Fifty-four-month survival in a 3-year-old child presenting with an aggressive metastatic dedifferentiated clival chordoma.

Dedifferentiated chordoma is a rare, aggressive, chemoresistant and radioresistant malignancy arising from notochord remnants that can occur anywhere along the spine. Incidence in patients under 20 years of age is 1 per 250 million. We report a case of dedifferentiated clival chordoma presenting in a 3-year-old boy with pulmonary metastasis, which responded unusually well to chemotherapy, achieving complete metastatic clearance and debulking of the primary tumour.

Perceiving and expressing feelings through actions in relation to individual differences in empathic traits: the Action and Feelings Questionnaire (AFQ).

Empathy is usually conceived of as independent of the non-verbal behaviors which mediate its experience, though embodied cognition theory predicts that individual differences in action representation will affect empathic traits. The "Actions and Feelings Questionnaire" (AFQ) was designed to capture individual differences in self-awareness of own and others' actions, particularly those associated with feelings, which we predicted would correlate with levels of empathic traits. A pilot 30-item questionnaire included items on perceptual sensitivity to action, imitation, action imagery, and gestural and facial expression.

The Patient Centered Assessment Method (PCAM): integrating the social dimensions of health into primary care.

Background: Social dimensions of health are known to contribute to what is often termed "patient complexity," which is particularly common among patients with multimorbidity. Health-care professionals require tools to help them identify and manage these aspects of patient needs.

Objectives: To examine: (i) the Patient Centered Assessment Method (PCAM), a tool for assessing patient complexity in ways that are sensitive to the biopsychosocial dimensions of health, in primary care settings in Scotland; (ii) the impact of the PCAM on referral patterns and its perceived value; and (iii) the PCAM's perceived applicability for use in a complex patient population.

The relationship between manual coordination and mental health.

Motor coordination impairments frequently co-occur with other developmental disorders and mental health problems in clinically referred populations. But does this reflect a broader dimensional relationship within the general population? A clearer understanding of this relationship might inform improvements in mental health service provision. However, ascertainment and referral bias means that there is limited value in conducting further research with clinically referred samples.

The 'Goldilocks Zone': getting the measure of manual asymmetries.

Some studies have shown that manual asymmetries decrease in older age. These results have often been explained with reference to models of reduced hemispheric specialisation. An alternative explanation, however, is that hand differences are subtle, and capturing them requires tasks that yield optimal performance with both hands.

Anticonvulsant Mechanisms of Electroconvulsive Therapy and Relation to Therapeutic Efficacy.

Background: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is held to confer anticonvulsant effects, although the role of rise in seizure threshold upon clinical effect is uncertain. This study investigated the relationship in a large, consecutive, retrospective sample of patients receiving ECT in Aberdeen. We have tested the hypotheses of previous authors to further examine the relationship between seizure and therapeutic effect as well as discuss the potential underlying neurobiological mechanisms.

Psychometric properties of the 16-item Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Effective management of depression is predicated upon reliable assessment. The Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS) is a depression severity scale with both self-rated (QIDS-SR16) and clinician-rated (QIDS-C16) versions. Although widely used in research, the psychometric properties of the QIDS16 have not been systematically reviewed.

Efficacy and tolerability of antidepressants for sub-threshold depression and for mild major depressive disorder.

Background: It is commonly assumed that robust evidence exists for the lack of efficacy of antidepressants at the milder end of the depression severity spectrum. In light of specific limitations of existing reviews, we assess if antidepressants are efficacious and tolerable for sub-threshold or mild major depressive disorder (MDD).

Method: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials of adults with sub-threshold depression or mild MDD (initial baseline symptom severity of HRSD≤20) comparing an antidepressant with placebo or treatment as usual (TAU) however defined.

Modeling a genetic risk for schizophrenia in iPSCs and mice reveals neural stem cell deficits associated with adherens junctions and polarity.

Defects in brain development are believed to contribute toward the onset of neuropsychiatric disorders, but identifying specific underlying mechanisms has proven difficult. Here, we took a multifaceted approach to investigate why 15q11.2 copy number variants are prominent risk factors for schizophrenia and autism.

A comparison of three methods of assessing differential item functioning (DIF) in the Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale: ordinal logistic regression, Rasch analysis and the Mantel chi-square procedure.

Purpose: It is important for clinical practice and research that measurement scales of well-being and quality of life exhibit only minimal differential item functioning (DIF). DIF occurs where different groups of people endorse items in a scale to different extents after being matched by the intended scale attribute. We investigate the equivalence or otherwise of common methods of assessing DIF.

