Vascular Quality of Care Assessment: Clinicians' Adherence to Lipid-Lowering Therapy for Patients with Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease.

Background: Lipid-lowering medication can considerably lessen the risk for cardiovascular events in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). Despite well-publicized guidelines and the accessibility of effective therapies, many patients do not attain their lipid goals and remain at high cardiovascular risk. Guidelines recommend statins as first-line therapy to reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in ASCVD.

Neural and genetic markers of vulnerability to post-traumatic stress symptoms among survivors of the World Trade Center attacks.

Although recent research has begun to describe the neural and genetic processes underlying variability in responses to trauma, less is known about how these processes interact. We addressed this issue by using functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the relationship between posttraumatic stress symptomatology (PTSS), a common genetic polymorphism of the serotonin transporter [5-HTT (5-hydroxy tryptamine)] gene and neural activity in response to viewing images associated with the 9/11 terrorist attack among a rare sample of high-exposure 9/11 survivors (n = 17). Participants varied in whether they carried a copy of the short allele in the promoter region of the 5-HTT gene.

A gene-brain-cognition pathway: prefrontal activity mediates the effect of COMT on cognitive control and IQ.

A core thesis of cognitive neurogenetic research is that genetic effects on cognitive ability are mediated by specific neural functions, however, demonstrating neural mediation has proved elusive. Pairwise relationships between genetic variation and brain function have yielded heterogeneous findings to date. This heterogeneity indicates that a multiple mediator modeling approach may be useful to account for complex relationships involving function at multiple brain regions.

Neurogenetics and pharmacology of learning, motivation, and cognition.

Many of the individual differences in cognition, motivation, and learning-and the disruption of these processes in neurological conditions-are influenced by genetic factors. We provide an integrative synthesis across human and animal studies, focusing on a recent spate of evidence implicating a role for genes controlling dopaminergic function in frontostriatal circuitry, including COMT, DARPP-32, DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4. These genetic effects are interpreted within theoretical frameworks developed in the context of the broader cognitive and computational neuroscience literature, constrained by data from pharmacological, neuroimaging, electrophysiological, and patient studies.

Genetics as a tool for the dissociation of mental operations over the course of development.

In recent years it has become possible to differentiate separable aspects of attention and to characterize the anatomical structure and dynamic states of their underlying networks. When individual differences in the structure and dynamics of these networks are used as dependent measures in associations with individual genetic variation, it becomes possible to assign cellular and molecular changes that occur over the course of normal development to specific aspects of network structure and function. In this way, a more granular understanding of the physiology of neural networks can be obtained.