Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Medical Norm Of Psychiatric Misdiagnoses In Rare Disease Patients, Rachel Han

Publications and Research

Spring 2022 ENG 120 Student Final Research Paper on the medical norm of psychiatric misdiagnosis throughout the diagnostic journeys of rare disease patients. The idea of a norm was taken from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Tedx Talk "The Danger of a Single Story". Paper discusses prevalence, harmful effects, and origin of this medical norm. Includes discussion of statistical data quoted relating to prevalence of rare diseases as well as anecdotal evidence of the severe ramifications of this norm. Discussion of how medically unexplained symptoms such as mysterious chronic pain often lead to the phenomenon of the psychogenic inference. Origins of this …

Systematic Review Of Pathways To Care In The U.S. For Black Individuals With Early Psychosis, Oladunni Oluwoye, Beshaun Davis, Franchesca S. Kuhney, Deidre M. Anglin

Publications and Research

The pathway to receiving specialty care for first episode psychosis (FEP) among Black youth in the US has received little attention despite documented challenges that negatively impact engagement in care and clinical outcomes. We conducted a systematic review of US-based research, reporting findings related to the pathway experiences of Black individuals with FEP and their family members. A systematic search of PubMed, PsycInfo, and Embase/Medline was performed with no date restrictions up to April 2021. Included studies had samples with at least 75% Black individuals and/or their family members or explicitly examined racial differences. Of the 80 abstracts screened, 28 …

Impact Of Forensic Medical Evaluations On Immigration Relief Grant Rates And Correlates Of Outcomes In The United States., Holly G. Atkinson, Katarzyna Wyka, Kathryn Hampton, Christian Seno, Elizabeth Yim, Deborah Ottenheimer, Nermeen Arastu

Publications and Research

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of forensic medical evaluations on grant rates for applicants seeking immigration relief in the United States (U.S.) and to identify significant correlates of grant success. We conducted a retrospective analysis of 2584 cases initiated by Physicians for Human Rights between 2008-2018 that included forensic medical evaluations, and found that 81.6% of applicants for various forms of immigration relief were granted relief, as compared to the national asylum grant rate of 42.4%. Among the study’s cohort, the majority (73.7%) of positive outcomes were grants of asylum. A multivariable regression analysis revealed …

A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis On The Efficacy Of Repeated Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation For Migraine, Guoshuai Cai, Zhu Xia, Leigh Charvet, Feifei Xiao, Abhishek Datta, X Michelle Androulakis

Publications and Research

Purpose: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) may have therapeutic potential in the management of migraine. However, studies to date have yielded conflicting results. We reviewed studies using repeated tDCS for longer than 4 weeks in migraine treatment, and performed meta-analysis on the efficacy of tDCS in migraine.

Methods: In this meta-analysis, we included the common outcome measurements reported across randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Subgroup analysis was performed at different post-treatment endpoints, and with different stimulation intensities and polarities.

Results: Five RCTs were included in the quantitative meta-analysis with a total of 104 migraine patients. We found a significant reduction of …

Using Carrots Not Sticks To Cultivate A Culture Of Safeguarding In Sport, Judith L. Komaki, Yetsa A. Tuakli-Wosornu

Publications and Research

The power-driven, win-at-all-costs milieu of many sport settings can create fertile ground for athlete victimization and abuse (Roberts et al., 2020). Victory can in fact be so sovereign that abusive coaches and staff are enabled and “even rewarded. . . in the name of winning” (Armour, 2020). Athlete abuse prevention therefore requires systemic cultural change (Letourneau et al., 2014; Rhind and Owusu-Sekyere, 2017). Thus far, however, enacting this idea has eluded organizations in sport (Mountjoy et al., 2016; Harris and Terry, 2019; Kerr et al., 2019; Rhind and Owusu-Sekyere, 2020) as well as in other settings (National Academies of Sciences, …

Modeling Interval Timing By Recurrent Neural Nets, Theodore Raphan, Eugene Dorokhin, Andrew R. Delamater

Publications and Research

The purpose of this study was to take a new approach in showing how the central nervous system might encode time at the supra-second level using recurrent neural nets (RNNs). This approach utilizes units with a delayed feedback, whose feedback weight determines the temporal properties of specific neurons in the network architecture. When these feedback neurons are coupled, they form a multilayered dynamical system that can be used to model temporal responses to steps of input in multidimensional systems. The timing network was implemented using separate recurrent “Go” and “NoGo” neural processing units to process an individual stimulus indicating the …

