Managing mental health: why we need to redress the balance between healthcare spending and social spending.

Background: Mental health outcomes vary widely among high-income countries, although mental health problems represent an increasing proportion of the burden of disease for all countries. This has led to increased demand for healthcare services, but mental health outcomes may also be particularly sensitive to the availability of social services. This paper examines the variation in the absolute and relative amounts that high-income countries spend on healthcare and social services to determine whether increased expenditure on social services relative to healthcare expenditure might be associated with better mental health outcomes.

Wearable Vital Signs Monitoring for Patients With Asthma: A Review.

Worldwide,an estimated 461 000 people die from asthma attacks each year. While there remain treatments to alleviate asthma symptoms and reduce deaths, patient deterioration needs to be identified in sufficient time. To prevent asthma deterioration, patients need to be aware of personal and environmental triggers and monitor their asthma symptoms.

Predicting motor, cognitive & functional impairment in Parkinson's.

Objective: We recently demonstrated that 998 features derived from a simple 7-minute smartphone test could distinguish between controls, people with Parkinson's and people with idiopathic Rapid Eye Movement sleep behavior disorder, with mean sensitivity/specificity values of 84.6-91.9%.

Automated lesion segmentation with BIANCA: Impact of population-level features, classification algorithm and locally adaptive thresholding.

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) or white matter lesions exhibit high variability in their characteristics both at population- and subject-level, making their detection a challenging task. Population-level factors such as age, vascular risk factors and neurodegenerative diseases affect lesion load and spatial distribution. At the individual level, WMH vary in contrast, amount and distribution in different white matter regions.

Developing a large scale population screening tool for the assessment of Parkinson's disease using telephone-quality voice.

Recent studies have demonstrated that analysis of laboratory-quality voice recordings can be used to accurately differentiate people diagnosed with Parkinson's disease (PD) from healthy controls (HCs). These findings could help facilitate the development of remote screening and monitoring tools for PD. In this study, 2759 telephone-quality voice recordings from 1483 PD and 15 321 recordings from 8300 HC participants were analyzed.

English and Chinese Children's Performance on Numerical Tasks.

East Asian pupils have consistently outperformed Western pupils in international comparisons of mathematical performance at both primary and secondary school level. It has sometimes been suggested that a contributory factor is the transparent counting systems of East Asian languages, which may facilitate number representation. The present study compared 35 7-year-old second-year primary school children in Oxford, England and 40 children of similar age in Hong Kong, China on a standardized arithmetic test; on a two-digit number comparison test, including easy, misleading and reversible comparisons; and on a number line task, involving placing numbers in the appropriate position on four number lines: 1-10, 1-20, 1-100, and 1-1000.

Fieldwork after conflict: contextualising the challenges of access and data quality.

Despite sustained scholarly interest in post-conflict states, there has not been a thorough review and analysis of associated methodology and the challenges of conducting research in these contexts. Addressing this gap, this paper directs attention to the particular effects of these settings on access and data quality and their ramifications for the resulting scholarship. It assesses the intrinsic challenges of performing fieldwork in these environments, drawing on both relevant social science literature and the authors' experiences of carrying out research in Afghanistan and Timor-Leste.

The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming.

How we manage farming and food systems to meet rising demand is pivotal to the future of biodiversity. Extensive field data suggest impacts on wild populations would be greatly reduced through boosting yields on existing farmland so as to spare remaining natural habitats. High-yield farming raises other concerns because expressed per unit area it can generate high levels of externalities such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and nutrient losses.

Modelling the distribution of white matter hyperintensities due to ageing on MRI images using Bayesian inference.

White matter hyperintensities (WMH), also known as white matter lesions, are localised white matter areas that appear hyperintense on MRI scans. WMH commonly occur in the ageing population, and are often associated with several factors such as cognitive disorders, cardiovascular risk factors, cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Despite the fact that some links between lesion location and parametric factors such as age have already been established, the relationship between voxel-wise spatial distribution of lesions and these factors is not yet well understood.

Investigating Voice as a Biomarker for Leucine-Rich Repeat Kinase 2-Associated Parkinson's Disease.

We investigate the potential association between leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) mutations and voice. Sustained phonations ('aaah' sounds) were recorded from 7 individuals with LRRK2-associated Parkinson's disease (PD), 17 participants with idiopathic PD (iPD), 20 non-manifesting LRRK2-mutation carriers, 25 related non-carriers, and 26 controls. In distinguishing LRRK2-associated PD and iPD, the mean sensitivity was 95.

Smartphone motor testing to distinguish idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder, controls, and PD.

Objective: We sought to identify motor features that would allow the delineation of individuals with sleep study-confirmed idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) from controls and Parkinson disease (PD) using a customized smartphone application.

Methods: A total of 334 PD, 104 iRBD, and 84 control participants performed 7 tasks to evaluate voice, balance, gait, finger tapping, reaction time, rest tremor, and postural tremor. Smartphone recordings were collected both in clinic and at home under noncontrolled conditions over several days.

