Pathological hair-pulling with onset in very early childhood is thought to represent a different disorder from that with later onset. We examined whether there are differences between adult hair-pullers with very early onset (VEO, i.e., <6 years), early onset (EO, i.e., 6 years to <18 years), and late onset (LO, i.e., ≥18 years) trichotillomania symptomatology. Participants with VEO (n = 76; 5%), EO (n = 1280; 80%), and LO (n = 248; 15%) symptoms of trichotillomania did not differ significantly from one another in terms of hair-pulling phenomenologies, comorbidity, functional impact, and perceived treatment response. However, hair-pulling sites varied across the groups; the VEO and EO groups were significantly more likely to pull eyelashes whereas the EO group was more likely to pull pubic hair. Study subjects had current hair-pulling, so biasing the sample to those with more enduring symptoms, despite differences in age of onset of initial pulling. The lack of significant differences found here does not support subtyping hair-pulling by age of onset in patients who present in adulthood.

We found no short- or long-term benefit of folic acid plus vitamin B12 on cardiovascular outcomes in patients with ischaemic heart disease. Our data suggest that cardiovascular risk prediction by plasma total homocysteine concentration may be confined to the homocysteine fraction that does not respond to B-vitamins.

Grooming disorders, such as trichotillomania (TTM), nail biting, and skin picking, are receiving increasing attention from researchers and clinicians. This is in part due to their possible link to obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). It is imperative that these disorders are categorized correctly in order to facilitate research and aid diagnosis and treatment. However, within current psychiatric classification systems TTM is currently conceptualized as an impulse control disorder and nail biting, lip biting, and skin picking are not yet included in the official nomenclature. It is therefore unclear whether these grooming disorders should form a category on their own (i.e., “grooming disorders” or “pathological grooming behaviors”), or whether they should be classified as obsessive–compulsive spectrum disorders (OCSD), impulse control disorders, or as body-focused repetitive behaviors. This chapter will discuss these diagnostic and taxonomic issues particularly as they pertain to clinical practice, fostering further discussion on the psychopathology of aberrant grooming behaviors.

Smoking lowered circulating concentrations of folate, PLP, and riboflavin, but concentrations increased significantly after a few days of smoking cessation. We propose that short-term effects may be related to acute smoking-induced oxidative stress, whereas the longer-lasting effects among ex-smokers may reflect changes in diet and/or restoration of vitamin concentrations in tissue during the first few months to years after smoking cessation.

In this work we review and compare three additional syntactic enhancements for the hierarchical phrase-based translation model, which have been presented in the last few years. We compare their performance when applied separately and study whether the combination may yield additional improvements. Our findings show that the models are complementary, and their combination achieve an increase of 1 % in BLEU and a reduction of nearly 2 % in TER. The models presented in this work are made available as part of the Jane open source machine translation toolkit. 1

To reduce the phenotypic heterogeneity of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) for genetic, clinical and translational studies, numerous factor analyses of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale checklist (YBOCS-CL) have been conducted. Results of these analyses have been inconsistent, likely as a consequence of small sample sizes and variable methodologies. Furthermore, data concerning the heritability of the factors are limited. Item and category-level factor analyses of YBOCS-CL items from 1224 OCD subjects were followed by heritability analyses in 52 OCD-affected multigenerational families. Item-level analyses indicated that a five factor model: (1) taboo, (2) contamination/cleaning, (3) doubts, (4) superstitions/rituals, and (5) symmetry/hoarding provided the best fit, followed by a one-factor solution. All 5 factors as well as the one-factor solution were found to be heritable. Bivariate analyses indicated that the taboo and doubts factor, and the contamination and symmetry/hoarding factor share genetic influences. Contamination and symmetry/hoarding show shared genetic variance with symptom severity. Nearly all factors showed shared environmental variance with each other and with symptom severity. These results support the utility of both OCD diagnosis and symptom dimensions in genetic research and clinical contexts. Both shared and unique genetic influences underlie susceptibility to OCD and its symptom dimensions.