Objectives: To assess the potential impacts of successive lockdown-easing measures in England, at a point in the COVID-19 pandemic when community transmission levels were relatively high.
Design: We developed a Bayesian model to infer incident cases and reproduction number () in England, from incident death data. We then used this to forecast excess cases and deaths in multiple plausible scenarios in which increases at one or more time points.
Although childhood adversity (CA) increases risk for subsequent mental illnesses, developmental mechanisms underpinning this association remain unclear. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPAA) is one candidate system potentially linking CA with psychopathology. However, determining developmental effects of CA on HPAA output and differentiating these from effects of current illness has proven difficult.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe A118G single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP rs1799971) in the μ-opioid receptor gene, OPRM1, has been much studied in relation to alcohol use disorders. The reported effects of allelic variation at this SNP on alcohol-related behaviors, and on opioid receptor antagonist treatments, have been inconsistent. We investigated the pharmacogenetic interaction between A118G variation and the effects of two μ-opioid receptor antagonists in a clinical lab setting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany neuropsychiatric illnesses are associated with psychosis, i.e., hallucinations (perceptions in the absence of causative stimuli) and delusions (irrational, often bizarre beliefs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA key challenge in studying reward processing in humans is to go beyond subjective self-report measures and quantify different aspects of reward such as hedonics, motivation, and goal value in more objective ways. This is particularly relevant for the understanding of overeating and obesity as well as their potential treatments. In this paper are described a set of measures of food-related motivation using handgrip force as a motivational measure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent research on human agency suggests that intentional causation is associated with a subjective compression in the temporal interval between actions and their effects. That is, intentional movements and their causal effects are perceived as closer together in time than equivalent unintentional movements and their causal effects. This so-called intentional binding effect is consistently found for one's own self-generated actions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Binge eating is associated with obesity and has been conceptualized as "food addiction." However, this view has received only inconsistent support in humans, and limited evidence relates key neurocircuitry to the disorder. Moreover, relatively few studies have used pharmacologic functional magnetic resonance imaging to probe the underlying basis of altered eating behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCamBAfx is a workflow application designed for both researchers who use workflows to process data (consumers) and those who design them (designers). It provides a front-end (user interface) optimized for data processing designed in a way familiar to consumers. The back-end uses a pipeline model to represent workflows since this is a common and useful metaphor used by designers and is easy to manipulate compared to other representations like programming scripts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe have constructed a broadband ultrafast time-resolved infrared (TRIR) spectrometer and incorporated it into our existing time-resolved spectroscopy apparatus, thus creating a single instrument capable of performing the complementary techniques of femto-/picosecond time-resolved resonance Raman (TR3), fluorescence, and UV/visible/infrared transient absorption spectroscopy. The TRIR spectrometer employs broadband (150 fs, approximately 150 cm(-1) FWHM) mid-infrared probe and reference pulses (generated by difference frequency mixing of near-infrared pulses in type I AgGaS2), which are dispersed over two 64-element linear infrared array detectors (HgCdTe). These are coupled via custom-built data acquisition electronics to a personal computer for data processing.
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