To produce or not to produce? Contrasting the effect of substance abuse in social decision-making situations

Substance use disorders (SUD) have been related to high criminal justice costs, expensive healthcare, social impairment, and decision-making deficits. In non-social decision-making tasks, people with SUD tend to take more risks and choose small immediate rewards than controls. However, few studies have explored how people with SUD behave in social decision-making situations where the resources and profits depend directly on participants' real-time interaction, i.e., social foraging situations. To fulfill this gap, we developed a real-time interaction task to (a) compare the proportion of producers (individuals who tend to search for food sources) and scroungers (individuals who tend to steal or join previously discovered food sources) among participants with SUD and controls with respect to the optimal behavior predicted by the Rate Maximization Model, and (b) explore the relationship between social foraging strategies, prosocial behavior, and impulsivity. Here participants with SUD (n = 20) and a non-user control group (n = 20) were exposed to the Guaymas Foraging task (GFT), the Social Discounting task (SD), and the Delay Discounting task (DD). We found that participants in the control group tended to produce more and obtain higher profits in contrast to substance abuser groups. Additionally, SD and DD rates were higher for scroungers than producers regardless of the group. Our results suggest that producers tend to be more altruistic and less impulsive than scroungers. Knowing more about social strategies and producers' characteristics could help develop substance abuse prevention programs.

Discounting and Executive functions as indicators of methamphetamine use in adolescents and adults

Abstract Meth-users have shown low performance in some executive functions tasks.  This low performance can entail problems of control behavior, and increased impulsivity such as preference the small reward over the large delayed one. The current study was aimed to evaluate the performance in three executive tasks (shifting, updating and inhibition), and four discounting tasks (delay and probability) of gains and losses by meth-users and non-users. We worked with 40 male adults (20 meth-users and 20 non-users), and 32 male adolescents (20 meth-users and 12 non-users). We found with CART algorithm that inhibition, updating and probability discounting tasks were the good predictors to identify non users and meth-users. Our general conclusion is the executive functions: Inhibition and Updating are related with cognitive issues due to drug use in a developing brain, and the discounting tasks do not reflect a general impulsivity trait.

Experience with granulocytapheresis in Crohn's disease

OBJECTIVE

To describe our experience with granulocyte apheresis to induce remission in patients with active Crohn's disease refractory to conventional treatment. We summarize the results previously obtained with this technique.

CONCLUSIONS

Granulocyte apheresis is a safe and well tolerated therapeutic modality that can be a valid therapeutic alternative in the induction of remission in inflammatory bowel disease, although controlled clinical trials must be conducted to define long-term efficacy, as well as to establish "optimal patient" selection, re-treatment interval, and number of sessions.

Congruence of terms between lists of problems and the ICNP--Alpha Version. International Classification for Nursing Practice

The International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP)--Alpha Version, is the first rendition of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) efforts to develop a standardized international nursing language system. This system has three principal components: nursing phenomena; nursing actions; and nursing outcomes. This article describes a study of agreements between terms used by nurses of the intensive care unit at the Hospital of the University of Sao Paulo, to designate patients' nursing problems and the terms proposed by the ICNP--Alpha Version. The records of 59 interned patients, admitted to the intensive therapy unit, were analysed for nursing problems. Of 336 problem categories listed by the nurses, 153 (45.5%) corresponded to the ICNP terms. The 183 categories of problems that did not correspond to the ICNP terms were categorized by the authors as the following: medical diagnoses (37.2%); signs (28.4%); interventions (26.2%); and historical data (8.2%). These results show that there may be no agreement between the concept of nursing phenomena for the ICNP and of nursing problems for the nurses whose records were analysed. Considering that medical diagnoses, intervention and historical data could not be accepted as nursing phenomena for the ICNP, the agreement is potentially higher than 45.5%.