Hospital-acquired bacterial pneumonia (HABP) and ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia (VABP) can be caused by a wide variety of bacteria that originate from the patient flora or the health care ...environment. We review the medical and microbiology literature and the results of the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program (1997-2008) to establish the pathogens most likely to cause HABP or VABP. In all studies, a consistent 6 organisms (Staphylococcus aureus 28.0%, Pseudomonas aeruginosa 21.8%, Klebsiella species 9.8%, Escherichia coli 6.9%, Acinetobacter species 6.8%, and Enterobacter species 6.3%) caused ∼80% of episodes, with lower prevalences of Serratia species, Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, and community-acquired pathogens, such as pneumococci and Haemophilus influenzae. Slight changes in the pathogen order were noted among geographic regions; Latin America had an increased incidence of nonfermentative gram-negative bacilli. In addition, VABP isolates of the same species had a mean of 5%-10% less susceptibility to frequently used extended-spectrum antimicrobials, and the rate of drug resistance among HABP and VABP pathogens has been increasing by 1% per year (2004-2008). In conclusion, the empirical treatment of HABP and VABP due to prevailing bacterial causes and emerging drug resistance has become more challenging and requires use of multidrug empirical treatment regimens for routine clinical practice. These facts have profound impact on the choices of comparison therapies to be applied in contemporary new drug clinical trials for pneumonia.
Although all 3 of the Dark Triad members are predisposed to engage in exploitative interpersonal behavior, their motivations and tactics vary. Here we explore their distinctive dynamics with 5 ...behavioral studies of dishonesty (total N = 1,750). All 3 traits predicted cheating on a coin-flipping task when there was little risk of being caught (Study 1). Only psychopathy predicted cheating when punishment was a serious risk (Study 2). Machiavellian individuals also cheated under high risk-but only if they were ego-depleted (Study 3). Both psychopathy and Machiavellianism predicted cheating when it required an intentional lie (Study 4). Finally, those high in narcissism showed the highest levels of self-deceptive bias (Study 5). In sum, duplicitous behavior is far from uniform across the Dark Triad members. The frequency and nature of their dishonesty is moderated by 3 contextual factors: level of risk, ego depletion, and target of deception. This evidence for distinctive forms of duplicity helps clarify differences among the Dark Triad members as well as illuminating different shades of dishonesty.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ
Significant individual differences in the trajectories of cognitive aging and in age-related changes of brain structure and function have been reported in the past half-century. In some individuals, ...significant pathological changes in the brain are observed in conjunction with relatively well-preserved cognitive performance. Multiple constructs have been invoked to explain this paradox of resilience, including brain reserve, cognitive reserve, brain maintenance, and compensation. The aim of this session of the Cognitive Aging Summit III was to examine the overlap and distinctions in definitions and measurement of these constructs, to discuss their neural and behavioral correlates and to propose plausible mechanisms of individual cognitive resilience in the face of typical age-related neural declines.
•People vary in their ability to maintain good cognition despite significant neuropathology.•Reserve, maintenance, and compensation may explain the paradox of resilience.•These constructs may have passive (structural) or active (functional) brain basis.•Identification of reliable reflective indicators will boost validity of reserve construct.•Progress requires integrating animal and human neuroimaging in longitudinal designs.
Topological phases protected by symmetry can occur in gapped and—surprisingly—in critical systems. We consider non-interacting fermions in one dimension with spinless time-reversal symmetry. It is ...known that the phases are classified by a topological invariant
ω
and a central charge
c
. We investigate the correlations of string operators, giving insight into the interplay between topology and criticality. In the gapped phases, these non-local string order parameters allow us to extract
ω
. Remarkably, ratios of correlation lengths are universal. In the critical phases, the scaling dimensions of these operators serve as an order parameter, encoding
ω
and
c
. We derive exact asymptotics of these correlation functions using Toeplitz determinant theory. We include physical discussion, e.g., relating lattice operators to the conformal field theory. Moreover, we discuss the dual spin chains. Using the aforementioned universality, the topological invariant of the spin chain can be obtained from correlations of local observables.
Past research on socially aversive personalities has focused on subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism, and Machiavellianism—the "Dark Triad" of personality. In the research reported here, ...we evaluated whether an everyday form of sadism should be added to that list. Acts of apparent cruelty were captured using two laboratory procedures, and we showed that such behavior could be predicted with two measures of sadistic personality. Study 1 featured a bug-killing paradigm. As expected, sadists volunteered to kill bugs at greater rates than did nonsadists. Study 2 examined willingness to harm an innocent victim. When aggression was easy, sadism and Dark Triad measures predicted unprovoked aggression. However, only sadists were willing to work for the opportunity to hurt an innocent person. In both studies, sadism emerged as an independent predictor of behavior reflecting an appetite for cruelty. Together, these findings support the construct validity of everyday sadism and its incorporation into a new "Dark Tetrad" of personality.
•Monoamine oxidases have been implicated in the pathophysiology of various neurological disorders.•Functional monoamine oxidase genetic polymorphisms are associated with neurological disorder risk, ...symptoms, and treatment response.•Rodents and primates display differences in monoamine oxidase function and developmental trajectory in the brain.•Monoamine oxidases are regulated by sex hormones via canonical and non-canonical pathways.•Monoamine oxidase inhibitors are promising therapeutic agents for preventing and slowing the progress of neurodegenerative disease.
Monoamine oxidase enzymes are responsible for the degredation of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine in the central neurvous system. Although it has been nearly 100 years since they were first described, we are still learning about their role in the healthy brain and how they are altered in various disease states. The present review provides a survey of our current understanding of monoamine oxidases, with a focus on their contributions to neuropsychiatric, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disease. Important species differences in monoamine oxidase function and development in the brain are highlighted. Sex-specific monoamine oxidase regulatory mechanisms and their implications for various neurological disorders are also discussed. While our understanding of these critical enzymes has expanded over the last century, gaps exist in our understanding of sex and species differences and the roles monoamine oxidases may play in conditions often comorbid with neurological disorders.
A central goal of cognitive neuroscience is to decode human brain activity-that is, to infer mental processes from observed patterns of whole-brain activation. Previous decoding efforts have focused ...on classifying brain activity into a small set of discrete cognitive states. To attain maximal utility, a decoding framework must be open-ended, systematic, and context-sensitive-that is, capable of interpreting numerous brain states, presented in arbitrary combinations, in light of prior information. Here we take steps towards this objective by introducing a probabilistic decoding framework based on a novel topic model-Generalized Correspondence Latent Dirichlet Allocation-that learns latent topics from a database of over 11,000 published fMRI studies. The model produces highly interpretable, spatially-circumscribed topics that enable flexible decoding of whole-brain images. Importantly, the Bayesian nature of the model allows one to "seed" decoder priors with arbitrary images and text-enabling researchers, for the first time, to generate quantitative, context-sensitive interpretations of whole-brain patterns of brain activity.
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