Publications by authors named "Aaron Prosser"

Background: We have previously developed and reported on a procedure for estimating the purported benefits of immunity mandates using a novel variant of the number needed to treat (NNT) which we called the number needed to isolate (NNI). Here we demonstrate its broader properties as a useful population health metric.

Main Body: The NNI is analogous to the number needed to treat (NNT = 1/ARR), except the absolute risk reduction (ARR) is the absolute transmission risk in a specific population.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Clinicians caring for adults with borderline personality disorder (BPD) in acute settings such as the emergency department (ED) have little evidence/guidance to base decisions on. Specific/detailed guidance for managing BPD in the ED is needed given the morbidity and mortality risks, high service utilisation, unique challenges and risk of iatrogenic interventions. The primary objective of this study is to use a consensus method to develop a guideline for managing adults with BPD in the ED.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

There is growing scientific interest in immunity mandates/passports (IMP) for viral diseases in light of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. IMP isolate those who remain nonimmune from various settings to reduce nonhousehold transmissions from the nonimmune and reduce severe/critical illness among the nonimmune. A major limitation in the scientific literature is that there are currently no methods to quantify how many nonimmune individuals need to be isolated to achieve these purported benefits.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This article proposes a formal model that integrates cognitive and psychodynamic psychotherapeutic models of psychopathy to show how two major psychopathic traits called and can be understood as a form of abnormal Bayesian inference about the self. This model draws on the predictive coding (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Developmental typologies regarding age of onset of violence and offending have not routinely taken account of the role of serious mental illness (SMI), and whether age of onset of offending in relation to onset of illness impacts on the manifestation of offending over the life course.

Aims: To test whether forensic psychiatric patients can be classified according to age of onset of SMI and offending, and, if so, whether subtypes differ by sex.

Methods: Details of all 511 patients enrolled into a large forensic mental health service in Ontario, Canada, in 2011 or 2012 were collected from records.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: We examine the association between rates of homicide resulting in a mental health disposition (termed mentally abnormal homicide [MAH]) and homicides without such a disposition, as well as to province-wide psychiatric hospitalisation and incarceration rates.

Method: In this population-based study, we investigate all adult homicide perpetrators ( n = 4402) and victims ( n = 3783) in Ontario from 1987 to 2012. We present annual rates of mentally abnormal and non-mentally abnormal homicide and position them against hospitalisation and incarceration rates.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Despite evidence for their comparable efficacy, psychotherapy faces a dramatic decline relative to pharmacotherapy in psychiatry. A deep ideological reason for this decline centres on the belief that psychotherapy is a psychosocial treatment whereas pharmacotherapy is a biological treatment. Modern cognitive neuroscience demonstrates that this distinction is a myth.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: As the number of systematic reviews is growing rapidly, we systematically investigate whether meta-analyses published in leading medical journals present an outline of available evidence by referring to previous meta-analyses and systematic reviews.

Methods: We searched PubMed for recent meta-analyses of pharmacological treatments published in high impact factor journals. Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses were identified with electronic searches of keywords and by searching reference sections.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: fopen(/var/lib/php/sessions/ci_session7vp54csphp2euo6mb31plnc1ov4l8uas): Failed to open stream: No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 177

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_start(): Failed to read session data: user (path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Session/Session.php

Line Number: 137

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once