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How a social episode is perceived by a person and how the experience affects her/his subsequent behaviors will inevitably and sometimes accidentally vary in each case on the developmental trajectory from the birth of consciousness to death. Both the preceding developmental conditions and the social impact of the episode become a starting point for the following states of human complex conditions, creating the extraordinary diversity that characterizes our complex society. In this evolutionarily carved landscape, genetic factors including stochastic epistasis, environmental modification, and gene-environment interactions are all active. In these processes, interactions between developmental social vulnerability and environmental influences can lead to the emergence and persistence of some derivative states with social maladaptation. In our model, every psychiatric condition including aberrant paranoid-hallucinatory states is classified as a derivative state. The probability distribution curve for these derivative states has a non-linear relationship with the liability in the population, and there is none with probability 1.0 or zero. Individuals with trivial social vulnerability or high resilience may develop the derivative states in tremendously stressful circumstances, and individuals with huge social vulnerability may not necessarily develop the derivative states in the presence of adequate social supports. Social skillfulness/unskillfulness and behavioral flexibility/inflexibility form the core of the vulnerability-related dimensions. The clinical picture of a derivative manifestation is profiled depending on the individual trait levels in the derivative-related dimensions. Each derivative state has a requisite lineup of dimensions and each dimension can contribute to multiple psychiatric conditions. For example, aberrant paranoid-hallucinatory states and bipolar condition may share some developmental conditions as the derivative-related dimensions. Therefore, multiple derivative states can co-occur or be sequentially comorbid. Although the 'learned strategies' can ostensibly mask the clinical manifestation of developmental deviations, the change of the true dimensional position to the socially skillful direction is efficiently obtained through social experiences in a supportive environment. The liability-probability model makes it impossible to discriminate individuals with psychiatric diagnosis from individuals without the diagnosis and allows all of us to reside in the same human complex diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Aim: Although lifestyle changes in university students are highly influential in causing their later obese-related diseases, there is still limited knowledge about obese university students. Metabolic syndrome-related markers and conditions were investigated among obese students in Kagoshima University, Japan. Methods: We evaluated 46 obese students (31 males and 15 females), with high body mass index (BMI) (≥30), aged between 18 and 24 years, and who were recruited at university annual health check-ups in 2006 and 2007. All subjects underwent measurement of waist circumference, laboratory evaluations for the diagnostic criteria (Japan Metabolic Syndrome Criteria Study Group) and levels of uric acid and plasminogen activator inhibitor type-1 (PAI-1), and behavioral assessments using a questionnaire about personal and lifestyle factors. Results: 39.1% of the obese university students fulfilled the criteria for metabolic syndrome. In the metabolic syndrome constituents, higher prevalence was obtained in hypertension and hypertriglyceridemia. Levels of uric acid and PAI-1 were high with statistical significance in metabolic syndrome. A broader expansion of positive correlations between PAI-1 and the metabolic syndrome components as compared with those of uric acid suggested the important roles of PAI-1 in the pathological processes or outcomes of metabolic syndrome. Conclusion: Our findings suggested that strategies to prevent hypertension and/or dyslipidemia are important for the prophylaxis of metabolic syndrome in university students, and that dietary fat lowering has a prophylactic importance in the control of hyperuricemia. Furthermore, a causal relationship between the regularly missed breakfasts and metabolic syndrome was suggested. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The ongoing paradigm shift from the traditional qualitative dichotomy concept to the quantitative framework increases the necessity of an evolutionary implication and interpretation of the presence of a hypo-reproductive behavioral extreme (autism) with strong genetic contribution. As a theoretical challenge to explain the survival of the dimensional distribution of autistic traits, an epistasis-associated oscillation of fitness outcomes is proposed. In this hypothesis, an allele could contribute to the existence of both phenotypic extreme tails and the hypothesized genetic machinery (quantitative trait loci) for autism would necessarily be common in the entire human population. The postulated autism genes would allow autistics to enjoy autistic traits and assets and all of the residual non-autistic individuals could owe their social skills and reproductive advantages to the same autism genes. Importantly, the reported modest correlations between core autistic dimensions can be illustrated using unsynchronized epistatic pleiotropy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]