Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Anxious?: Re-Designing Women’S Jewelry To Help Manage Symptoms Of Anxiety Disorders, Nourbanu Feras Hijazi

Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety is a common and often stigmatized condition. Destigmatizing mental disorders can positively impact people’s interaction and communication with others and can prompt conversations in which people share their experiences with mental health, leading to improved societal understanding and perception.

My design solution tackles behavioral symptoms of anxiety, specifically two conditions that fall under obsessive-compulsive behavior: Dermatillomania and Trichotillomania. By redesigning women’s jewelry to specialized accessories, my intention is for these objects to help destigmatize these conditions and relieve symptoms of maladaptive behaviors and hurtful impulses. By redirecting these irresistible urges to an external artifact, the objects are designed to …

Shared Genetic And Environmental Influences On Fear, Anxiety, Posttraumatic Stress, And Brain Morphometry, Chelsea Sawyers

Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety disorders (ADs) and stress-related disorders are some of the most common psychiatric disorders in the United States. Like other c0mplex psychiatric illness, genetics and neuroimaging research has focused on understanding their underlying neurobiology. Areas within the fear-network play important roles in threat perception, fear conditioning/learning, cognitive processing, and modulation of fear responses including contextual modulation and extinction and have been implicated in ADs as well as stress disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The primary gap in the current search for underlying biological mechanisms is in whether biomarkers associated with disorders share genetic influences with the disorders they …

5-Ht2b Receptor-Mediated Cardiac Valvulopathy, Pallavi Nistala

Theses and Dissertations

5-HT_2B receptor agonism causes cardiac valvulopathy, a condition characterized by thickening of the heart valves and as a result, regurgitation of blood within the heart. The anti-obesity drug fenfluramine, which was originally prescribed as an anorectic, was withdrawn from the market due to causing cardiac valvulopathy. Fenfluramine, after metabolism by N-dealkylation, produces the metabolite norfenfluramine, which acts as a more potent valvulopathogen. The same was seen with MDMA (ecstasy), a popular drug of abuse, which is metabolized by N-dealkylation to produce MDA, a more potent valvulopathogen. Glennon and co-workers. studied a series of 2,5-dimethoxy-4- substituted phenylisopropylamines (DOX type) hallucinogens …

Penalized Mixed-Effects Ordinal Response Models For High-Dimensional Genomic Data In Twins And Families, Amanda E. Gentry

Theses and Dissertations

The Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study (BLTS) was being conducted in Australia and was funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Adolescent twins were sampled as a part of this study and surveyed about their substance use as part of the Pathways to Cannabis Use, Abuse and Dependence project. The methods developed in this dissertation were designed for the purpose of analyzing a subset of the Pathways data that includes demographics, cannabis use metrics, personality measures, and imputed genotypes (SNPs) for 493 complete twin pairs (986 subjects.) The primary goal was to determine what combination of SNPs and …