Age and Social Context Modulate the Effect of Anxiety on Risk-taking in Pediatric Samples.

Although risk-taking has been studied from a developmental perspective, no study has examined how anxiety, age, risk-valence and social context interact to modulate decision-making in youths. This study probes this question using a risk-taking task, the Stunt Task, in clinically anxious children (n = 17, 10 F, age = 8.3-12.

Interaction of threat and verbal working memory in adolescents.

Threat induces a state of sustained anxiety that can disrupt cognitive processing, and, reciprocally, cognitive processing can modulate an anxiety response to threat. These effects depend on the level of cognitive engagement, which itself varies as a function of task difficulty. In adults, we recently showed that induced anxiety impaired working memory accuracy at low and medium but not high load.

Oxytocin and vasopressin modulate risk-taking.

The modulation of risk-taking is critical for adaptive and optimal behavior. This study examined how oxytocin (OT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) influence risk-taking in function of three parameters: sex, risk-valence, and social context. Twenty-nine healthy adults (14 males) completed a risk-taking task, the Stunt task, both in a social-stress (evaluation by unfamiliar peers) and non-social context, in three separate drug treatment sessions.

Adolescent transformations of behavioral and neural processes as potential targets for prevention.

Adolescence is a transitional period in development that is marked by a distinct, typical behavioral profile of high rates of exploration, novelty-seeking, and emotional lability. While these behaviors generally assist the adolescent transition to independence, they can also confer vulnerability for excessive risk-taking and psychopathology, particularly in the context of specific environmental or genetic influences. As prevention research depends on the identification of targets of vulnerability, the following review will discuss the interplay among motivational systems including reward-related, avoidance-related, and regulatory processes in typical and atypical adolescent development.

Metastases of the heart and pericardium.

Tumours metastasizing to the heart are one of the least investigated subjects in clinical oncology. Nevertheless, this problem holds great practical significance in relation to the operability and type of treatment of neoplastic patients. Of 4769 patients autopsied at the Institute of Pathological Anatomy of Trieste from 1994 through 1995, 1148 males (42%) and 780 females (38%) had a primary tumour.

From epithelial dysplasia to squamous carcinoma of the head and neck region: evolutive and prognostic histopathological markers.

Ki67 immunoreactivity, p53 expression and apoptotic index were examined in 26 non-malignant lesions of the head and neck region, 22 dysplastic lesions of patients without evidence of head and neck carcinoma during follow-up time, 24 dysplastic lesions of patients who subsequently developed a squamous carcinoma in the same area, and 42 squamous cancer cases. A directly proportional relation between Ki67 immunoreactive pattern, apoptotic index and histological evolution from normal to dysplastic or neoplastic mucosa was evident. As far as p53 protein is concerned, its expression became higher and frequently transmural in neoplastic mucosa.

Neoplastic and borderline lesions of the prostate: autopsy study and epidemiological data.

Early detection and management of prostatic cancer (PC) is an important public health problem in all industrialized countries, where the relative rate of the elderly population is rapidly increasing. We examined the epidemiology of PC in the province of Trieste, Italy and studied the relationship between prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN) and PC. The average annual incidence of PC was 99.