Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis has greatly affected human lives across the world. Uncertainty and quarantine have been affecting people’s mental health. Estimations of mental ...health problems are needed immediately for the better planning and management of these concerns at a global level. A rapid scoping review was conducted to get the estimation of mental health problems in the COVID-19 pandemic during the first 7 months. Peer-reviewed, data-based journal articles published in the English language were searched in the PubMed, Medline, and Google Scholar electronic databases from December 2019 to June 2020. Papers that met the inclusion criteria were analyzed and discussed in this review. A total of 16 studies were included. Eleven studies were from China, two from India, and one from Spain, Italy, and Iran. Prevalence of all forms of depression was 20%, anxiety 35%, and stress 53% in the combined study population of 113,285 individuals. The prevalence rate of all forms of depression, anxiety, stress, sleep problems, and psychological distress in general population was found to be higher during COVID-19 pandemic.
Previous meta-analyses were conducted during the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, which utilized a smaller pool of data. The current meta-analysis aims to provide additional (and updated) ...evidence related to the psychological impact among healthcare workers. The search strategy was developed by a medical librarian and bibliographical databases, including Medline, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Scopus were searched for studies examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the psychological health of healthcare workers. Articles were screened by three reviewers. Heterogeneity among studies was assessed by I
statistic. The random-effects model was utilized to obtain the pooled prevalence. A subgroup analysis by region, gender, quality of study, assessment methods, healthcare profession, and exposure was performed. Publication bias was assessed by Funnel plot and Egger linear regression test. Sixty-five studies met the inclusion criteria and the total sample constituted 79,437 participants. The pooled prevalence of anxiety, depression, stress, post-traumatic stress syndrome, insomnia, psychological distress, and burnout was 34.4%, 31.8%, 40.3%, 11.4%, 27.8%, 46.1%, and 37.4% respectively. The subgroup analysis indicated higher anxiety and depression prevalence among females, nurses, and frontline responders than males, doctors, and second-line healthcare workers. This study highlights the need for designing a targeted intervention to improve resilience and foster post-traumatic growth among frontline responders.
Biotic and abiotic stresses impose a serious limitation on crop productivity worldwide. Prior or simultaneous exposure to one type of stress often affects the plant response to other stresses, ...indicating extensive overlap and cross-talk between stress-response signaling pathways. Systems biology approaches that integrate large genomic and prot-eomic data sets have facilitated identification of candidate genes that govern this stress-regulatory crosstalk. Recently, we constructed a yeast two-hybrid map around three rice proteins that control the response to biotic and abiotic stresses, namely the immune receptor XA21, which confers resistance to the Gram-negative bacterium, Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae; NH1, the rice ortholog of NPR1, a key regulator of systemic acquired resistance; and the ethylene-responsive transcription factor, SUBIA, which confers tolerance to submergence stress. These studies coupled with transcriptional profiling and co-expression analyses identified a suite of proteins that are positioned at the interface of biotic and abiotic stress responses, including mitogen-activated protein kinase 5 （OsMPK5）, wall-associated kinase 25 （WAK25）, sucrose non-fermenting-l-related protein kinase-1 （SnRK1）, SUBIA binding protein 23 （SAB23）, and several WRKY family tran- scription factors. Emerging evidence suggests that these genes orchestrate crosstalk between biotic and abiotic stresses through a variety of mechanisms, including regulation of cellular energy homeostasis and modification of synergistic and/or antagonistic interactions between the stress hormones salicylic acid, ethylene, jasmonic acid, and abscisic acid.
Objectives
Deficits in anticipating pleasure may be an important dimension of anhedonia and functioning in psychiatric disorders, particularly schizophrenia and depression; however, inconsistent ...findings have limited the conclusions that can be drawn. We conducted the first systemic review and meta‐analysis of the extant literature for research comparing psychiatric groups to healthy control groups on anticipatory pleasure.
Methods
Academic Search Complete, Science Direct, and CINAHL databases were systematically searched up to 9 June 2018 for relevant peer‐reviewed articles, book chapters, and dissertations. Reference lists were also hand searched. A total of 36 studies were included in the review.
Results
A moderate‐sized deficit was observed in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (k = 32, 1,851 patients and 1,449 controls, g = −0.42 95% CI = −0.53 to −0.31, p < .001), and a large deficit in major depression (k = 415 patients and 506 controls, g = −0.87 95% CI = −1.23 to −0.51, p < .001), with this effect being significantly larger for depression (p < .05). Meta‐regression showed that heterogeneity was partially explained in schizophrenia spectrum by longer duration of illness and lower cognitive functioning predicting larger deficits. In depression, some evidence was found that ruling out a history of psychiatric illness in controls may be related to larger effects. There was evidence for small study bias inflating estimates in schizophrenia spectrum disorders.
Conclusions
Deficits in anticipatory pleasure are manifest in these disorders, and significantly more so in major depression. These findings indicate a possible therapeutic target to link cognitive, affective, and behavioural factors that precipitate and maintain disorder.
Practitioner points
Anticipatory pleasure is impaired in schizophrenia spectrum and major depression.
A particular focus on enhancing anticipatory pleasure may improve motivation for rewarding behaviour and psychosocial functioning.
The review contained only a small number of studies for major depression.
Given the heterogeneity in effects, there are likely to be more moderators of anticipatory pleasure that require examination.
Teaching is a stressful profession that exposes workers to the risk of burnout. Techniques involving higher mental functions, such as transcendental meditation and prayer, have been used in stress ...and burnout prevention programs. In this study, we report the results of an experience conducted in a group of teachers of a religious institute, in which prayer was used as a technique to prevent burnout.
