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Attentional biases have been posited as one of the key mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of chronic pain and co-occurring internalizing mental health symptoms. Despite this theoretical prominence, a comprehensive understanding of the nature of biased attentional processing in chronic pain and its relationship to theorized antecedents and clinical outcomes is lacking, particularly in youth. This study used eye-tracking to assess attentional bias for painful facial expressions and its relationship to theorized antecedents of chronic pain and clinical outcomes. Youth with chronic pain (n = 125) and without chronic pain (n = 52) viewed face images of varying levels of pain expressiveness while their eye gaze was tracked and recorded. At baseline, youth completed questionnaires to assess pain characteristics, theorized antecedents (pain catastrophizing, fear of pain, and anxiety sensitivity), and clinical outcomes (pain intensity, interference, anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress). For youth with chronic pain, clinical outcomes were reassessed at 3 months to assess for relationships with attentional bias while controlling for baseline symptoms. In both groups, youth exhibited an attentional bias for painful facial expressions. For youth with chronic pain, attentional bias was not significantly associated with theorized antecedents or clinical outcomes at baseline or 3-month follow-up. These findings call into question the posited relationships between attentional bias and clinical outcomes. Additional studies using more comprehensive and contextual paradigms for the assessment of attentional bias are required to clarify the ways in which such biases may manifest and relate to clinical outcomes.

Children's heightened attention to pain and parental narrative style have been linked to the development of negatively-biased pain memories in children (i.e., recalling higher levels of pain and fear than initially reported, which robustly predicts maladaptive pain outcomes). However, the interplay between child attention bias and parental narrative style remains to be assessed. This study aims to fill this gap using enhanced paradigms assessing children's cognitive biases for cues signaling actual pain. Healthy school children (N = 63; 9-15 years old) received painful heat stimuli while performing a spatial cueing task measuring attention bias to cues signaling actual pain. Parent-child interaction upon completion of the painful task, was coded for parental narrative style (i.e., elaboration, repetition and evaluation). Children's pain-related memories were elicited two weeks later. Findings indicated that children showed an attention bias to cues signaling pain. Furthermore, children who were hypervigilant to pain cues benefitted from parents elaborating more about the pain experience, while children who avoided pain cues developed more negatively-biased pain memories if parents had a more elaborative style compared to a more evaluative parental style. In conclusion, this study suggests that optimal ways to talk about children's pain depend upon child characteristics (i.e., children's attention bias to pain).

Contains fulltext : 240214.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access), Cyberattacks against healthcare institutions threaten patient care. The risk of being targeted by a damaging attack is increased when medical devices are used which rely on unmaintained legacy software that cannot be replaced and may have publicly known vulnerabilities. This review aims to provide insight into solutions presented in the literature that mitigate risks caused by legacy software on medical devices. We performed a scoping review by categorising and analysing the contributions of a selection of articles, taken from a literature set discovered through bidirectional citation searching. We found 18 solutions, each fitting at least one of the categories of intrusion detection and prevention, communication tunnelling or hardware protections. Approaches taken include proxying Bluetooth communication through smartphones, behaviour-specification based anomaly detection and authenticating signals based on physical characteristics. These solutions are applicable to various use-cases, ranging from securing pacemakers to medical sensor networks. Most of the solutions are based on intrusion detection and on tunnelling insecure wireless communications. These technologies have distinct application areas, and the decision which one is most appropriate will depend on the type of medical device.

Contains fulltext : 219064.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access), Children's experience of chronic pain is influenced by the psychological and behavioural responses of their parents. However, the majority of research has been cross-sectional, precluding examination of how these dynamic relationships unfold over time. This study used a microlongitudinal design to examine the daily relationships between parent mood and protective responses and child chronic pain. We also examined the moderating roles of child and parent pain catastrophizing to determine how the affective-motivational context may alter the influence of parent factors. Participants included 95 youth with idiopathic chronic pain (Mage = 14.08; 71.6% female) and their parents. At baseline, parents and youth reported on their catastrophic thinking about child pain. For 7 consecutive days, parents completed daily assessments of their mood and protective responses, while youth completed assessments of their pain intensity, unpleasantness, and interference. Multilevel path analyses were conducted. At a daily level, greater parent protectiveness significantly predicted higher youth pain unpleasantness, interference, and intensity; more negative parent mood significantly predicted higher youth pain intensity and unpleasantness. Higher baseline youth pain catastrophizing predicted a stronger daily association between parent mood and youth pain unpleasantness and intensity. Higher baseline parent pain catastrophizing predicted a weaker daily association between parent protectiveness and youth pain interference. Findings suggest that parent mood and protective responses are dynamic, daily predictors of child pain. Findings also underscore the importance of addressing parents' daily mental health and protectiveness, among youth with chronic pain, and suggest different intervention targets depending on levels of child and parent catastrophizing.

Current theoretical models of pain catastrophizing have diverging predictions regarding the role of social context and perceived threat on pain expression. The communal coping model of catastrophizing predicts that high pain catastrophizers display more pain expression in the presence of another, regardless of the threat value of the pain, while a cognitive appraisal model predicts high pain catastrophizers to express more pain when pain has increased threat value, regardless of social context. A 2 x 2 factorial design was used to test the validity of both predictions. Healthy participants with varying levels of pain catastrophizing were exposed to a cold pressor task, consisting of a 60 s immersion and 60 s recovery period. Interestingly, the immersion results revealed that beyond and independent from the effects of pain catastrophizing, the effect of threat on verbal pain report and facial expression was dependent on social context and vice versa. In a threatening context, perceived threat of pain mediated the inhibitory effect of social presence on pain expression, suggesting that the observer acted as a safety signal. In the recovery period, social presence enhanced facial expression, but only when no threat was induced. The results are discussed in terms of the dynamic interaction between social context and threat appraisals.