Teaching Third-Year Medical Students To Address Patients’ Spiritual Needs In The Surgery/Anesthesiology Clerkship, Holly G. Atkinson, David Fleenor, Susan M. Lerner, Edward Poliandro, Joseph Truglio

Publications and Research

Introduction: Despite many patients wanting physicians to inquire about their religious/spiritual beliefs, most physicians do not make such inquiries. Among physicians who do, surgeons are less likely than family and general practitioners and psychiatrists to do so.

Methods: To address this gap, we developed a 60-minute curriculum that follows the Kolb cycle of experiential learning for third-year medical students on their surgery/anesthesiology clerkship. The session includes definitions of religion/spirituality, an overview of the literature on spirituality in surgery, a review of the FICA Spiritual History Tool, discussion of the role of the chaplain and the process of initiating a chaplain …

Readability Of Colorectal Cancer Online Information: A Brief Report, Corey Basch, Danna Ethan, Sarah A. Maclean, Philip Garcia, Charles E. Basch

Publications and Research

Purpose: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. A decline in deaths caused by CRC has been largely attributable to screening and prompt treatment. Motivation, shown to influence cancer-related screening and treatment decisions, can be shaped by information from the Internet. The extent to which this information is easily readable on cancer-related websites is not known. The purpose of this study was to assess the readability levels of CRC information on 100 websites.

Methods: Using methods from a prior study, the keyword, “colorectal cancer,” was searched on a cleared Internet browser. Scores …

Maternal Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis Response To Foraging Uncertainty: A Model Of Individual Vs. Social Allostasis And The "Superorganism Hypothesis", Jeremy D. Coplan, Nishant K. Gupta, Asif Karim, Anna Rozenboym, Eric L.P. Smith, John G. Kral, Leonard A. Rosenblum

Publications and Research

Introduction: Food insecurity is a major global contributor to developmental origins of adult disease. The allostatic load of maternal food uncertainty from variable foraging demand (VFD) activates corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) without eliciting hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activation measured on a group level. Individual homeostatic adaptations of the HPA axis may subserve second-order homeostasis, a process we provisionally term “social allostasis.” We postulate that maternal food insecurity induces a “superorganism” state through coordination of individual HPA axis response.

Methods: Twenty-four socially-housed bonnet macaque maternal-infant dyads were exposed to 16 weeks of alternating two-week epochs of low or high foraging demand shown to compromise …

Posttraumatic Reactions To Psychosis: A Qualitative Analysis, Weili Lu, Kim T. Mueser, Stanley D. Rosenberg, Philip T. Yanos, Neisrein Mahmoud

Publications and Research

The current study aimed to evaluate the potentially traumatic aspects of psychotic symptoms and psychiatric treatment of psychosis using qualitative methods. Participants included 63 people with first episode psychosis or multiple psychotic episodes recruited from an inpatient psychiatric unit and an urban state psychiatric hospital in the North East region of the United States. Quasi-structured interviews were used to explore those aspects of symptoms and treatment that were perceived as traumatic Emotional reactions to the most traumatic aspect of symptoms and treatment, during and after the event, were also examined. Participants described a number of traumatogenic aspects of psychotic symptoms, …

Persistent Amygdala Novelty Response Is Associated With Less Anterior Cingulum Integrity In Trauma-Exposed Women, Seungyeon A. Yoon, Mariann R. Weierich

Publications and Research

Objectives: We investigated the potential role of cingulum and uncinate fasciculus integrity in trauma-related neural hypervigilance, indexed by less discrimination between amygdala activation to novel and familiar affective images.

Participants: 22 women (mean age 21.7 ± 3.9 years) with a history of trauma, and 20 no-trauma controls (mean age 21.9 ± 4.8 years).

