Publications by authors named "Shinn A"

This study set out to characterise the in vitro development, including musculature, of the microphallid parasite of the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides (Linnaeus, 1767), Maritrema gratiosum Nicoll, 1907 collected in Scotland. An in vitro culture model was developed to obtain ovigerous adults of M. gratiosum and their morphology was observed.

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Background: Niemann-Pick Disease Type C (NPC) is an ultra-rare disorder characterized by progressive psychiatric and neurologic manifestations, with late infantile, juvenile, and adolescent/adult presentations. We examined morphological properties of the choroid plexus, a protective blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier, in NPC, and their relationship with neurodegeneration, clinical status, and circulatory markers. This study also determined whether choroid plexus morphology differentiates between NPC and more prevalent illnesses, schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD), which have overlapping psychiatric symptoms with adolescent and adult-onset NPC and are associated with misdiagnosis.

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Article Synopsis
  • Schizophrenia can start after age 40 in 20% of cases, prompting a study to identify risk factors for late-onset psychosis by comparing affected individuals to healthy controls.* -
  • The study included 142 late-onset psychosis patients (ages 40-65) and matched them with 568 controls, analyzing health records and using logistic regression to assess various risk factors.* -
  • Findings revealed significant risk factors for late-onset psychosis, including immigration, depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, severe trauma, and caregiver burden, highlighting the need for further research to understand causal relationships.*
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A recurring trend in evidence scrutinized over the past few decades is that disease outbreaks will become more frequent, intense, and widespread on land and in water, due to climate change. Pathogens and the diseases they inflict represent a major constraint on seafood production and yield, and by extension, food security. The risk(s) for fish and shellfish from disease is a function of pathogen characteristics, biological species identity, and the ambient environmental conditions.

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  • A recent study investigated the relationship between prescription amphetamines and the risk of developing psychosis or mania, finding that amphetamine use has increased in the U.S. over the past years.
  • The research used case-control methods, comparing hospitalized patients with psychosis against those hospitalized for other psychiatric issues, and identified a significant link between higher doses of amphetamines and increased odds of these serious mental health outcomes.
  • The findings highlight the need for cautious prescribing practices, particularly for high doses of amphetamines, along with ongoing monitoring for signs of psychosis or mania in patients.
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Background: Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and auditory hallucinations (AHs) display a distorted sense of self and self-other boundaries. Alterations of activity in midline cortical structures such as the prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) during self-reference as well as in the superior temporal gyrus (STG) have been proposed as neuromarkers of SZ and AHs.

Methods: In this randomized, participant-blinded, sham-controlled trial, 22 adults (18 males) with SZ spectrum disorders (SZ or schizoaffective disorder) and frequent medication-resistant AHs received one session of real-time fMRI neurofeedback (NFB) either from the STG (n = 11; experimental group) or motor cortex (n = 11; control group).

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Background: Voice hearing (VH) is a transdiagnostic experience that is common in trauma-related disorders. However, the neural substrates that underlie trauma-related VH remain largely unexplored. While auditory perceptual dysfunction is among the abnormalities implicated in VH in schizophrenia, whether VH in trauma-related disorders also involves auditory perceptual alterations is unknown.

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In September 2023, several hatcheries in Latin America experienced significant mortality rates, up to 90%, in zoea stage 2 of . Observations of fresh mounts revealed structures resembling lipid droplets, similar to those seen in a condition known as "las bolitas syndrome". Routine histopathological examinations identified detached cells and tissues in the digestive tracts of affected zoea, contrasting with the typical algal cell contents seen in healthy zoea.

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Siamese fishing fish () or betta are usually subjected to a special method of transportation for global trade, where they are individually conveyed in plastic bags containing just enough water to cover their bodies. This study aimed to investigate the effects of transportation on their stress response by measuring hematological values, stress hormone levels, glucose levels, and stress-related gene expression. Betta fish (average body weight 1.

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Article Synopsis
  • Asian seabass (Lates calcarifer) is a key species in aquaculture but faces significant bacterial disease challenges, necessitating effective strategies for disease prevention.
  • Vaccination is highlighted as a vital, eco-friendly method to protect these fish, but currently, only one commercially available vaccine exists for preventing Streptococcus iniae.
  • The development of new vaccines encounters hurdles, including a limited understanding of fish immune responses, high production costs, and the need for better adoption among farmers, alongside efforts to align fish vaccine technologies with advances seen in human and terrestrial animal healthcare.
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Immersion vaccination, albeit easier to administer than immunization by injection, sometimes has challenges with antigen uptake, resulting in sub-optimal protection. In this research, a new strategy to enhance antigen uptake of a heat-inactivated Vibrio harveyi vaccine in Asian seabass (Lates calcarifer) using oxygen nanobubble-enriched water (ONB) and positively charged chitosan (CS) was explored. Antigen uptake in fish gills was assessed, as was the antibody response and vaccine efficacy of four different combinations of vaccine with ONB and CS, and two control groups.

