Impact of Obesity on Outcomes in a Multiethnic Cohort of Medical Intensive Care Unit Patients.

Purpose: To examine the association of obesity with in-hospital mortality and complications during critical illness.

Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of a multiethnic cohort of 699 patients admitted to medical intensive care unit between January 2010 and May 2011 at Mount Sinai St. Luke's and Mount Sinai West Hospitals, tertiary care centers in New York City.

Cocaine cues drive opposing context-dependent shifts in reward processing and emotional state.

Background: Prominent neurobiological theories of addiction posit a central role for aberrant mesolimbic dopamine release but disagree as to whether repeated drug experience blunts or enhances this system. Although drug withdrawal diminishes dopamine release, drug sensitization augments mesolimbic function, and both processes have been linked to drug seeking. One possibility is that the dopamine system can rapidly switch from dampened to enhanced release depending on the specific drug-predictive environment.