scholarly journals Does Exposure to Analgesics in Utero Cause Schizophrenia?

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-130
Author(s):  
Richard L O’Reilly

The cause of schizophrenia, a serious mental illness characterized by hallucinations, delusions and a marked deterioration in social functioning, is an enigma that continues to perplex the scientific community. While we know that approximately 80% of the risk of developing schizophrenia is conferred by genes (1), no research group has yet located a gene(s) contributing to the cause of schizophrenia. Moreover, while a significant environmental contribution is indicated by the fact that one-half of monozygotic twins pairs are discordant for schizophrenia, the nature of this environmental contribution is still controversial. The past theory that an abnormal family upbringing was the causative environmental factor has not stood up to scientific scrutiny. In recent years, the search for causative environmental factors has focused on the possibility that some type of prenatal insult predisposes the fetus to develop schizophrenia in early adult life. The initial suspicion of an intrauterine insult was based on indirect evidence. First, dermatoglyphic patterns in patients with schizophrenia were noted to be abnormal. The dermal ridges are laid down between the third and fifth month of gestation, in effect leaving a fossilized record of neurodevelopmental perturbation. Second, minor physical anomalies, typically involving the mouth, ears and eyes, occur with increased frequency in schizophrenia. Much like dermatoglyphic abnormalities, minor physical anomalies represent a disruption of the final phase of the developmental shaping of the face, which takes place in the second trimester. Of course, both abnormal dermatoglyphic patterns and minor physical anomalies may reflect the effects of abnormal genetic regulation of development rather than an extrinsic insult.

Author(s):  
Allan Megill

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.


Author(s):  
Aurora G. Vincent ◽  
Anne E. Gunter ◽  
Yadranko Ducic ◽  
Likith Reddy

AbstractAlloplastic facial transplantation has become a new rung on the proverbial reconstructive ladder for severe facial wounds in the past couple of decades. Since the first transfer including bony components in 2006, numerous facial allotransplantations across many countries have been successfully performed, many incorporating multiple bony elements of the face. There are many unique considerations to facial transplantation of bone, however, beyond the considerations of simple soft tissue transfer. Herein, we review the current literature and considerations specific to bony facial transplantation focusing on the pertinent surgical anatomy, preoperative planning needs, intraoperative harvest and inset considerations, and postoperative protocols.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3046
Author(s):  
Shervin Minaee ◽  
Mehdi Minaei ◽  
Amirali Abdolrashidi

Facial expression recognition has been an active area of research over the past few decades, and it is still challenging due to the high intra-class variation. Traditional approaches for this problem rely on hand-crafted features such as SIFT, HOG, and LBP, followed by a classifier trained on a database of images or videos. Most of these works perform reasonably well on datasets of images captured in a controlled condition but fail to perform as well on more challenging datasets with more image variation and partial faces. In recent years, several works proposed an end-to-end framework for facial expression recognition using deep learning models. Despite the better performance of these works, there are still much room for improvement. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach based on attentional convolutional network that is able to focus on important parts of the face and achieves significant improvement over previous models on multiple datasets, including FER-2013, CK+, FERG, and JAFFE. We also use a visualization technique that is able to find important facial regions to detect different emotions based on the classifier’s output. Through experimental results, we show that different emotions are sensitive to different parts of the face.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Brown ◽  
Ibrahim Boussaad ◽  
Javier Jarazo ◽  
Julia C. Fitzgerald ◽  
Paul Antony ◽  
...  

AbstractRecent evidence suggests neurogenesis is on-going throughout life but the relevance of these findings for neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) is poorly understood. Biallelic PINK1 mutations cause early onset, Mendelian inherited PD. We studied the effect of PINK1 deficiency on adult neurogenesis of dopaminergic (DA) neurons in two complementary model systems. Zebrafish are a widely-used model to study neurogenesis in development and through adulthood. Using EdU analyses and lineage-tracing studies, we first demonstrate that a subset of ascending DA neurons and adjacent local-projecting DA neurons are each generated into adulthood in wild type zebrafish at a rate that decreases with age. Pink1-deficiency impedes DA neurogenesis in these populations, most significantly in early adult life. Pink1 already exerts an early effect on Th1+ progenitor cells rather than on differentiated DA neurons only. In addition, we investigate the effect of PINK1 deficiency in a human isogenic organoid model. Global neuronal differentiation in PINK1-deficient organoids and isogenic controls is similar, but PINK1-deficient organoids display impeded DA neurogenesis. The observation of impaired adult dopaminergic neurogenesis in Pink1 deficiency in two complementing model systems may have significant consequences for future therapeutic approaches in human PD patients with biallelic PINK1 mutations.


Author(s):  
Richard Wennberg ◽  
Sukriti Nag ◽  
Mary-Pat McAndrews ◽  
Andres M. Lozano ◽  
Richard Farb ◽  
...  

A 24-year-old woman was referred because of incompletely-controlled complex partial seizures. Her seizures had started at age 21, after a mild head injury with brief loss of consciousness incurred in a biking accident, and were characterized by a sensation of bright flashing lights in the right visual field, followed by numbness and tingling in the right foot, spreading up the leg and to the arm, ultimately involving the entire right side, including the face. Occasionally they spread further to involve right facial twitching with jerking of the right arm and leg, loss of awareness and, at the onset of her epilepsy, rare secondarily generalized convulsions. Seizure frequency averaged three to four per month. She was initially treated with phenytoin and clobazam and subsequently changed to carbamazepine 800 milligrams per day. She also complained that her right side was no longer as strong as her left and that it was also numb, especially the leg, but felt that this weakness had stabilized or improved slightly over the past two years.


PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (5) ◽  
pp. 977-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Neiman

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”


1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (11) ◽  
pp. 833-838 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Greenberg ◽  
Philip P. Green ◽  
Katherine J. Roggenkamp ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett-Connor ◽  
Herman A. Tyroler ◽  
...  

1997 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Coombs

Flight capacity of female and male moths was age dependent in both H. punctigera and H. armigera using a tethered-flight technique. In H. punctigera, flight capacity increased from the first night following emergence up to Night 4, and was maintained at least until Night 10. In H. armigera, a peak in flight capacity occurred on Night 4, followed by a decline with increasing age. Long-flying moths (> 5 h duration) were evident in both species from the night following emergence. Attainment of reproductive maturity was rapid in both species, with 91% of H. punctigera and 77% of H. armigera ovipositing by Night 3. Hence, the increase in flight capacity recorded for both species during early adult life is coincident with the onset of reproductive activity. Both species retain the capacity for extensive inter-crop and inter-regional movement throughout most of the reproductive phase of their adult lives. Neither successful mating or the absence of adult food sources influenced flight capacity during early adult life.


2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Hollis

Schizophrenia is a devastating chronic disorder that typically presents in early adult life and impacts on a broad swathe of social and psychological functioning. It is not surprising that psychiatrists have tended to be circumspect about making this ominous diagnosis in children and adolescents. Genuine concerns about the validity of applying ‘adult’ psychotic diagnoses in this young age group, together with the lack of diagnosis-specific interventions, have suggested a cautious approach to diagnosis. Furthermore, the relative rarity of schizophrenia in this age group has meant that most psychiatrists have relatively little experience with ‘atypical’ early presentation of the disorder.


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