Publications by authors named "Alda"

The occurrence of cyclic morphological alternation in male crayfish of the family Cambaridae following molting is widely acknowledged. However, there remains a contentious issue within the genus : Some previous studies have proposed that male exhibit a pair of noncorneous Form II gonopods during the non-breeding season, while others argue that these species lack Form II in adult males. This study examined the color and shape of the corneous tips on the gonopod to determine its form.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - This study explores the levels and geographical differences of contaminants found in house dust across Europe, identifying over 1200 anthropogenic compounds using advanced techniques like mass spectrometry and suspect screening.
  • - The research indicates that contaminant concentrations vary less than threefold within Europe, showing similarities with North American dust due to shared consumer products and materials.
  • - It highlights geographical patterns, revealing that certain contaminants increased from north to south (like PAHs and chlorinated paraffins), whereas others, like biocides, decreased; it also emphasizes a significant risk from older, restricted contaminants, like DEHP and PCBs, despite limited toxicity data available for newer compounds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a common entity in neurology clinics. A variety of etiologies have been implicated in the presentation of GBS. Although rarely reported, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has also been reported to cause GBS.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a high-prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, frequently co-occurring with other psychiatric and medical conditions. Current diagnosis is time-consuming and often delays effective treatment; to date, no valid biomarker has been identified to facilitate this process. Research has linked the core symptoms of ADHD to autonomic dysfunction resulting from impaired arousal modulation, which contributes to physiological abnormalities that may serve as useful biomarkers for the disorder.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Perovskite solar cells are considered to be one of the most promising solar cell designs in terms of photovoltaic efficiency. However, their practical deployment is strongly affected by their short lifetimes, mostly caused by environmental conditions and UV degradation. In this contribution, we present a metasurface made of silver nanoparticles used as a UV filter on a perovskite solar cell.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Bipolar disorder (BD) is a complex mental health condition, and researchers aimed to identify a neurodevelopmental phenotype (NDP) that contributes to its development and impacts clinical outcomes.
  • By analyzing data from over 4,400 BD patients, they established nine specific clinical features that characterize this NDP, which are linked to poorer prognosis and treatment responses.
  • The findings suggest that patients with a higher NDP load may have overlapping genetic factors with ADHD, indicating a potential shared biological basis for these disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: The use of antidepressants in bipolar disorder (BD) remains contentious, in part due to the risk of antidepressant-induced mania (AIM). However, there is no information on the architecture of mood regulation in patients who have experienced AIM. We compared the architecture of mood regulation in euthymic patients with and without a history of AIM.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Biochemical reaction networks adapt to environmental conditions by sensing chemical or physical stimuli and using tightly controlled mechanisms. While most signals come from molecules, many cells can also sense and respond to light. Among the biomolecular structures that enable light sensing, we selected a light-oxygen-voltage (LOV) domain in a previous study that tested the engineering of novel regulatory mechanisms into a nucleic acid polymerase.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Biological invasions pose risks to the normal functioning of ecosystems by altering the structure and composition of several communities. Molluscs stand out as an extensively studied group given their long history of introduction by either natural or anthropogenic dispersal events. An alien population of the lymnaeid species Orientogalba viridis was first sighted in 2009 in southern Spain.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Deficits in memory performance have been linked to a wide range of neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions. While many studies have assessed the memory impacts of individual conditions, this study considers a broader perspective by evaluating how memory recall is differentially associated with nine common neuropsychiatric conditions using data drawn from 55 international studies, aggregating 15,883 unique participants aged 15-90. The effects of dementia, mild cognitive impairment, Parkinson's disease, traumatic brain injury, stroke, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder on immediate, short-, and long-delay verbal learning and memory (VLM) scores were estimated relative to matched healthy individuals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: COVID-19 pandemic stressors affected youth's mental health. This longitudinal study aims to explore these effects while considering predictive factors such as age and sex.

Methods: An initial sample of 1502 caregivers answered a longitudinal survey evaluating their youths' (4-17 years of age) emotional/behavioral symptoms using the Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) screening tool.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: To compare the prevalence of physical morbidities between older aged patients with bipolar disorder (OABD) and non-psychiatric comparisons (NC), and to analyze sex differences in prevalence.

