Strengthening autonomy in mental health care through a relational approach.

Respect for autonomy is foundational to all types of clinical care, and receiving mental health care places people in a vulnerable situation that has a direct impact on their ability to live as they choose, making concerns about autonomy central. The classical understanding of personal autonomy, which still influences medical guidelines, is based on an individualistic framework and is inadequate for ethical mental health care. The goal of this Comment is to articulate why the relational autonomy model, developed in feminist bioethics, is a necessary approach for the mental health field.

Anti-amyloid treatments in Alzheimer's disease: elegance, evidence and ethics.

The so-called "amyloid cascade hypothesis" provides an elegant explanation of Alzheimer's disease (AD), has motivated the amyloid-lowering therapeutic strategy, and led to the elaboration of a rich experimental and conceptual toolkit for the field to progress. But it might be incorrect. The scientific evidence base supporting the efficacy and safety of current anti-amyloid antibody treatments in AD is weak.

Reducing confusion surrounding expert conceptions of Alzheimer's and dementia: A practical analysis.

Biological, clinicobiological and clinical conceptions of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias are being promoted simultaneously to different practical ends. The co-existence of contemporary conceptions and the 'scary label' associated with older diagnostic criteria create the possibility of misunderstanding and harm. In this comment, we argue in favour of socio-ethical interventions targeted to health workers and the general public so as to lower the uncertainties introduced by contemporary diagnostic criteria and to articulate how they relate to established criteria.

Survival time in Alzheimer's disease: An overlooked measure of safety and efficacy of disease-modifying therapies.

It is of vital importance to patients and physicians, as well as administrators and drug regulators, that the treatment for a disease has been shown to be safe and clinically meaningful in long-term use. Recent literature has highlighted 3 major categories of arguments for and against modification of the underlying disease process in Alzheimer's disease (AD): pathophysiology, biomarkers and data from clinical trials. We argue that the Alzheimer's arena is over-reliant on theories of disease modification based solely on brain positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and blood biomarkers of tau and Aβ peptides.

A philosophy of science approach to the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease.

Disputes about the scientific validity of the amyloid-β hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease have been held since the early 1990s, with little constructive progress made between opposing sides despite recent therapeutic progress. Here, I argue that philosophy of science can improve the chance of constructive debate by giving researchers technical language to describe and assess scientific progress. To do so, I interpret the amyloid hypothesis using a modified version of the research programme concept from philosopher of science Imre Lakatos.

The iceberg of dementia risk: empirical and conceptual arguments in favor of structural interventions for brain health.

While pharmacological interventions for dementia struggle to demonstrate improved outcomes for patients and at-risk populations, non-pharmacological lifestyle interventions have been proposed as a tool to achieve dementia risk reduction. In this review, it is argued that lifestyle modification alone is a surface-level intervention from the point of view of fair and far-reaching dementia prevention. Below the tip of this "iceberg of dementia risk," there are living conditions and social structures that represent deeper contributions to risk in the population.

The undeclared use of third-party service providers in academic publishing is unethical: an epistemic reflection and scoping review.

There is a substantial body of scientific literature on the use of third-party services (TPS) by academics to assist as "publication consultants" in scholarly publishing. TPS provide a wide range of scholarly services to research teams that lack the equipment, skills, motivation, or time to produce a paper without external assistance. While services such as language editing, statistical support, or graphic design are common and often legitimate, some TPS also provide illegitimate services and send unsolicited e-mails (spam) to academics offering these services.

Clarifying middle authorship contributions to reduce abuses in science publishing and assessment of top-ranked SJR biochemistry and pharmacology journals' authorship criteria.

So-called "middle authors," being neither the first, last, nor corresponding author of an academic paper, have made increasing relative contributions to academic scholarship over recent decades. No work has specifically and explicitly addressed the roles, rights, and responsibilities of middle authors, an authorship position which we believe is particularly vulnerable to abuse via growing phenomena such as paper mills. Responsible middle authorship requires transparent declarations of intellectual and other scientific contributions that journals can and should require of co-authors and established guidelines and criteria to achieve this already exist (ICMJE/CRediT).

Beyond disclaimers: the need for a curation-based model of PubMed.

According to its own description, the biomedical meta-database PubMed exists "with the aim of improving health-both globally and personally." Unfortunately, PubMed contains an increasing amount of low-quality research that may detract from this goal. Currently, PubMed warns its users and protects itself from such problems with a disclaimer stating that the presence of any article, book, or document in PubMed does not imply an endorsement of, or concurrence with, its contents by the NLM, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or the U.

Against "silent" retractions in neuroscience.

When an academic paper is published in a journal that assigns a digital object identifier (DOI) to papers, this is a de facto fait accompli. Corrections or retractions are supposed to follow a specific protocol, especially in journals that claim to follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. In this paper, we highlight a case of a new, fully open access neuroscience journal that claims to be COPE-compliant, yet has silently retracted two papers since all records, bibliometrics, and PDF files related to their existence have been deleted from the journal's website.

Active Surveillance of Powassan Virus in Massachusetts Ticks, Comparing Detection Using a New Triplex Real-Time PCR Assay with a Luminex Vector-Borne Panel.

Powassan virus is an emerging tick-borne pathogen capable of causing severe neuroinvasive disease. As the incidence of human Powassan virus grows both in magnitude and geographical range, the development of sensitive detection methods for diagnostics and surveillance is critical. In this study, a Taqman-based triplex real-time PCR assay was developed for the simultaneous and quantitative detection of Powassan virus and Powassan virus lineage II (deer tick virus) in ticks.

The proteinopenia hypothesis: Loss of Aβ and the onset of Alzheimer's Disease.

The dominant protein-lowering strategy in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) has failed to provide a clinically-meaningful treatment for patients. We hypothesize that the loss of functional, soluble Aβ42 during the process of aggregation into amyloid is more detrimental to the brain than the corresponding accrual of insoluble amyloid.

Against Over-reliance on PRISMA Guidelines for Meta-analytical Studies.

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were elaborated to allow authors of such papers to identify quality articles for inclusion in their scholarly work. However, we have identified several issues that point to an over-reliance on the PRISMA guidelines. Firstly, we question the rigor of implementation by authors and the rigor of verification by peer reviewers and editors, and whether they have screened papers to ensure adherence to the PRISMA guidelines.