Fifty teachers and support staff employed at a Catholic school of a Congregation of nuns volunteered for this study. They were randomized into two groups: prayer treatment (
= 25) or control group (
= 25). The treatment protocol was based on the combination of individual Christian prayer and a focus group of prayer-reflection. The participants received two 30 min training sessions a week over 2 months. Job satisfaction, well-being, and burnout symptoms (emotional exhaustion and depersonalization sub-scales) were measured at baseline and at follow-up (4 months) with the Italian versions of the Maslach Burnout Inventory validated for teaching and education sector, the General Health Questionnaire, and the Warr, Cook, and Wall's Job Satisfaction Scale.
At follow-up, a significant improvement of all outcome measures was observed. Emotional exhaustion (16.80-4.92,
< 0.001), depersonalization (3.72-0.60,
< 0.001) levels, and psychological impairment (10.08-2.04,
< 0.001) were significantly decreased, and job satisfaction (45.96-77.00,
< 0.001) was increased. The effect sizes (Glass' Δ) of the therapeutic interventions ranged from 0.53 (satisfaction level) to 2.87 (psychological health), suggesting moderate to large effects.
Prayer could be effective, no less than meditation and other spiritual or mind-body techniques, in contrasting the negative effects of occupational stress and preventing burnout among teachers and possibly other human service professionals.
In recent years, the use of plants as bioreactors has emerged as an exciting area of research and significant advances have created new opportunities. The driving forces behind the rapid growth of ...plant bioreactors include low production cost, product safety and easy scale up. As the yield and concentration of a product is crucial for commercial viability, several strategies have been developed to boost up protein expression in transgenic plants. Augmenting tissue-specific transcription, elevating transcript stability, tissue-specific targeting, translation optimization and sub-cellular accumulation are some of the strategies employed. Various kinds of products that are currently being produced in plants include vaccine antigens, medical diagnostics proteins, industrial and pharmaceutical proteins, nutritional supplements like minerals, vitamins, carbohydrates and biopolymers. A large number of plant-derived recombinant proteins have reached advanced clinical trials. A few of these products have already been introduced in the market.
The electroencephalogram (EEG) based motor imagery (MI) signal classification, also known as motion recognition, is a highly popular area of research due to its applications in robotics, gaming, and ...medical fields. However, the problem is ill-posed as these signals are non-stationary and noisy. Recently, a lot of efforts have been made to improve MI signal classification using a combination of signal decomposition and machine learning techniques but they fail to perform adequately on large multi-class datasets. Previously, researchers have implemented long short-term memory (LSTM), which is capable of learning the time-series information, on the MI-EEG dataset for motion recognition. However, it can not model very long-term dependencies present in the motion recognition data. With the advent of transformer networks in natural language processing (NLP), the long-term dependency issue has been widely addressed. Motivated by the success of transformer algorithms, in this article, we propose a transformer-based deep learning neural network architecture that performs motion recognition on the raw BCI competition III IVa and IV 2a datasets. The validation results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance than the existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method produces classification accuracy of 99.7% and 84% on the binary class and the multi-class datasets, respectively. Further, the performance of the proposed transformer-based model is also compared with LSTM.
•Nano-sized undoped and Cu (1.0–5.0%) doped ZnO has been synthesized by co-precipitation route.•PLE and PL spectra for doped ZnO NPs show large excitation and emission in visible region in comparison ...to undoped NPs.•Degradation of Crystal Violet dye with Cu doping and at various pH is discussed in detail.•Synthesized NPs at higher pH show remarkable modification in photocatalytic studies.•Synthesized NPs can be use to degrade dyes of variable pH without adjusting pH of dye solution.
Undoped and Copper (Cu) doped zinc oxide (ZnO) (Zn1−xCuxO, x=0.01, 0.02, 0.03, 0.04 and 0.05) nanoparticles (NPs) capped with (1.0%) Thioglycerol (TG) have been successfully synthesized by co-precipitation method. The synthesized samples have been characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Photoluminescence (PL) and UV–Visible spectroscopy. Incorporation of impurity ions in pure ZnO NPs leads to a shift the spectra for both excitation and emission to visible region as compared to pure ZnO. The photocatalytic activity of undoped and Cu doped ZnO photocatalyst were investigated by the degradation of Crystal Violet (CV) dye in aqueous medium under exposure of UV–Visible light irradiations. Firstly, degradation of CV dye has been studied with TG capped, undoped and Cu doped ZnO NPs synthesized at pH-8.0. From the results, it has been found that Cu doping concentration of 3.0% is optimal for higher photophysical and photocatalytic properties. When pH of optimum doped NPs was varied from 8.0 to 10.0, 78.7% to 96.5% of CV dye has been degraded after 3.5h. Further increasing the pH to 12.0 for optimum doped NPs, 100% dye degrades in 2.5h. This shows that the doping and pH has a pronounced effect on the photocatalytic activity of ZnO NPs. Loading of catalyst shows maximum photodegradation of CV dye at 3.0g/L of Cu (3.0%) doped ZnO at pH-12.0 for 10mg/L of CV dye. Kinetic studies shows that photo degradation of CV follow a pseudo first-order kinetic law. The reason for enhanced degradation with Cu doped NPs in comparison to undoped NPs has been described and discussed in this work.
The raging COVID-19 pandemic has been a great source of anxiety, distress, and stress among the population. Along with mandates for social distancing and infection control measures, the growing ...importance of managing and cultivating good mental well-being practices cannot be disregarded. The purpose of this commentary is to outline and discuss some research-proven positive well-being and stress reduction strategies to instill healthy coping mechanisms among individuals and community members. The authors anticipate that usage of these strategies at the individual and the community level should greatly benefit the mental well-being not only in the current COVID-19 pandemic but also in any future epidemics at the national level.
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