Accuracy of diagnosis of depression in patients with Type 1 diabetes mellitus

This study assesses the clinical accuracy of physicians (Specialists in Endocrinology and Nutrition: SEN) to make the diagnosis of depression in patients with Type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM1). This study involved 11 SEN physicians, and 153 patients with DM1. The diagnosis of depression was performed using the SCID-1 structured interview and clinical assessment. From the initial sample, 50 patients were randomly selected (imposing the condition that it was included 25 patients with depression and 25 without depression). The results show that clinicians performed a higher percentage of negative diagnoses (patients without depression) than positive ones (patients with depression). A significant percentage of patients with depression were not diagnosed (25%). It therefore seems necessary to provide adequate clinical protocols to evaluate the presence of this disorder in DM1, as well as continuing research into the diagnostic process for clinical decision making.     

Aging in cognitive control of social processing: evidence from the attention network test

ABSTRACT

Aging seems to be associated with impairment of attentional network functioning. It is not known whether social information can modulate this age-related decline. We used three variants of Attention Network test to examine the age-related decline of attentional effects in response to stimuli with and without social-cognitive content. Three groups of younger, middle-aged, and older participants performed the ANT, using fish, drawings, or photographs of faces looking to the left or right as target and flanker stimuli. The results showed that both executive attention and alerting were more resistant to the age-related decline with social stimuli and that orienting attention scores showed a progressive increase with age in the presence of this kind of stimuli. These findings underline the importance of social information in modulating and contrasting the age-related decline and support the status of human faces as a special class of visual stimuli for the human attentional systems.     

Global Diversification in Medicine Regulation: Insights from Regenerative Stem Cell Medicine

ABSTRACT

Medicine regulation worldwide has undergone a process of regulatory diversification. The evidence-based medicine (EBM) paradigm, centered on multi-phase randomized controlled trials, is increasingly contested and replaced by new models of clinical validation. To explain these changes, STS research has cited just a few factors, e.g. growing pressure form health consumers; the role of pharmaceutical companies to lobby for fast, affordable drug development; the influence of neoliberal ideas and libertarian advocacy of deregulation; and the agency of national governments to enable domestic innovation opportunities in the context of global competition and inequalities. Those factors individually cannot account for the increasing variation in medicine regulation at both national and global levels. Instead it is helpful to integrate elements of existing explanations into a framework with four pairs of conflicting regulatory choices, which play a central role in the formation of medicine regulation. We use this framework to compare regulatory changes in the USA, European Union, China, India, Argentina, and Japan. Across these jurisdictions, the case studies illustrate four dynamics of diversification. Key regulatory concepts such as evidence, risk, safety, efficacy, responsibility and accountability acquire different meanings, reshaping medicine innovation in far-reaching and often contradictory ways. The boundaries between medical research and healthcare provision, commerce and humanitarian service, as well as state control and medical self-regulation are re-defined.     

Words with Consistent Diachronic Usage Patterns are Learned Earlier: A Computational Analysis Using Temporally Aligned Word Embeddings

In this study, we use temporally aligned word embeddings and a large diachronic corpus of English to quantify language change in a data-driven, scalable way, which is grounded in language use. We show a unique and reliable relation between measures of language change and age of acquisition (AoA) while controlling for frequency, contextual diversity, concreteness, length, dominant part of speech, orthographic neighborhood density, and diachronic frequency variation. We analyze measures of language change tackling both the change in lexical representations and the change in the relation between lexical representations and the words with the most similar usage patterns, showing that they capture different aspects of language change. Our results show a unique relation between language change and AoA, which is stronger when considering neighborhood-level measures of language change: Words with more coherent diachronic usage patterns tend to be acquired earlier. The results support theories positing a link between ontogenetic and ethnogenetic processes in language.