Metacognitive functioning predicts positive and negative symptoms over 12 months in first episode psychosis.

The negative symptoms of schizophrenia are a major source of impairment and distress but both pharmacological and psychological treatment options provide only modest benefit. Developing more effective psychological treatments for negative symptoms will require a more sophisticated understanding of the psychological processes that are implicated in their development and maintenance. We extended previous work by demonstrating that metacognitive functioning is related to negative symptom expression across the first 12 months of first episode psychosis (FEP).

How adults with an intellectual disability experience bereavement and grief: a qualitative exploration.

This qualitative study explored the lived experiences of bereavement of 13 adults with an intellectual disability and found that their experiences could be situated within the concept of disenfranchised grief. The latter mediated participants' meaning making of the grieving process illustrated in the themes of intra- and interpersonal bereavement experiences, core beliefs about life and death, level of inclusion, and maintaining a continuing relationship with the deceased. The results suggest that participants experience bereavement and grief in a manner similar to that of the general population and suggest the need for open communication, facilitation of informed choice, and a culture of inclusion.

Manual control age and sex differences in 4 to 11 year old children.

To what degree does being male or female influence the development of manual skills in pre-pubescent children? This question is important because of the emphasis placed on developing important new manual skills during this period of a child's education (e.g. writing, drawing, using computers).

The development and initial validation of the cognitive fusion questionnaire.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) emphasizes the relationship a person has with their thoughts and beliefs as potentially more relevant than belief content in predicting the emotional and behavioral consequences of cognition. In ACT, "defusion" interventions aim to "unhook" thoughts from actions and to create psychological distance between a person and their thoughts, beliefs, memories, and self-stories. A number of similar concepts have been described in the psychology literature (e.

Common genetic variants on 1p13.2 associate with risk of autism.

Autism is a highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorder, and known genetic variants, mostly rare, account only for a small proportion of cases. Here we report a genome-wide association study on autism using two Chinese cohorts as gene discovery (n=2150) and three data sets of European ancestry populations for replication analysis of top association signals. Meta-analysis identified three single-nucleotide polymorphisms, rs936938 (P=4.

Involving patients and the public in research.

Aim: To present the actions taken by the Scottish Dementia Clinical Research Network (SDCRN) to comply with Scotland's National Dementia Strategy (SNDS) on patient and public involvement (PPI).

Background: Tackling priorities in dementia research is paramount to success in planning and delivering effective health services. Identifying such priorities is a task that should involve patients with dementia and their carers.

A novel method testing the ability to imitate composite emotional expressions reveals an association with empathy.

Social communication relies on intentional control of emotional expression. Its variability across cultures suggests important roles for imitation in developing control over enactment of subtly different facial expressions and therefore skills in emotional communication. Both empathy and the imitation of an emotionally communicative expression may rely on a capacity to share both the experience of an emotion and the intention or motor plan associated with its expression.

Psychometric properties of the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS-SR) in UK primary care.

It is widely believed that severity of depressive disorder should guide treatment selection and many guidelines emphasise this factor. The Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QID-SR16) is a self-complete measure of depression severity which includes all DSM-IV criterion symptoms for major depressive disorder. The object of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of the QIDS-SR16 in a primary care sample.

Differential item functioning of the HADS and PHQ-9: an investigation of age, gender and educational background in a clinical UK primary care sample.

Background: The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) are commonly used measures in clinical practice and research. It is important that such scales measure the trait they purport to measure and that the impact of other measurement artefacts is minimal. Differential item functioning of these scales by gender, educational background and age is currently assessed.

Common variant at 16p11.2 conferring risk of psychosis.

Epidemiological and genetic data support the notion that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share genetic risk factors. In our previous genome-wide association study, meta-analysis and follow-up (totaling as many as 18 206 cases and 42 536 controls), we identified four loci showing genome-wide significant association with schizophrenia. Here we consider a mixed schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (psychosis) phenotype (addition of 7469 bipolar disorder cases, 1535 schizophrenia cases, 333 other psychosis cases, 808 unaffected family members and 46 160 controls).

Asymmetric dimethylarginine: a possible link between vascular disease and dementia.

There is good epidemiological evidence that vascular disease predisposes to cognitive decline and dementia. The impact of vascular disease on dementia is likely to increase further because of the poor diagnosis and management of vascular risk factors, the increase in life expectancy, and the improved survival following major cardiovascular events, e.g.

Readability of CAMHS clinical letters.

Background:   Sending clinical letters to patients is common practice in CAMHS. Ease of reading and understanding is important for patients. Readability formulae are feasible and quick ways to assess this.