How Early Stressful Life Experiences Combine With Adolescents’ Conjoint Health Risk Trajectories to Influence Cardiometabolic Disease Risk in Young Adulthood

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Research has primarily focused on additive (unique) associations between early stressful life experiences (specifically, socioeconomic adversity and maltreatment)...     

A test of the effectiveness of speaker verification for differentiating between identical twins

This paper presents investigations into the ability of speaker verification technology to discriminate between identical twins. It is shown that whilst, in general, the genetic and non-genetic characteristics of voice are both of value to speaker verification capabilities, it is the latter which is highly beneficial in the separation of the speech of identical twins. It is further demonstrated that through the use of unconstrained cohort normalisation as a complementary means for the exploitation of such voice characteristics, the verification reliability can be considerably enhanced for both identical twins and unrelated speakers. Experiments were conducted using a bespoke clean-speech database consisting of utterances from 49 identical twin pairs. The paper details the problem in speaker verification posed by identical twins, discusses the experimental investigations and provides an analysis of the results.     

New developments in SPME, Part 1: The use of vapor-phase deprotonation and on-fiber derivatization with alkylchloroformates in the analysis of preparations containing amphetamines

Due to their high polarity and low vapor pressure, most amine salts of amphetamine-type drugs are not directly amenable to headspace recovery using solid-phase microextraction (SPME). Described in this article is a simple vapor-phase procedure for the conversion of solid drug salt samples into their free bases by the use of triethylamine. This process can be conducted simultaneously with headspace SPME, the outcome being that solid drug salts can be sampled directly for GC-MS without the need for dissolution and chemical processing. Potential applications for this methodology include the noninvasive recovery of drug traces from objects such as banknotes and garments. This new process for recovery of amphetamine-type drugs has been combined with on-fiber derivatization using alkylchloroformates. This extra step was included to improve the chromatographic performance of analytes and allow for the resolution of drug enantiomers.     

Treating impulsivity, irritability, and aggression of antisocial personality disorder with quetiapine

There are few effective treatments of antisocial personality disorder (APD). Preliminary work suggests that the atypical antipsychotic quetiapine can decrease irritability, impulsivity, and aggressiveness. Data were collected from 4 patients with APD who were referred to a maximum-security inpatient psychiatric facility for pretrial evaluation and were treated with quetiapine. Quetiapine was effective in these patients as was indicated by a decrease in symptoms such as impulsivity, hostility, aggressiveness, irritability, and rage reactions. Typical dosage was 600 to 800 mg per day. Patients attributed their willingness to comply with quetiapine treatment to both the effectiveness of the drug and its favorable adverse-event profile. Quetiapine was successfully combined with mood stabilizers, particularly gabapentin, in patients with prominent affective instability. Quetiapine has demonstrated efficacy in aggression, impulsivity, and irritability and has proved to be an effective medication in these patients with APD. In addition, its favorable adverse-event profile makes patients willing to comply.