Adolescents and young adults with social withdrawal in France: Sociodemographic characteristics and validation of the French version of the Hikikomori Questionnaire-25 (HQ-25).

Background: Clinical situations marked by severe social withdrawal in youths are increasingly recognized as an important public health issue in European countries, while the relation with the hikikomori syndrome initially described in Japan remains poorly investigated.

Aims: This study aims to describe the sociodemographic features of adolescents and young adults with social withdrawal in French and to validate a French version of the Hikikomori Questiuonnaire-25 (HQ-25).

Method: An online questionnaire was completed by 450 participants aged 13 to 25 years.

Initial HIV-1 viral load in French Guiana: Factors associated with viral load set point differences.

Objectives: HIV viral load set points may vary between virus subtypes and host characteristics. The HIV epidemic in French Guiana entails a mix of viruses and populations of cosmopolitan origins. In this epidemiological context, we aimed to determine whether, at the scale of our territory, we could identify differences in HIV-1 viral load setpoints in our hospital cohort.

Attitudes of French laypeople toward children's medically-assisted dying.

The issue of medically-assisted dying in pediatric care, including euthanasia and deep sedation, is ethically complex. Despite its relevance, no research has applied Information Integration Theory to evaluate the acceptability of these practices in pediatric care, which is what we did in the present study. A sample of 166 French laypeople read 54 scenarios involving end-of-life situations involving children and assessed the acceptability of a physician's decision in each one.

Forty Years of HIV Research in French Guiana: Comprehend to Combat.

The drivers of the HIV epidemic, the viruses, the opportunistic infections, the attitudes and the resources allocated to the fight against HIV/AIDS, vary substantially across countries. French Guiana, at the crossroads between Amazonian South America and the Caribbean, constitutes a singular context with poor populations and rich country health funding, which has allowed researchers to gather lots of information on the particulars of our epidemic. We aimed to focus on the little known story of forty years of HIV research in French Guiana and emphasize how local research intertwined with public health action has yielded continuous progress, despite the difficult social conditions of the affected population.