Publications by authors named "Hector Contreras-Mora"

Puerto Rico (PR) has faced environmental and public health challenges that could have significantly affected cancer screening access. Using administrative claims data from PR's Medicaid population, this study assessed trends in colorectal and breast cancer screening from 2016 to 2021, the impact of disasters in screening, and the absolute deficit in screening due to the pandemic. The monthly rates of claims were analyzed using Poisson regression.

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People with depression and Parkinsonism frequently show effort-related motivational symptoms, such as anergia, psychomotor retardation, and fatigue. Tasks that assess effort-related choice are being used as animal models of these motivational symptoms. The present studies characterized the ability of monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors with varying selectivity profiles to reverse the low effort bias induced by the monoamine storage inhibitor tetrabenazine.

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Motivated behavior can be characterized by behavioral activation and high work output. Moreover, people with depression and other disorders show effort-related motivational symptoms, such as anergia, psychomotor retardation, and fatigue. Effort-based decision making is studied using tasks offering choices between high effort options leading to highly valued reinforcers vs low effort/low reward options, and such tasks could be useful as animal models of motivational symptoms.

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Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by difficulty learning to read and write. The underlying biological and genetic etiology remains poorly understood. One candidate gene, dyslexia susceptibility 1 candidate 1 (DYX1C1), has been shown to be associated with deficits in short-term memory in dyslexic populations.

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The cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) include resting tremor, akinesia, bradykinesia, and rigidity, and these motor abnormalities can be modeled in rodents by administration of the VMAT-2 (type-2 vesicular monoamine transporter) inhibitor tetrabenazine (9,10-dimethoxy-3-(2-methylpropyl)-1,3,4,6,7, 11b hexahydrobenzo[a]quinolizin-2-one; TBZ). Depression is also commonly associated with PD, and clinical data indicate that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as fluoxetine ((±)-N-methyl-γ-[4-(trifluoromethyl)phenoxy]benzenepropanamine hydrochloride; FLX) are frequently used to treat depression in PD patients. The aim of the present study was to characterize the effect of FLX on the motor dysfunctions induced by a low dose of TBZ (0.

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