Measures: Trauma exposure and trauma-related symptoms were assessed during structured clinical interview. White matter integrity in the anterior cingulum, parahippocampal cingulum, and uncinate fasciculus was measured using diffusion weighted imaging. Amygdala response to novel and familiar affective scenes was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Results: Trauma-exposed …

Updating Temporal Expectancy Of An Aversive Event Engages Striatal Plasticity Under Amygdala Control, Glenn Dallérac, Michael Graupner, Jeroen Knippenberg, Raquel Chacon Ruiz Martinez, Tatiane Ferreira Tavares, Lucille Tallot, Nicole El Massioui, Anna Verschueren, Sophie Höhn, Julie Boulanger Bertolus, Alex D. Reyes, Joseph E. Ledoux, Glenn E. Schafe, Lorenzo Diaz-Mataix, Valérie Doyère

Publications and Research

Pavlovian aversive conditioning requires learning of the association between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned, aversive stimulus (US) but also involves encoding the time interval between the two stimuli. The neurobiological bases of this time interval learning are unknown. Here, we show that in rats, the dorsal striatum and basal amygdala belong to a common functional network underlying temporal expectancy and learning of a CS–US interval. Importantly, changes in coherence between striatum and amygdala local field potentials (LFPs) were found to couple these structures during interval estimation within the lower range of the theta rhythm (3–6 Hz). Strikingly, we …

Research Methods In Occupational Health Psychology, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Chu-Hsiang Chang

Publications and Research

http://www.springerpub.com/occupational-health-psychology.html

Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field that focuses on the science and practice of psychology in promoting and developing workplace health- and safety-related initiatives. This comprehensive text for undergraduate and graduate survey courses is the first to encompass a wide range of key issues in OHP. It draws from the domains of psychology, public health, preventive medicine,nursing, industrial engineering, law, and epidemiology to focus on the theory and practice of protecting and promoting the health, well-being, and safety of individuals in the workplace and improving the quality of work life.

The text addresses key psychosocial …

Burnout Et Dépression, Entre Normal Et Pathologique? Histoire D’Une Différenciation Hasardeuse, Bianchi Renzo, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

Initial described in the 1970s, the burnout syndrome has been difficult to characterize. It has been difficult to distinguish it from both clinical and subclinical depressive syndromes. In this chapter, we present a logical analysis of the distinction between burnout and depression. We synthesize the results of studies that bear on that distinction. We find that methodological and the historical separation of two lines of research as well as the lack of articulation between dimensional and categorical approaches to psychopathology.

On The Dead End Of Current Research On Burnout's Prevalence, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

Dimou et al. (2016) concluded that >50% of surgeons experience burnout. For three reasons, we think that such conclusions are unwarranted. First, there are no consensual or binding diagnostic criteria for burnout. Second, recent research (e.g., Bianchi, Schonfeld, & Laurent, 2015) suggests that burnout is actually a depressive syndrome. Finally, we note that researchers’ recommendations about stress-reducing organizational changes often remain incantatory because they insufficiently consider the economic issues and macrosocial power relationships that can hamper the recommendations’ implementation. Current practices in burnout research have led to an accumulation of results, the clinical meaning of which is obscure.

Burnout-Depression Overlap: A Study Of New Zealand Schoolteachers, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Mayor, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

We examined the overlap of burnout with depression in a sample of 184 New Zealand schoolteachers. Burnout and depressive symptoms were strongly correlated with each other (r = .73; disattenuated correlation: .82) and moderately correlated with dysfunctional attitudes, ruminative responses, and pessimistic attributions. All the participants with high frequencies of burnout symptoms were identified as clinically depressed. Suicidal ideation was reported by 36% of those participants. Three groups of teachers emerged from a two-step cluster analysis: “low burnout-depression,” “medium burnout-depression,” and “high burnout-depression.” The correlation between the affective-cognitive and somatic symptoms of depression was similar in strength to the burnout-depression …

Burnout’S Prevalence Estimations: A House Of Cards?, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

Elmariah et al. (2016) found that 65% of the internal medicine residents who were assessed suffered from burnout. We have 3 concerns about the conclusion. First, the authors used a cutoff score on a burnout measure that is problematic because (a) it is devoid of theoretical or clinical grounding and (b) burnout items were formatted in an unorthodox manner, and (c) including residents who responded "neutral" to a symptom item among those identified as burned out. Second, the authors identified as burned out residents who worked on the night float rotation although the data suggest otherwise. Third information on symptom …

Burnout And Depression: Label-Related Stigma, Help-Seeking, And Syndrome Overlap, Renzo Bianchi, Jay Verkuilen, Romain Brisson, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

