Do mental disorders moderate the association between diabetes status and alcohol consumption?

Although heavy alcohol consumption is associated with diabetes-related complications, little is known about patterns of alcohol use among people with diabetes. Moreover, heavy drinking is more common among individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD), bipolar disorder (BD), and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) than in the general population, and these disorders are often comorbid with diabetes. The present study tested the hypothesis that mental disorders moderate the association between diabetes status and alcohol consumption.

A MBD-seq protocol for large-scale methylome-wide studies with (very) low amounts of DNA.

We recently showed that, after optimization, our methyl-CpG binding domain sequencing (MBD-seq) application approximates the methylome-wide coverage obtained with whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGB-seq), but at a cost that enables adequately powered large-scale association studies. A prior drawback of MBD-seq is the relatively large amount of genomic DNA (ideally >1 µg) required to obtain high-quality data. Biomaterials are typically expensive to collect, provide a finite amount of DNA, and may simply not yield sufficient starting material.

A systematic examination of the nature and content of vignettes in schizophrenia research.

Background: Vignettes are often used in psychiatric research, yet there are few systematic studies on their content, creation, and use.

Aims: This article describes a study of: (a) how researchers create vignettes in research on schizophrenia and (b) how these vignettes portray individuals with schizophrenia.

Method: We conducted a systematic search of the PubMed database for articles between 2008 and 2012 that used vignettes to measure attitudes about schizophrenia.