pathogenic process, which may predict functional impairment, prognosis and response to therapy. The traditional approach based on invasive techniques (bronchoalveolar lavage and biopsies) may be replaced, at least in part, by using less invasive methods to collect specimens (sputum and blood), in which biomarkers could be measured. Proteomics, by the association between different protein profiles and pathogenic processes, is gaining an important role in pulmonary medicine allowing a more precise discrimination between patients with different outcomes and response to therapy. The aim of this review was to evaluate the use of biomarkers of airway inflammation in the context of both research and clinical practice

    Web User-session Inference by Means of Clustering Techniques

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    This paper focuses on the definition and identification of “Web user-sessions”, aggregations of several TCP connections generated by the same source host. The identification of a user-session is non trivial. Traditional approaches rely on threshold based mechanisms. However, these techniques are very sensitive to the value chosen for the threshold, which may be difficult to set correctly. By applying clustering techniques, we define a novel methodology to identify Web user-sessions without requiring an a priori definition of threshold values. We define a clustering based approach, we discuss pros and cons of this approach, and we apply it to real traffic traces. The proposed methodology is applied to artificially generated traces to evaluate its benefits against traditional threshold based approaches. We also analyze the characteristics of user-sessions extracted by the clustering methodology from real traces and study their statistical properties. Web user-sessions tend to be Poisson, but correlation may arise during periods of network/hosts anomalous behavior

    Weight change over eight years in relation to alcohol consumption in a cohort of continuing smokers and quitters

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    INTRODUCTION: Stopping smoking results in weight gain. Avoidance of alcohol is often advocated to reduce cues to smoking, but the effect of alcohol consumption on body weight is unclear. METHODS: We used regression models to examine weight change by baseline alcohol consumption in quitting and continuing smokers. Weight was measured at baseline and at 8 years, and weekly alcohol consumption was reported at baseline in participants from the Oxfordshire general practices nicotine patch/placebo trial. Of 698 smokers attempting to stop smoking, 85 were abstinent for 8 years and 613 continued to smoke. RESULTS: The association between baseline alcohol consumption and weight change depended upon smoking status (p for interaction = .019). In smokers, there was no association with weight change, 0.005 (95% CI: -0.037 to 0.056) kg per UK unit (U) (8 g of ethanol) consumed each week. This was unmodified by gender and baseline body mass index (BMI). In quitters, there was a negative association with weight change, -0.174 (95% CI: -0.315 to -0.034) kg per U consumed each week (unmodified by gender and baseline BMI). Quitters who consumed 14 U (112 g ethanol) a week weighed a mean 2.4 kg less than quitters who did not drink. CONCLUSIONS: Quitting smokers who drink more alcohol appear to gain less weight after quitting than those who do not drink. This is consistent across studies, it may be accounted for by unmeasured confounders or it may be that alcohol reduces weight gain. If alcohol reduces weight gain, the advice for quitting smokers must balance the benefits and hazards of alcohol consumption. However, there is currently insufficient evidence to advise quitters who drink little or no alcohol to increase consumption

    The effects of gamelike features and test location on cognitive test performance and participant enjoyment

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    ArticleComputerised cognitive assessments are a vital tool in the behavioural sciences, but participants often view them as effortful and unengaging. One potential solution is to add gamelike elements to these tasks in order to make them more intrinsically enjoyable, and some researchers have posited that a more engaging task might produce higher quality data. This assumption, however, remains largely untested. We investigated the effects of gamelike features and test location on the data and enjoyment ratings from a simple cognitive task. We tested three gamified variants of the Go-No-Go task, delivered both in the laboratory and online. In the first version of the task participants were rewarded with points for performing optimally. The second version of the task was framed as a cowboy shootout. The third version was a standard Go-No-Go task, used as a control condition. We compared reaction time, accuracy and subjective measures of enjoyment and engagement between task variants and study location. We found points to be a highly suitable game mechanic for gamified cognitive testing because they did not disrupt the validity of the data collected but increased participant enjoyment. However, we found no evidence that gamelike features could increase engagement to the point where participant performance improved. We also found that while participants enjoyed the cowboy themed task, the difficulty of categorising the gamelike stimuli adversely affected participant performance, increasing No-Go error rates by 28% compared to the non-game control. Responses collected online vs. in the laboratory had slightly longer reaction times but were otherwise very similar, supporting other findings that online crowdsourcing is an acceptable method of data collection for this type of research.The authors are members of the United Kingdom Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, a UKCRC Public Health Research: Centre of Excellence which receives funding from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, and the National Institute for Health Research, under the auspices of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration. This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_12013/6) and a PhD studentship to JL funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Cambridge Cognition Limited. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

    Slimming World in Stop Smoking Services (SWISSS): Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

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    BACKGROUND: Quitting smokers gain weight. This deters some from trying to stop smoking and may explain the increased incidence of type 2 diabetes after cessation. Dieting when stopping smoking may be counterproductive. Hunger increases cravings for smoking and tackling two behaviours together may undermine quitting success. A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) showed individualized dietary support may prevent weight gain, although there is insufficient evidence whether it undermines smoking cessation. Commercial weight management providers (CWMPs), such as Slimming World, provide individualized dietary support for National Health Service (NHS) patients; however, there is no evidence that they can prevent cessation-related weight gain.Our objective is to determine whether attending Slimming World from quit date, through referral from NHS Stop Smoking Services, is more effective than usual care at preventing cessation-related weight gain. METHODS: This RCT will examine the effectiveness of usual cessation support plus referral to Slimming World compared to usual cessation support alone. Healthy weight, overweight and obese adult smokers attending Stop Smoking Services will be included. The primary outcome is weight change in quitters 12 weeks post-randomization. Multivariable linear regression analysis will compare weight change between trial arms and adjust for known predictors of cessation-related weight gain.We will recruit 320 participants, with 160 participants in each arm. An alpha error rate of 5% and 90% power will detect a 2 kg (SD = 2.5) difference in weight gain at 12 weeks, assuming 20% remain abstinent by then. DISCUSSION: This trial will establish whether referral to the 12-week Slimming World programme plus usual care is an effective intervention to prevent cessation-related weight gain. If so, we will seek to establish whether weight control comes at the expense of a successful quit attempt in a further non-inferiority trial.Positive results from both these trials would provide a potential solution to cessation-related weight gain, which could be rolled out across England within Stop Smoking Services to better meet the needs of 0.75 million smokers stopping with NHS support every year. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN65705512
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