We report serial MRI findings in a 58-year-old man with cervical cord involvement by Toxocara canis, in whom antihelminthic chemotherapy yielded improvement of the neurological deficits and cord lesions seen on MRI.

Hantavirus (HTV) is recently discovered "hemorrhagic fever virus" belonging to the Bunyaviridae family, which is spread throughout the world by wild rodents and/or laboratory rats. During an epidemic in the Belgian-French Ardennes in 1993, more than 200 acute cases were recorded of the milder European form of HTV-illness, otherwise known as Nephropathia epidemica (NE). This variant may be recognized by the sudden onset of fever, acute renal failure, thrombocytopenia and sometimes by ophthalmologic complications. The symptomatology is rather aspecific and diagnosis can only be confirmed by serologic tests, of which the best option nowadays seems to be: screening by IgG EIA, followed by IgM confirmation with a mu-capture EIA test. Some of the tests described allow an evaluation of the causative serotype or even the moment of infection. Next to the "classic" serologic assays for detection of specific viral antibodies, we describe briefly our own experience with newer tests such as "high densi

In the Trypanosoma b. brucei AnTat 1.1C clone, the gene coding for the variant-specific surface antigen is telomeric and appears as a hybrid sequence, partially modified by gene conversion. This conversion is very similar to that observed in another AnTat 1.1-expressor clone (AnTat 1.1B). This sequence is not activated by duplicative transposition, although it could be activated by duplication in another clone (AnTat 1.10). Instead activation of the AnTat 1.1C gene seems operated by reciprocal recombination between its own telomere and the telomere carrying the previous (AnTat 1.16) ELC. Indeed, from the switch to AnTat 1.1C onward, the AnTat 1.16 ELC becomes a new silent member of its gene family, whereas in the variant directly derived from AnTat 1.1C (AnTat 1.3B), the AnTat 1.1C-containing telomere is lost, probably replaced by a large duplicate, at least 40 kb long, of the AnTat 1.3 gene-containing telomere. Different DNA rearrangement mechanisms used by the trypanosome to change its antigenic type thus contribute, by gain and loss of genes, to the evolution of the repertoire for surface antigens., Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In Trypanosoma brucie brucie, T. b. rhodesiense, T. b. gambiense and T. evansi, the variant-specific antigen (VSA) genes are organized in families of related sequences, one of which is duplicated when expressed. Some of these VSA sequences appear to be conserved in the different species and sub-species: restriction mapping of isotypic genes of AnTat 1.8 VSA (from T. b. brucei) reveals extensive homology in T. b. rhodesiense, T. b. gambiense and T. evansi, although the genetic surrounding differs in each case. By contrast, the AnTat 1.1 sequence (also from T. b. brucei) appears to be absent from T. b. gambiense DNA., Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Expression of the gene coding for the trypanosome AnTat 1.1 surface antigen is linked to the duplicative transposition of a basic copy (BC) of this gene to an expression site. In two trypanosome clones successively derived from AnTat 1.1 (AnTat 1.10 and AnTat 1.1B) we found evidence that gene conversions are involved in the transformation of the AnTat 1.1 transposed element into the two new surface antigen coding sequences. Although the three resultant mRNAs--AnTat 1.1, 1.10, and 1.1B--are different, they still share large homologies. Two of them, AnTat 1.1 and 1.1B, code for surface coats that are indistinguishable by conventional serological techniques, whereas AnTat 1.10 has been found different by the same methods. The three genomic rearrangements involve two of the five members of the AnTat 1.1 gene family. These two members are both located in unstable telomeric regions similar to the expression site, each in a different orientation with respect to the DNA terminus. We have concluded that the duplicative transposition is achieved by a gene conversion that may affect variable lengths of the same silent genes, and that different members of the same surface antigen gene family can contribute to the diversification of the antigen repertoire., Journal Article, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

A specific surface glycoprotein of a variant of Trypanosoma brucei was cleaved with trypsin and the two major domains of the molecule have been purified. We have studied the chemical composition of each domain and compared the data to published results of the specific cDNA sequence. Circular dichroism measurements show that the amino-terminal domain includes preferentially alpha-helical or beta-sheet structure. The physicochemical analyses are supplemented by a prediction of secondary structure and a statistical pattern of hydrophilicity-hydrophobicity. The results are discussed in light of the internal limits that were described in the process of partial gene conversion occurring between the variant gene sequence and related members of the same gene family. Immunoblots with homologous antiserum indicate that the amino-terminal domain is implicated in antigenicity. In addition, immunoblotting with heterologous antiserum on native antigen, tryptic hydrolysates, or purified domains suggests a site of interaction supported by the two domains., Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Full length double-stranded complementary DNAs (ds cDNAs) could be synthesized on mRNAs enriched in sequences coding for the synthesis of the variant specific antigens (VSAs) AnTat 1.1 and AnTat 1.8 from Trypanosoma brucei brucei. The size of these ds cDNAs is about 1700 and 1850 base pairs for AnTat 1.1 and AnTat 1.8 respectively. The ds cDNAs were cloned in the plasmid pBR322; two clones harboring a copy of each coding sequence were selected. Both the hybrid-arrested translation and the positive hybridization elution methods confirmed that these recombinants contain VSA-specific inserts. A restriction map was constructed in each case. The two sequences seem to be inserted in a reversed 3'--5' orientation, respective to the plasmid polarity. The AnTat 1.8 cloned sequence is a palindrome probably due to a cloning artefact. Hybridization of the cloned DNAs with "Northern" blots of total or poly(A)+ RNA revealed in each case a single, specific band. The expression of these VSA genes appears thus to be regulated at the transcriptional level., Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, info:eu-repo/semantics/published