Methods: OABD was defined as bipolar disorder among adults aged ≥50 years. Outcomes analyzed were the prevalence of diseases affecting the cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, renal, musculoskeletal, and endocrine systems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Multivariate techniques better fit the anatomy of complex neuropsychiatric disorders which are characterized not by alterations in a single region, but rather by variations across distributed brain networks. Here, we used principal component analysis (PCA) to identify patterns of covariance across brain regions and relate them to clinical and demographic variables in a large generalizable dataset of individuals with bipolar disorders and controls. We then compared performance of PCA and clustering on identical sample to identify which methodology was better in capturing links between brain and clinical measures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a multifactorial psychiatric illness affecting ∼1% of the global adult population. Lithium (Li), is the most effective mood stabilizer for BD but works only for a subset of patients and its mechanism of action remains largely elusive.

Methods: In the present study, we used iPSC-derived neurons from patients with BD who are responsive (LR) or not (LNR) to lithium.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Bipolar disorder (BD) features disrupted sleep patterns and nerve cell loss, with lithium being a common but variably effective treatment.
  • Research focused on how certain circadian genes and their interactions influence cell survival and lithium response using neurons from BD patients and regular controls.
  • Findings indicated that certain gene knockdowns affected cell survival differently between lithium responders and non-responders, suggesting complex roles of circadian rhythms in BD and lithium treatment efficacy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

There is limited information on the association between participants' clinical status or trajectories and missing data in electronic monitoring studies of bipolar disorder (BD). We collected self-ratings scales and sensor data in 145 adults with BD. Using a new metric, Missing Data Ratio (MDR), we assessed missing self-rating data and sensor data monitoring activity and sleep.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a mood disorder with different phases alternating between euthymia, manic or hypomanic episodes, and depressive episodes. While motor abnormalities are commonly seen during depressive or manic episodes, not much attention has been paid to postural abnormalities during periods of euthymia and their association with illness burden. We collected 24-hour posture data in 32 euthymic participants diagnosed with BD using a shirt-based wearable.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - This study aimed to see if bipolar disorder (BD) patients' clinical profiles could be better differentiated by diagnostic subtype or by how they respond to lithium treatment.
  • - Researchers analyzed 477 adult BD patients treated with lithium for at least a year, using various clinical features to create clusters that reflected treatment responses and BD subtypes.
  • - The results indicated that the clusters provided more insight into lithium responsiveness than BD subtype, with a smaller cluster containing a higher percentage of lithium responders, suggesting that treatment response could be a more effective way to categorize these patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study aimed to compare bachelor nursing students' knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding tropical diseases. This cross-sectional study was conducted with 128 participants who were recruited using stratified random sampling and completed a sociodemographics questionnaire and KAP questionnaire concerning tropical diseases. Descriptive statistics were used to present the data, and inferential statistics, including one-way analysis of variance and Mann-Whitney U tests, were calculated to identify potential differences between variables.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a heritable mental illness with complex etiology. While the largest published genome-wide association study identified 64 BD risk loci, the causal SNPs and genes within these loci remain unknown. We applied a suite of statistical and functional fine-mapping methods to these loci, and prioritized 17 likely causal SNPs for BD.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Lithium is the primary treatment for bipolar disorder (BD), but how it works and predicts outcomes is not fully understood.
  • A previous study identified key cellular pathways linked to lithium response, including focal adhesion and PI3K-Akt signaling.
  • In this new study, researchers confirmed these pathways in a larger group of 2039 patients but found no connection with the extracellular matrix, suggesting that issues with neuronal growth signaling may impact lithium effectiveness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Customized metasurfaces allow for controlling optical responses in photonic and optoelectronic devices over a broad band. For sensing applications, the spectral response of an optical device can be narrowed to a few nanometers, which enhances its capabilities to detect environmental changes that shift the spectral transmission or reflection. These nanophotonic elements are key for the new generation of plasmonic optical sensors with custom responses and custom modes of operation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF