Prolactin

During an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) glucose and insulin levels were measured in 26 patients with prolactin-producing pituitary tumours without growth hormone excess. Basal glucose and insulin levels did not differ from the values of an age-matched control group. After glucose load the hyperprolactinaemic patients showed a decrease in glucose tolerance and a hyperinsulinaemia. Bromocriptine (CB 154), which suppressed PRL, improved glucose tolerance and decreased insulin towards normal in a second OGTT. — Human PRL or CB 154 had no significant influence on insulin release due to glucose in the perfused rat pancreas. — These findings suggest a diabetogenic effect of PRL. CB 154 might be a useful drug in improving glucose utilization in hormone-active pituitary tumours

Dysconnectivity of the medio-dorsal thalamic nucleus in drug-naïve first episode schizophrenia: diagnosis-specific or trans-diagnostic effect?

Converging lines of evidence implicate the thalamocortical network in schizophrenia. In particular, the onset of the illness is associated with aberrant functional integration between the medio-dorsal thalamic nucleus (MDN) and widespread prefrontal, temporal and parietal cortical regions. Because the thalamus is also implicated in other psychiatric illnesses including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), the diagnostic specificity of these alterations is unclear. Here, we determined whether aberrant functional integration between the MDN and the cortex is a specific feature of schizophrenia or a trans-diagnostic feature of psychiatric illness. Effective connectivity (EC) between the MDN and rest of the cortex was measured by applying psychophysiological interaction analysis to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data of 50 patients with first episode schizophrenia (FES), 50 patients with MDD, 50 patients with PTSD and 122 healthy controls. All participants were medication-naïve. The only significant schizophrenia-specific effect was increased EC between the right MDN and the right pallidum (p < 0.05 corrected). In contrast, there were a number of significant trans-diagnostic alterations, with both right and left MDN displaying trans-diagnostic increased EC with several prefrontal and parietal regions bilaterally (p < 0.05 corrected). EC alterations between the MDN and the cortex are not specific to schizophrenia but are a trans-diagnostic feature of psychiatric disorders, consistent with emerging conceptualizations of mental illness based on a single general psychopathology factor. Therefore, dysconnectivity of the MDN could potentially be used to assess the presence of general psychopathology above and beyond traditional diagnostic boundaries

Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands

In Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, Nancy Sinkoff examines some of the thinkers, particularly Mendel Lefin and Joseph Perl, who as part of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) of the nineteenth century attempted to articulate a vision and plan for how the Jews of Eastern Europe could become modern while remaining Jews. The book contains a new preface by the author

From Left to Right Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History

Intellectual biography of Holocaust historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz.Front Cover -- Title Page -- Half Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- A Word about Personal and Place Names -- Introduction -- I. In New York City in the Interwar Years -- 1. American Immigrant Daughter -- In the Alcoves of Hunter College -- Starting Out in Yiddish in the 1930s -- Lost in Migration: Leibush Lehrer's Ambivalent Secularism -- II. In Poland, Refugee New York City, and Germany -- 2. An American in Vilna -- The Men and Women of the YIVO -- The Aspirantur -- Christian and Jewish Poles -- Days of Decision -- 3. The New York YIVO in Wartime -- Back in the United States -- Trouble on the YIVO's Home Front -- 4. In the American and British Zones of Occupied Postwar Germany -- The Offenbach Archival Depot -- In the British Zone -- III. Becoming an American -- 5. Insider Politics at the American Jewish Committee -- Seeing Red -- Intergroup Relations in Black, White, and Jewish -- First Cracks in Intergroup Relations -- 6. Whither Secularism? -- How High the Wall? -- The Personal Is Political -- 7. Representing Polish Jewry: The Golden Tradition -- Writing Jewish Communal Life in the Diaspora -- Khurbn Forshung for the American Public -- Dubnow's Other Daughter -- 8. Defending Polish Jewry: The War Against the Jews -- The Centrality of Antisemitism to Hitler's Intentionalism -- Dawidowicz and Hilberg, Part 1 -- Dawidowicz and Hilberg-and Arendt, Part 2 -- Dawidowicz and Hilberg, Part 3 -- 9. Universalism and Particularism among the New York Intellectuals -- Arendt's Allure -- Dawidowicz's Authenticity -- IV. Eastern Europe in America -- 10. The Europeanness of the Jewish "Neoconservative Turn" -- Jewish Neoconservative Avant la Lettre -- The Problem of Violence and Black Power -- The Language and Literature of Power-and AntisemitismPostcolonialism and the External Critique of Jewish "Power" -- That "Infamous" Resolution -- 11. Dina d'malkhuta Dina ("The Law of the Land Is the Law") -- Utopian Anxiety -- The New Jewish Left and the Internal Critique of Jewish "Power" -- Quiescence as Diasporic Political Savvy -- Intellectual Tomboy -- Making Peace with Capitalism -- 12. Warsaw and Vilna on Her Mind -- The Holocaust on the Mall -- Stung by Stingo -- Babi Yar, the War in the East, and Ukrainian-Jewish Relations -- Polish-Jewish Relations and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- 13. Rapprochement with Republicanism -- Recriminations on American Soil -- Operation Peace for Galilee and Israel-Diaspora Politics -- A Small Circle of Friends -- Crossing the Aisle -- Reagan, Bitburg, and German Guilt -- Zakhor -- Epilogue: Jewish History, Jewish Politics -- Historical Agency: Who Has It? -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the AuthorIntellectual biography of Holocaust historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries

Transdiagnostic Multimodal Neural Correlates of Psychosis Dimensions

Psychosis refers to a debilitating set of symptoms that impacts individuals, their communities, and society at large. Current psychiatric nosology treats psychosis as a categorical construct. However, recent evidence suggests that a dimensional approach that cuts across extant nosological boundaries may more accurately represent the underlying phenomena contributing to dysfunction in psychosis. One putative domain of transdiagnostic variation is cognitive control, a construct that refers to the set of functions that enable and support goal-directed behavior and regulation of one’s thoughts and actions. Previous analyses in both healthy individuals and individuals with psychosis have led to a number of findings in structural, resting-state, and task magnetic resonance imaging, however it remains unclear how results relate across modalities and along the psychosis spectrum in support of cognitive control. To address this, the present work first used data-driven analysis methods to identify multimodal correlates of cognitive control in a healthy community cohort. Next, these results were replicated using both predictive and independent analysis methods in an independent healthy community cohort from the same study. Analyses were then extended to individuals with psychosis. Results from the first healthy cohort were used to predict cognitive control performance in a transdiagnostic psychosis cohort consisting of healthy controls, persons with bipolar disorder, and persons with schizophrenia. Finally, an independent analysis in the psychosis cohort was performed to identify novel patterns of variation. Results identified a set of replicable findings in the healthy population that suggest positive associations across modalities and included contributions from known cognitive control regions, canonical restingstate network organization, as well as strong contributions from visual regions. Analyses using results from the healthy cohort to predict performance in the psychosis cohort identified significant relationships in two out of five modalities, further supporting transdiagnostic conceptualizations of psychosis. Independent analysis of the psychosis cohort identified neural contributions that were highly similar to those found in the healthy cohort and also significantly correlated with cognitive control performance. Together, findings support transdiagnostic conceptualization of psychosis and provide targets for future study and may aid efforts to move beyond the existing categorical nosology and improve diagnosis and treatment of psychosis