Publications by authors named "Hens K"

Understanding what people believe the causes of autism to be has implications for experiences of familial guilt and stigma. Using a qualitative approach, we investigated how Brazilian healthcare professionals, parents of young and adult autistic people and young and adult autistic people consider the origins of autism and the interaction between the biological and social environment concerning the challenges autistic people encounter. Eight health professionals who assist autistic people, five young autistic people, six family members of young autistic people, five autistic adults, and four parents of autistic adults participated in the research.

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Introduction: Advancing research and support for neurologically diverse populations requires novel data harmonisation methods that are capable of aligning with contemporary approaches to understanding health and disability.

Objectives: We present the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) as a conceptual framework to support harmonisation of mental health data and present a proof of principle within the Risk and Resilience in Developmental Diversity and Mental Health (R2D2-MH) consortium.

Method: 138 measures from various mental health datasets were linked to the ICF following the WHO's established linking rules.

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Background: Fertility centre websites are a key sources of information on medically assisted reproduction (MAR) for both infertile people and the general public. As part of a global fertility market, they are also a window to attract potential future patients. They give formal and practical information but in the way the information is displayed, they also convey social representations, and in particular, gender representation in its intersectional dimension.

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Background: Truth-telling in health care is about providing patients with accurate information about their diagnoses and prognoses to enable them to make decisions that can benefit their overall health. Physicians worldwide, especially in the United Kingdom (U.K.

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Current rates of habitat degradation and climate change are causing unprecedented declines in global biodiversity. Studies on vertebrates highlight how conservation genomics can be effective in identifying and managing threatened populations, but it is unclear how vertebrate-derived metrics of genomic erosion translate to invertebrates, with their markedly different population sizes and life histories. The Black-veined White butterfly (Aporia crataegi) was extirpated from Britain in the 1920s.

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In this paper, we report the results from an experimental reproductive ethics study exploring questions about reproduction and parenthood. The main finding in our study is that, while we may assume that everyone understands these concepts and their relationship in the same way, this assumption may be unwarranted. For example, we may assume that if 'x is y's father', it follows that 'y is x's child'.

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Human geography and bioethics both take pride in their interdisciplinary approaches. Relatively little cross-pollination has occurred between human geography and bioethics. This paper takes three cases to highlight the generative potentials of both disciplines, dedicating time and space to learning from each other.

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Synthetic Biology (SynBio) is a technology that brings new possibilities and benefits, as well as new ethical concerns. We have performed a systematic review and thematic analysis of papers that deal with the possible ethical and social issues surrounding SynBio. We found that articles mention deontological concerns related to tinkering with life and more consequentialist matters related to biosafety and biosecurity.

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Autism is increasingly viewed as an expression of neurodiversity deserving accommodation, rather than merely as a disorder in need of remediation or even prevention. This reconceptualization has inspired calls to broaden the ethical debate on early autism care beyond matters of efficient screenings and effective interventions. We conducted 14 in-depth interviews with 26 parents of infants at an increased likelihood for autism (siblings, preterms and children with persistent feeding difficulties) to understand which benefits and risks these parents see for the implementation of a systematic, early autism detection program in our region.

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Ongoing health challenges, such as the increased global burden of chronic disease, are increasingly answered by calls for personalized approaches to healthcare. Genomic medicine, a vital component of these personalization strategies, is applied in risk assessment, prevention, prognostication, and therapeutic targeting. However, several practical, ethical, and technological challenges remain.

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Are attention issues disorders or not? Philosophers of medicine have tried to address this question by looking for properties that distinguish disorders from non-disorders. Such properties include deviation of a statistical norm, a loss of function or experienced suffering. However, attempts at such conceptual analysis have not led to a consensus on the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of disorder.

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The aim of this article was to think with and elaborate on theories developed outside of autism research and the autistic community, and through this support the production of new autistic-led theories: theories and concepts based on autistic people's own embodied experiences and the social worlds we inhabit. The article consists of three different sections all of part of the overall umbrella, . In each section, we import useful concepts from elsewhere and tailor them to autism studies.

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The dominant discourse surrounding neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and ADHD emphasizes biological explanations. Neurodevelopmental conditions are conceived as different types of brains, the result of different types of genes. This way of thinking is present both in medical research and in clinical practice.

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A lot of people who do research are also neurodivergent (such as being autistic or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), but neurodivergent people do not always feel welcome in research spaces which are often shaped around neurotypical people. Some neurotypical researchers lack confidence in talking to neurodivergent people, and others feel like neurodivergent people might not be able to do good research about other people who are like them without being biased. We think it is important that all researchers are able to work well together, regardless of whether they are neurotypical, autistic, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (or any other neurotype) - in truly 'neurodiverse' teams.

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Drosophila Insulin-Producing Cells (IPCs) are the main production site of the Drosophila Insulin-like peptides or dilps which have key roles in regulating growth, development, reproduction, lifespan and metabolism. To better understand the signalling pathways and transcriptional networks that are active in the IPCs we queried publicly available transcriptome data of over 180 highly inbred fly lines for dilp expression and used dilp expression as the input for a Genome-wide association study (GWAS). This resulted in the identification of variants in 125 genes that were associated with variation in dilp expression.

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In September 2020, the surgeon Paulo Macchiarini, who used stem cell technology to enable the transplants of artificial and donor trachea, was charged with aggravated assault in Sweden. In this comment, we argue that the Ethics Council of the Karolinska Institute should have considered issues from philosophy of science when they were brought to their attention, rather than dismiss them as irrelevant to research ethics. We demonstrate how conceptual issues of a philosophy-of-science-kind about clinical research and medical practice should be integral to research ethics.

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Offering unique wavelength versatility, continuous-wave optical parametric oscillators (cw OPOs) are appealing sources of widely tunable laser light. Due to technical challenges, however, practical tunable cw OPO devices have so far been mostly limited either to near-infrared wavelength coverage or to maximum optical output powers in the 100 mW range-or both. We present a novel cw OPO design achieving output powers at the Watt-level throughout the very wide 500-765 nm gap-free tuning range in the visible and coverage of up to 3540 nm in the infrared spectral range.

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Current and past pandemics have several aspects in common. It is expected that all members of society contribute to beat it. But it is also clear that the risks associated with the pandemic are different for different groups.

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There has been a spurt in both fundamental and translational research that examines the underlying mechanisms of the human microbiome in psychiatric disorders. The personalized and dynamic features of the human microbiome suggest the potential of its manipulation for precision psychiatry in ways to improve mental health and avoid disease. However, findings in the field of microbiome also raise philosophical and ethical questions.

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BACKGROUND After decades of research and clinical experience, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) turns out to be heterogeneous in every sense, including phenotype and etiology. How is this heterogeneous view translated in information that is useful and significant to parents and clinicians?
AIM: To formulate recommendations with regard to clinical ASD care in young children.
METHOD: We conducted in-depth interviews on how parents (11 mothers and 6 fathers of 11 children) and physicians (n = 16) view and experience a young child's ASD diagnosis.

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The fact that environmental factors and lifestyle play a role in mental health is well known. In the last decades more research has gone into the link between environment and genetics: epigenetics has shown us the molecular link between these two, and the influence of the microbiome on mental health has demonstrated the importance of food. Still, ethical questions remain about how lifestyle advice can be integrated in clinical practice in an ethical way.

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