Countering antivaccination attitudes Horne, Zachary; Powell, Derek; Hummel, John E. ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
08/2015, Letnik:
112, Številka:
33
Journal Article
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Three times as many cases of measles were reported in the United States in 2014 as in 2013. The reemergence of measles has been linked to a dangerous trend: parents refusing vaccinations for their ...children. Efforts have been made to counter people’s antivaccination attitudes by providing scientific evidence refuting vaccination myths, but these interventions have proven ineffective. This study shows that highlighting factual information about the dangers of communicable diseases can positively impact people’s attitudes to vaccination. This method outperformed alternative interventions aimed at undercutting vaccination myths.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a serious mental health condition thought to be mediated by a dysregulated stress response system. Stress, especially chronic stress, affects mitochondrial ...activity and their efficiency in duplicating their genomes. Human cells contain numerous mitochondria that harbor multiple copies of their own genome, which consist of a mixture of wild type and variant mtDNA - a condition known as mitochondrial heteroplasmy. Number of mitochondrial genomes in a cell and the degree of heteroplasmy may serve as an indicator of mitochondrial allostatic load. Changes in mtDNA copy number and the proportion of variant mtDNA may be related to mental disorders and symptom severity, suggesting an involvement of mitochondrial dysfunction also in PTSD. Therefore, we examined number and composition of mitochondrial DNA before and after six weeks of inpatient psychotherapy treatment in a cohort of 60 female PTSD patients. We extracted DNA from isolated monocytes before and after inpatient treatment and quantified cellular mtDNA using multiplex qPCR. We hypothesized that treatment would lead to changes in cellular mtDNA levels and that change in mtDNA level would be associated with PTSD symptom severity and treatment response. It could be shown that mtDNA copy number and the ratio of variant mtDNA decreased during therapy, however, this change did not correlate with treatment response. Our results suggest that inpatient treatment can reduce signs of mitochondrial allostatic load, which could have beneficial effects on mental health. The quantification of mtDNA and the determination of cellular heteroplasmy could represent valuable biomarkers for the molecular characterization of mental disorders in the future.
•Mitochondrial allostatic load may contribute to stress-related disorders, such as PTSD.•Every human cell contains numerous mitochondria, and these in turn contain many copies of mtDNA.•The number of mitochondrial genomes, and the proportion of polymorphic DNA copies (heteroplasmy) can change under stress.•Six weeks of inpatient psychotherapy led to reduced numbers of mitochondrial DNA in PTSD patients.•The number of mitochondrial DNA could represent a biomarker for the classification of mental disorders and therapy outcome.
The understanding of mechanisms linking psychological stress to disease risk depend on reliable stress biomarkers. Circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) has emerged as a potential biomarker of cellular ...stress, aging, inflammatory processes, and cell death. Recent studies indicated that psychosocial stress and physical exercise might also influence its release. We compared the effects of acute psychosocial and physical exercise stress on cfDNA release by exposing 20 young, healthy men to both an acute psychosocial laboratory stressor and an acute physical exercise stressor. Venous blood and saliva samples were collected before and after stress exposure. Cell-free DNA was extracted from plasma and quantified by qPCR. Furthermore, cfDNA fragment length was analyzed and cfDNA methylation patterns were assayed across time. In addition, release of stress hormones and subjective stress responses were measured. Results showed a twofold increase of cfDNA after TSST and fivefold increase after exhaustive treadmill exercise, with an overabundance of shorter cfDNA fragments after physical exhaustion. Interestingly, cell-free mitochondrial DNA showed similar increase after both stress paradigms. Furthermore, cfDNA methylation signatures-used here as a marker for diverse cellular origin-were significantly different post stress tests. While DNA methylation decreased immediately after psychosocial stress, it increased after physical stress, suggesting different cellular sources of active DNA release. In summary, our results suggest stimulus and cell-specific regulation of cfDNA release. Whereas the functional role of stress-associated cfDNA release remains elusive, it might serve as a valuable biomarker in molecular stress research as a part of the psychophysiological stress response.
Telocyte (TC) is a newly identified type of cell in the cardiac interstitium (www.telocytes.com). TCs are described by classical transmission electron microscopy as cells with very thin and long ...telopodes (Tps; cellular prolongations) having podoms (dilations) and podomers (very thin segments). TCs' three‐dimensional (3D) morphology is still unknown. Cardiac TCs seem to be particularly involved in long and short distance intercellular signalling and, therefore, their 3D architecture is important for understanding their spatial connections. Using focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB‐SEM) we show, for the first time, the whole ultrastructural anatomy of cardiac TCs. 3D reconstruction of cardiac TCs by FIB‐SEM tomography confirms that they have long, narrow but flattened (ribbon‐like) telopodes, with humps generated by the podoms. FIB‐SEM tomography also confirms the network made by TCs in the cardiac interstitium through adherens junctions. This study provides the first FIB‐SEM tomography of a human cell type.
We demonstrate how to directly transform a close-packed hexagonal colloidal monolayer into nonclose-packed particle arrays of any two-dimensional symmetry at the air/water interface. This major ...advancement in the field of nanoparticle self-assembly is based on a simple one-dimensional stretching step in combination with the particle array orientation. Our method goes far beyond existing strategies and allows access to all possible two-dimensional Bravais lattices. A key element of our work is the possibility to macroscopically stretch a particle array in a truly one-dimensional manner, which has not been possible up to now. We achieve this by stretching the nanoparticle array at an air/water interface during the transfer process. The degree of stretching is simply controlled by the wettability of the transfer substrate. To retain the symmetry of the transferred structure, the capillary forces upon drying have to be circumvented. We demonstrate two concepts based on thermal fixation for this. It allows for the first time to fabricate nonclose-packed, nonhexagonal colloidal monolayers on a macroscopic length scale.
