1,720,971 research outputs found
The impact of early-life stress in the development and course of bipolar disorder: Mechanisms and implications
Full text linkTraumatic events experienced throughout the different stages of childhood and adolescence are frequent circumstances with a detrimental impact on the physical and psychological health of the individual. A growing body of evidence shows the trauma-related effects on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the sympathetic nervous system, the serotonin system, the immune system, on brain development, structure, and connectivity. Interestingly, a relation was found between early life stress and Bipolar Disorder: the patients who were exposed to childhood trauma showed a worsened course of the disorder with poor clinical and psychopathological factors. According to the kindling hypothesis, early environmental stressors interact with the genetic susceptibility through epigenetic mechanisms, making the subject more vulnerable to milder stressors, and lowering the threshold for the occurrence of subsequent mood episodes. Understanding these processes is crucial to the discovery of new targets of treatment to reduce or, possibly, revert the effect of early life stress on bipolar disorder
Environmental correlates of growth patterns in Neolithic Liguria (northwestern Italy)
Full text linkObjective: This study evaluates patterns of human growth in the Neolithic to make inferences about environmental
correlates of developmental disturbances.
Materials: 33 children/adolescents from the Neolithic of Liguria (Italy), 29 of which date between 4,800-4,400
cal BCE.
Methods: Neolithic patterns of growth are compared with a modern sample (the Denver Growth Study; DGS).
Dental development was used to determine age at death. Proxies for postcranial maturation are femoral length
and proportion of mean adult femoral length attained.
Results: Ligurian children show growth faltering compared to DGS, especially between 4 and 9 years of age.
Between 1 and 2 years, and in later childhood and adolescence, values are more similar or higher than DGS,
when using the proportion of adult femoral length attained.
Conclusions: The pattern of growth in Ligurian Neolithic children may reflect a deprived and highly-infectious
environment: three individuals show skeletal lesions consistent with tuberculosis. The relatively faster growth in
infancy may result from the buffering provided by maternal milk. Older children and adolescents may exhibit
catch-up growth.
Significance: This study contributes to our understanding of Neolithic selective pressures and possible biocultural
adaptive strategies.
Limitations: The cross-sectional nature of the data and the small sample size make it unclear whether the observed
pattern is representative of the growth patterns in the living population. The possibility that adults are
stunted undermines the interpretation of optimal growth in the first years.
Suggestions for Further Research: Refine age estimates, increase sample size through the study of other bone
elements
Adult Consequences of Neurodevelopmental Disorders
No full textNeurodevelopmental disorders are a miscellaneous group of mental conditions characterized by the impairment in one or more emotional, social, and cognitive skills at different stages of childhood or adolescence. Their early manifestation, together with the lack of immediate life-threatening consequences, is responsible for the delayed or absent achievement of developmental milestones, causing a marked impact on various areas of functioning, such as personal, social, academic, or occupational. Even though precociously recognized in many cases, the impairment may persist throughout the entire life span, with functional repercussions on adult life and an increased risk of co-occurring medical and psychiatric comorbidities. This chapter focuses on neurodevelopmental conditions, namely, autism spectrum disorders (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and intellectual disabilities (ID), concentrating on the characteristic epidemiology, clinical manifestations, diagnosis, and treatment recommendations in adults’ life
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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