The oncostatin M-stromal cell axis in health and disease.

The field of stromal immunology has risen to prominence in the last decade, fuelled by accumulating evidence that nonhaematopoietic mesenchymal cells are not simply involved in modulating tissue structure, but actively contribute to immune processes. In addition to regulating tissue integrity during homoeostasis, stromal cells are sensitive sensors of inflammatory stimuli produced downstream of tissue injury or infection, and respond by producing a wide variety of chemokines, cytokines and adhesion factors that contribute to immunity and tissue repair. When not appropriately regulated, these same processes can result in inflammatory pathology and organ dysfunction.

Unravelling mycorrhiza-induced wheat susceptibility to the English grain aphid Sitobion avenae.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are root symbionts that can increase or decrease aphid growth rates and reproduction, but the reason by which this happens is unknown. To investigate the underlying mechanisms of this interaction, we examined the effect of AM fungi on the English Grain aphid (Sitobion avenae) development, reproduction, attraction, settlement and feeding behaviour on two naturally susceptible varieties Triticum aestivum (L.) variety Solstice and T.

Oncostatin M drives intestinal inflammation and predicts response to tumor necrosis factor-neutralizing therapy in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), including Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), are complex chronic inflammatory conditions of the gastrointestinal tract that are driven by perturbed cytokine pathways. Anti-tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF) antibodies are mainstay therapies for IBD. However, up to 40% of patients are nonresponsive to anti-TNF agents, which makes the identification of alternative therapeutic targets a priority.

An interdisciplinary review of current and future approaches to improving human-predator relations.

In a world of shrinking habitats and increasing competition for natural resources, potentially dangerous predators bring the challenges of coexisting with wildlife sharply into focus. Through interdisciplinary collaboration among authors trained in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, we reviewed current approaches to mitigating adverse human-predator encounters and devised a vision for future approaches to understanding and mitigating such encounters. Limitations to current approaches to mitigation include too much focus on negative impacts; oversimplified equating of levels of damage with levels of conflict; and unsuccessful technical fixes resulting from failure to engage locals, address hidden costs, or understand cultural (nonscientific) explanations of the causality of attacks.

The sustainability of changes in agricultural technology: The carbon, economic and labour implications of mechanisation and synthetic fertiliser use.

New agricultural technologies bring multiple impacts which are hard to predict. Two changes taking place in Indian agriculture are a transition from bullocks to tractors and an associated replacement of manure with synthetic fertilisers. This paper uses primary data to model social, environmental and economic impacts of these transitions in South India.

Group membership: Who gets to decide?

In this commentary, I focus on several problems that the authors' understanding of group identity raises: the legality of avoiding background diversity, the problem of effectively unshareable knowledge, the practical quality of some outcomes arrived at by groups with homogeneous backgrounds, and moral issues about fairness. I note also that much recent research challenges the view that background diversity is more likely to be a detriment than a benefit.

Inflammation, Innate Immunity, and the Intestinal Stromal Cell Niche: Opportunities and Challenges.

Stromal cells of multiple tissues contribute to immune-mediated protective responses and, conversely, the pathological tissue changes associated with chronic inflammatory disease. However, unlike hematopoietic immune cells, tissue stromal cell populations remain poorly characterized with respect to specific surface marker expression, their ontogeny, self-renewal, and proliferative capacity within tissues and the extent to which they undergo phenotypic immunological changes during the course of an infectious or inflammatory insult. Extending our knowledge of the immunological features of stromal cells provides an exciting opportunity to further dissect the underlying biology of many important immune-mediated diseases, although several challenges remain in bringing the emerging field of stromal immunology to equivalence with the study of the hematopoietic immune cell compartment.

Detecting and monitoring the symptoms of Parkinson's disease using smartphones: A pilot study.

Background: Remote, non-invasive and objective tests that can be used to support expert diagnosis for Parkinson's disease (PD) are lacking.

Methods: Participants underwent baseline in-clinic assessments, including the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), and were provided smartphones with an Android operating system that contained a smartphone application that assessed voice, posture, gait, finger tapping, and response time. Participants then took the smart phones home to perform the five tasks four times a day for a month.

Studying the impact of plating on ratings of the food served in a naturalistic dining context.

An experiment conducted in a naturalistic dining context is reported, in which the impact of different styles of plating on diners' experience of the food was assessed. A hundred and sixty three diners were separated into two groups during a luncheon event held in a large dining room. Each group of diners was served the same menu, with a variation in the visual presentation of the ingredients on the plate.

Inherited Representations are Read in Development.

Recent theoretical work has identified a tightly constrained sense in which genes carry representational content. Representational properties of the genome are founded in the transmission of DNA over phylogenetic time and its role in natural selection. However, genetic representation is not just relevant to questions of selection and evolution.

Methodological Encounters with the Phenomenal Kind.

Block's well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue.