Early Primate Evolution in Afro-Arabia.

Early primate evolution in Afro-Arabia.

Filed under: Depression Treatment

Evol Anthropol. 2012 Nov; 21(6): 239-53
Seiffert ER

The peculiar mammalian fauna that inhabited Afro-Arabia during the Paleogene first came to the attention of the scientific community in the early part of the twentieth century, when Andrews1 and Schlosser2 published their landmark descriptions of fossil mammals from the Fayum Depression in northern Egypt. Their studies revealed a highly endemic assemblage of land mammals that included the first known Paleogene records of hyraxes, proboscideans, and anthropoid primates, but which lacked ancestors of many iconic mammalian lineages that are found in Africa today, such as rhinos, zebras, bovids, giraffes, and cats. Over the course of the last century, the Afro-Arabian Paleogene has yielded fossil remains of several other endemic mammalian lineages,3 as well as a diversity of prosimian primates,4 but we are only just beginning to understand how the continent’s faunal composition came to be, through ancient processes such as the movement of tectonic plates, changes in climate and sea level, and early phylogenetic splits among the major groups of placental mammals. These processes, in turn, made possible chance dispersal events that were critical in determining the competitive landscape-and, indeed, the survival-of our earliest anthropoid ancestors. Newly discovered fossils indicate that the persistence and later diversification of Anthropoidea was not an inevitable result of the clade’s competitive isolation or adaptive superiority, as has often been assumed, but rather was as much due to the combined influences of serendipitous geographic conditions, global cooling, and competition with a group of distantly related extinct strepsirrhines with anthropoid-like adaptations known as adapiforms. Many of the important details of this story would not be known, and could never have been predicted, without the fossil evidence that has recently been unearthed by field paleontologists. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
HubMed – depression

Reciprocal longitudinal associations between pain and depressive symptoms in adolescents.

Filed under: Depression Treatment

Eur J Pain. 2012 Dec 28;
Lewandowski Holley A, Law EF, Zhou C, Murphy L, Clarke G, Palermo TM

BACKGROUND: Elevated depressive symptoms are common in youth with chronic pain, and pain symptoms are frequent in adolescents with depressive disorders. While studies have identified concurrent associations between pain and depression over time in youth, it is unclear how change in one symptom impacts change in the other symptom. METHODS: This three-time point 12-month longitudinal study examined reciprocal associations among pain and depression in a clinical sample of adolescents (12-18) diagnosed with chronic pain (n?=?55) or a depressive disorder (n?=?40). Mixed-effects multivariate models were used to test if changes over a preceding time interval predicted symptom severity at subsequent time points. Study group, age, sex, race, baseline pain intensity and baseline depressive symptoms were included as covariates. RESULTS: Generalized estimating equations revealed that pain and depressive symptoms were significantly associated over time (??=?1.54; p?HubMed – depression

Investigating differences in treatment effect estimates between propensity score matching and weighting: a demonstration using STARD trial data.

Filed under: Depression Treatment

Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2012 Dec 28;
Ellis AR, Dusetzina SB, Hansen RA, Gaynes BN, Farley JF, Stürmer T

PURPOSE: The choice of propensity score (PS) implementation influences treatment effect estimates not only because different methods estimate different quantities, but also because different estimators respond in different ways to phenomena such as treatment effect heterogeneity and limited availability of potential matches. Using effectiveness data, we describe lessons learned from sensitivity analyses with matched and weighted estimates. METHODS: With subsample data (N?=?1292) from Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression, a 2001-2004 effectiveness trial of depression treatments, we implemented PS matching and weighting to estimate the treatment effect in the treated and conducted multiple sensitivity analyses. RESULTS: Matching and weighting both balanced covariates but yielded different samples and treatment effect estimates (matched RR 1.00, 95% CI: 0.75-1.34; weighted RR 1.28, 95% CI: 0.97-1.69). In sensitivity analyses, as increasing numbers of observations at both ends of the PS distribution were excluded from the weighted analysis, weighted estimates approached the matched estimate (weighted RR 1.04, 95% CI 0.77-1.39 after excluding all observations below the 5th percentile of the treated and above the 95th percentile of the untreated). Treatment appeared to have benefits only in the highest and lowest PS strata. CONCLUSIONS: Matched and weighted estimates differed due to incomplete matching, sensitivity of weighted estimates to extreme observations, and possibly treatment effect heterogeneity. PS analysis requires identifying the population and treatment effect of interest, selecting an appropriate implementation method, and conducting and reporting sensitivity analyses. Weighted estimation especially should include sensitivity analyses relating to influential observations, such as those treated contrary to prediction. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
HubMed – depression

Find More Depression Treatment Information…