Understanding and addressing a 'difficult' family in ICU.

Conflicts between ICU staff and patient/relatives are common and are a source of additional stress in an already tense environment. These conflicts vary from disagreements to serious controversies, which may lead to legal process or even violence. Unsuccessful communication is recognised as a common denominator for such disagreements.

Changes in the Firmicutes to Bacteriodetes ratio in the gut microbiome in individuals with anorexia nervosa following inpatient treatment: A systematic review and a case series.

Objective: Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate among psychiatric illnesses. Current treatments remain ineffective for a large fraction of patients. This may be due to unclear mechanisms behind its development and maintenance.

Compulsive avoidance in youths and adults with OCD: an aversive pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer study.

Compulsive behaviour may often be triggered by Pavlovian cues. Assessing how Pavlovian cues drive instrumental behaviour in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is therefore crucial to understand how compulsions develop and are maintained. An aversive Pavlovian-to-Instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm, particularly one involving avoidance/cancellation of negative outcomes, can enable such investigation and has not previously been studied in clinical-OCD.

Association of Environmental Uncertainty With Altered Decision-making and Learning Mechanisms in Youths With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Importance: Adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) display perseverative behavior in stable environments but exhibit vacillating choice when payoffs are uncertain. These findings may be associated with intolerance of uncertainty and compulsive behaviors; however, little is known about the mechanisms underlying learning and decision-making in youths with OCD because research into this population has been limited.

Objective: To investigate cognitive mechanisms associated with decision-making in youths with OCD by using executive functioning tasks and computational modeling.

Impaired cognitive plasticity and goal-directed control in adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Background: Youths with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience severe distress and impaired functioning at school and at home. Critical cognitive domains for daily functioning and academic success are learning, memory, cognitive flexibility and goal-directed behavioural control. Performance in these important domains among teenagers with OCD was therefore investigated in this study.