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Good adherence to antipsychotic therapy helps prevent relapses in first-episode psychosis (FEP). We used data from the FEP-CAUSAL Collaboration, an international consortium of observational cohorts, to emulate a target trial comparing antipsychotics, with treatment discontinuation as the primary outcome. Other outcomes included all-cause hospitalization.

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Early and accurate diagnosis is crucial for effective treatment and improved outcomes, yet identifying psychotic episodes presents significant challenges due to its complex nature and the varied presentation of symptoms among individuals. One of the primary difficulties lies in the underreporting and underdiagnosis of psychosis, compounded by the stigma surrounding mental health and the individuals' often diminished insight into their condition. Existing efforts leveraging Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to retrospectively identify psychosis typically rely on structured data, such as medical codes and patient demographics, which frequently lack essential information.

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Article Synopsis
  • Early diagnosis of psychosis is vital for effective treatment, but challenges arise due to underreporting, stigma, and the diverse symptoms presented by individuals.* -
  • The study utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze psychiatric admission notes, comparing various algorithms, including rule-based and machine learning models, to improve detection accuracy.* -
  • The XGBoost classifier, enhanced by expert-curated keywords, achieved the best performance (F1 score of 0.8881), significantly outperforming traditional methods based on ICD codes (F1 score of 0.7608).*
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  • * Probiotics with quorum-quenching capabilities show promise as a non-antibiotic solution, effectively disrupting bacterial communication and reducing pathogen virulence in fish.
  • * Despite their potential, the use of quorum-quenching probiotics is still in early development, requiring further research to optimize their application and integrate them into existing disease control methods in aquaculture.
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Objectives: Current guidelines recommend transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) following an ischemic stroke as the primary technique to identify cardiac abnormalities associated with an increased risk of cerebral embolism. It is unclear whether cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (cMRI), a technique shown to provide increased imaging resolution, may also enhance the cardiac assessment of ischemic stroke patients. We compared cMRI with TTE in the evaluation of Left Atrial (LA) size and pump function in a cohort of 44 patients with ischemic stroke.

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Asian seabass (Lates calcarifer) holds significant economic value in fish farming in the Asia-Pacific region. Vibriosis caused by Vibrio harveyi (Vh) is a severe infectious disease affecting intensive farming of this species, for which prevention strategies by vaccination have been developed. This study investigated an alternative approach to injectable vaccination to prevent vibriosis in Asian seabass juveniles.

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Background: The cerebellum contributes to the precise timing of non-motor and motor functions, and cerebellum abnormalities have been implicated in psychosis pathophysiology. In this study, we explored the effects of cerebellar theta burst stimulation (TBS), an efficient transcranial magnetic stimulation protocol, on temporal discrimination and self-reported mood and psychotic symptoms.

Methods: We conducted a case-crossover study in which patients with psychosis (schizophrenias, schizoaffective disorders, or bipolar disorders with psychotic features) were assigned to three sessions of TBS to the cerebellar vermis: one session each of intermittent (iTBS), continuous (cTBS), and sham TBS.

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Medication adherence is an important component of treatment and has the potential to influence illness trajectory in individuals with first-episode psychosis (FEP). We sought to examine time to medication non-adherence as well as factors related to non-adherence in a real-world FEP clinic. We conducted a survival analysis to examine time to medication non-adherence using data extracted from medical records of patients admitted to a FEP clinic at an academic psychiatric hospital between May 2012 and October 2017 (n = 219).

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Psychiatric electronic health records (EHRs) present a distinctive challenge in the domain of ML owing to their unstructured nature, with a high degree of complexity and variability. This study aimed to identify a cohort of patients with diagnoses of a psychotic disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), develop clinically-informed guidelines for annotating these health records for instances of traumatic events to create a gold standard publicly available dataset, and demonstrate that the data gathered using this annotation scheme is suitable for training a machine learning (ML) model to identify these indicators of trauma in unseen health records. We created a representative corpus of 101 EHRs (222,033 tokens) from a centralized database and a detailed annotation scheme for annotating information relevant to traumatic events in the clinical narratives.

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Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a potentially unique risk factor for auditory hallucinations (AH), but few studies have examined the moderating effects of sex or the association of CSA with limbic gray matter volume (GMV) in transdiagnostic samples of people with psychotic disorders. Here we found that people with psychotic disorders reported higher levels of all surveyed maltreatment types (e.g.

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Background: Childhood trauma is common and associated with worse psychiatric outcomes. Yet, clinicians may not inquire about childhood trauma due to a misconception that patients cannot provide reliable reports. The goal of this study was to examine the reliability of self-reports of childhood trauma in psychotic disorders.

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