We investigated whether burnout and depression differed in terms of public stigma and help-seeking attitudes and behaviors. Secondarily, we examined the overlap of burnout and depressive symptoms. A total of 1046 French schoolteachers responded to an Internet survey in November–December 2015. The survey included measures of public stigma, help-seeking attitudes and behaviors, burnout and depressive symptoms, self-rated health, neuroticism, extraversion, history of anxiety or depressive disorder, social desirability, and sociodemographic variables.The burnout label appeared to be less stigmatizing than the depression label. In either case, however, fewer than 1% of the participants exhibited stigma scores signaling agreement with the proposed …

Critical Time Intervention For People Leaving Shelters In The Netherlands: Assessing Fidelity And Exploring Facilitators And Barriers, Renee De Vet, Danielle A. M. Lako, Marielle D. Beijersbergen, Linda Van Den Dries, Sarah Conover, Albert M. Van Hemert, Daniel Herman, Judith R. L. M. Wolf

Publications and Research

International dissemination of evidence-based interventions calls for rigorous evaluation. As part of an evaluation of critical time intervention (CTI) for homeless people and abused women leaving Dutch shelters, this study assessed fidelity in two service delivery systems and explored factors influencing model adherence. Data collection entailed chart review (n = 70) and two focus groups with CTI workers (n = 11). The intervention obtained an overall score of three out of five (fairly implemented) for compliance fidelity and chart quality combined. Fidelity did not differ significantly between service systems, supporting its suitability for a range of populations. The eight themes …

Massacre In Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized And Killed In Meiktila, Richard Sollom, Holly G. Atkinson

Publications and Research

This report details the results of a Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) investigation into the March 20 and 21, 2013, attacks on Muslim students, teachers, and residents in the Mingalar Zayyone quarter of Meiktila, a small town in central Burma.

A two-person team, the authors of the report, from PHR conducted 33 interviews about the attacks, which resulted in the deaths of at least 20 children and four teachers. The report details the attacks by the Buddhist mobs, provides evidence that local police officers were complicit in the crimes, and lists policy recommendations for the Burmese government and the international …

Under The Gun: Ongoing Assaults On Bahrain’S Health System, Richard Sollom, Holly G. Atkinson

Publications and Research

In February 2011, the Government of Bahrain began targeting health professionals who treated protesters. In April 2012, PHR's Richard Sollom, Deputy Director, and Holly Atkinson, MD, FACP, past President of PHR's Board and volunteer expert, authored a report showing the devastation on Bahrain's health system that have resulted from the Government of Bahrain’s continued assault on doctors, patients, and the healthcare system.

Posttraumatic Stress And Myocardial Infarction Risk Perceptions In Hospitalized Acute Coronary Syndrome Patients, Donald Edmondson, Jonathan A. Shaffer, Ellen-Ge Denton, Daichi Shimbo, Lynn Clemow

Publications and Research

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is related to acute coronary syndrome (ACS; i.e., myocardial infarction or unstable angina) recurrence and poor post-ACS adherence to medical advice. Since risk perceptions are a primary motivator of adherence behaviors, we assessed the relationship of probable PTSD to ACS risk perceptions in hospitalized ACS patients (n = 420). Participants completed a brief PTSD screen 3-7 days post-ACS, and rated their 1-year ACS recurrence risk relative to other men or women their age. Most participants exhibited optimistic bias (mean recurrence risk estimate between "average" and "below average"). Further, participants who screened positive for current PTSD (n …

Ten-Year Consistency In Neurological Test Performance Of Children Without Focal Neurological Deficit, Stephen Q. Shafer, Cornelius Stokman, David Shaffer, Stephen K-C Ng, Patricia A. O'Connor, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

To assess 'soft-sign' persistence and its correlates outside a referred sample, 159 members of a local birth cohort of the United National Collaborative Perinatal Project were traced and their performance on six neurological test scales was measured at age 17 by examiners blind to their status at age seven. A comparison group was also formed, who had been 'sign-free' at age seven. On four of the six tests (dysdiadochokinesis, mirror movements, dysgraphesthesia and motor slowness) index boys did significantly worse than the comparison boys; by contrast, index girls scored significantly worse than comparisons only on motor slowness.