All rights reserved.”
“Persecutory delusions, a common symptom of schizophrenia, involve a disruption in the way that patients determine the intentions of others and especially their trustworthiness. However, it is unclear to what extent general

preference affects trustworthiness judgments in patients with schizophrenia and how that relates to paranoid symptomology. Patients with schizophrenia and control subjects rated unfamiliar faces CHIR-99021 ic50 for trustworthiness and attractiveness (as a proxy for preference). The results demonstrate that patients do not show an overall difference in their trustworthiness ratings of unfamiliar faces. However, they do show a significant reduction in the correlation between trustworthiness and other indicators of preference, in this case, attractiveness judgments.

The level of persecutory delusions is associated with this effect, such that patients with low levels of delusions show correlations near that of normal controls and high levels of persecutory delusions are related to a reduced trust/attractiveness correlation. These results suggest that patients with schizophrenia suffering from persecutory delusions rely less on normative social cues when making interpersonal judgments. Such findings underscore the importance of examining symptom-specific information when studying trust in patients with schizophrenia. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“The strategies of structured treatment interruptions (STIs) of antiretroviral therapies have been proposed for clinical

management of HIV infected patients, but clinical studies on STIs failed Selleck PD0332991 to achieve a consistent conclusion for this strategy. To evaluate the STI strategies, in particular, CD4(+) T cell count-guided STIs, and explain these controversial conclusions from different clinical studies, in this paper we propose to use piecewise HIV virus dynamic models to quantitatively explore the STI strategies and investigate their Epacadostat research buy dynamic behaviors. Our analysis results indicate that CD4(+) T cell counts can be maintained above a safe level using the STI with a single threshold or a threshold window. Numerical simulations show that the CD4(+) T cell counts either fluctuate or approach a stable level for a patient, depending on the prescribed upper or lower threshold values. In particular, the CD4(+) T cell counts can be stabilized at a desired level if the threshold policy control is applied. The durations of drug-on and drug-off are very sensitive to the prescribed upper or lower threshold levels, which possibly explains why the on-off strategy with fixed schedule or an STI strategy with frequent switches are associated with the high rate of failure. Our findings suggest that it is critical to carefully choose the thresholds of CD4(+) T cell count and individualize the STIs for each individual patient based on initial CD4(+) T cell counts. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.