Cosmetic surgery tourism has increased in popularity in recent years, with arising complications and post-operative follow-up care often managed in the client's home country, thereby burdening the ...Swiss health care system.
We retrospectively reviewed patients with complications after cosmetic surgeries abroad and in Switzerland who were treated at the University Hospital Zurich between 2015 and 2019. Data were collected from medical records and reviewed for patient characteristics, procedures, complications, and treatment modalities.
A total of 228 patients (207 females and 21 males) were identified with female mean age of 40.9±12.0 years and male mean age of 34.3±8.9 years. Most complications were observed for procedures performed in Europe (69%) with only thirty-six patients (16%) experiencing complications due to a procedure undertaken in Switzerland. Breast surgery was the most frequently performed procedure (60%), followed by body contouring (17%) and facial surgery (12%). The most common complications occurring after surgeries abroad were pain and discomfort (19%) as well as aesthetic dissatisfaction (18%), followed by wound breakdown (14%) and infection (11%). Most patients (76%) were treated as outpatients and the treatment of all patients over the observed period cost the healthcare system $ 795,574.
There is an ongoing trend of cosmetic surgery tourism leading to an increasing number of patients with complications requiring aftercare in Switzerland. In contrast to previous research, more men are seeking cosmetic surgery abroad and the most common complications, such as wound healing disorders and infection, descreased in favor of aethetic dissatisfaction, possibly indicating ameliorated patient aftercare abroad.
The authors present a theory of how relational inference and generalization can be accomplished within a cognitive architecture that is psychologically and neurally realistic. Their proposal is a ...form of
symbolic connectionism
: a connectionist system based on distributed representations of concept meanings, using temporal synchrony to bind fillers and roles into relational structures. The authors present a specific instantiation of their theory in the form of a computer simulation model, Learning and Inference with Schemas and Analogies (LISA). By using a kind of self-supervised learning, LISA can make specific inferences and form new relational generalizations and can hence acquire new schemas by induction from examples. The authors demonstrate the sufficiency of the model by using it to simulate a body of empirical phenomena concerning analogical inference and relational generalization.
Introduction Pear decline (PD) is one of the most devastating diseases of Pyrus communis in Europe and North America. It is caused by the pathogen ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma pyri’ and transmitted by ...pear psyllids ( Cacopsylla pyri , C. pyricola , and C. pyrisuga ). Identifying attractant and repellent volatile organic compounds (VOCs) could improve the development of alternative plant protection measurements like push-pull or attract-and-kill strategies against pear psyllids. Our objective was to investigate which chemical cues of the host plant could influence the host-seeking behavior of pear psyllids, and if cedarwood (CWO) and cinnamon bark (CBO) essential oils could serve as repellents. Results and discussion Based on the literature, the five most abundant VOCs from pear plants elicited EAG responses in both C. pyri and C. pyrisuga psyllid species. In Y-olfactometer trials, single compounds were not attractive to C. pyri . However, the main compound mixture was attractive to C. pyri and C. pyrisuga females. CWO and CBO were repellent against C. pyri , and when formulated into nanofibers (NF), both were repellent in olfactometer trials. However, CBO nanoformulation was ineffective in masking the odors of pear plants. In a field trial, attractive, repellent CWO and blank formulated NF were inserted in attractive green sticky traps. C. pyri captures in traps with CWO NF were statistically lower than in traps with the attractive mixture. Nevertheless, no statistical differences in the numbers of caught specimens were observed between CWO NF and those captured in green traps baited with blank NF. Transparent traps captured fewer psyllids than green ones. In a second field study with a completed different design (push-and-count design), dispensers filled with CBO were distributed within the plantation, and attractive green sticky traps were placed around the plantation. The numbers of trapped pear psyllids increased significantly in the border of the treated plantation, showing that psyllids were repelled by the EOs in the plantation. Although further field evaluation is needed to assess and improve their effectiveness, our results show that these aromatic compounds, repellent or attractive both in nanoformulations and marking pen dispensers, offer great potential as an environmentally sustainable alternative to currently applied methods for managing pear decline vectors.
Relational thinking plays a central role in human cognition. However, it is not known how children and adults acquire relational concepts and come to represent them in a form that is useful for the ...purposes of relational thinking (i.e., as structures that can be dynamically bound to arguments). The authors present a theory of how a psychologically and neurally plausible cognitive architecture can discover relational concepts from examples and represent them as explicit structures (predicates) that can take arguments (i.e., predicate them). The theory is instantiated as a computer program called DORA (Discovery Of Relations by Analogy). DORA is used to simulate the discovery of novel properties and relations, as well as a body of empirical phenomena from the domain of relational learning and the development of relational representations in children and adults.
This article describes an integrated theory of analogical access and mapping, instantiated in a computational model called
LISA
(Learning and Inference with Schemas and Analogies). LISA represents ...predicates and objects as distributed patterns of activation that are dynamically bound into propositional structures, thereby achieving both the flexibility of a connectionist system and the structure sensitivity of a symbolic system. The model treats access and mapping as types of guided pattern classification, differing only in that mapping is augmented by a capacity to learn new correspondences. The resulting model simulates a wide range of empirical findings concerning human analogical access and mapping. LISA also has a number of inherent limitations, including capacity limits, that arise in human reasoning and suggests a specific computational account of these limitations. Extensions of this approach also account for analogical inference and schema induction.
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