Pediatric NCCP may be characterized by recurrent pain accompanied by emotional distress and functional impairment. This paper reviews and critiques literature on pediatric noncardiac chest pain (NCCP) and introduces a theoretical conceptualization to guide future study of NCCP in children and adolescents. A developmentally informed biopsychosocial…

Autism is a pervasive developmental condition with complex aetiology. To aid the discovery of genetic mechanisms, researchers have turned towards identifying potential endophenotypes--subtle neurobiological or neurocognitive traits present in individuals with autism and their "unaffected" relatives. Previous research has shown that relatives of…

Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) have convincingly established that national IQs correlate positively with GDP, education, and many other social and economic factors. The direction of causality remains debatable. The present study re-examines data from military psychological assessments of the German federal army that show strong IQ gains of 0.5 IQ point…

Most people have 23 pairs of chromosomes; one set from the mother and one from the father. However, nondisjunction errors during meiosis can lead to a case of trisomy, where there are three rather than two chromosomes. Although such events are not uncommon, they are usually lethal, and account for a high proportion of spontaneous abortions. There…

This study examined whether "melodic contour deafness" (insensitivity to the direction of pitch movement) in congenital amusia is associated with specific types of pitch patterns (discrete versus gliding pitches) or stimulus types (speech syllables versus complex tones). Thresholds for identification of pitch direction were obtained using discrete…

Concepts from disciplines such as Biochemistry, Genetics, Cellular and Molecular Biology are essential to the understanding and treatment of an elevated number of illnesses, but often they are studied separately, with no integration between them. This article proposes a model for basic sciences integration based on problem-based learning (PBL) and…

Individuals diagnosed with fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common known form of inherited intellectual disability, are reported to exhibit considerable deficits in mathematical skills that are often attributed to brain-based abnormalities associated with the syndrome. We examined whether participants with FXS would display emergent…

The aims of the present study are twofold: (1) to examine cortical morphology (CM) associated with alterations in cognition in fragile X syndrome (FXS); (2) to characterize the CM profile of FXS versus FXS with an autism diagnosis (FXS+Aut) as a preliminary attempt to further elucidate the behavioral distinctions between the two sub-groups. We…

This study aims at examining problematic learning trajectories of students with emotional behavioral disorders (EBD) by means of a longitudinal and time serial (micro genetic) study of individual instruction sessions during arithmetic lessons. Micro genetic analysis techniques were applied on the variable "responsiveness" in the scaffolding…

Objective: College lifestyle places an individual at greater risk for the development of insulin resistance (IR) and disease. The aim of this study was to establish a baseline measurement of insulin, and other variables influencing IR in college freshmen. Participants: Twenty-two men and women, 18 to 19 years of age, during first month of college.…

Depression is a developmental phenomenon. Considerable progress has been made in describing the syndrome, establishing its prevalence and features, providing clues as to its etiology, and developing evidence-based treatment and prevention options. Despite considerable headway in distinct lines of vulnerability research, there is an explanatory gap…

Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY) was initially described in the context of its endocrinologic and physical features; however, subsequent studies have revealed specific impairments in verbal skills and social functioning. Males with sex chromosomal aneuploidies are known to have variability in their developmental profile with the majority presenting…

Autism is a strongly genetic disorder and de novo mutations may play a causal role in a relatively large percentage of individuals with the disease. It is discussed how altered development may be an important factor that forces diverse genetic vulnerabilities into common syndromic presentation in autism.

Dyslexia is a complex reading and writing disorder with a strong genetic component. In a German case-control cohort, we studied the influence of the suspected dyslexia-associated gene DCDC2. For the first time in a German cohort, we describe association of a 2445 basepair deletion, first identified in an American study. Evidence of association for…

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a rare genetic disorder within the autistic spectrum. This study compared socio-demographic, clinical and genetic characteristics of the international database, InterRett, and the population-based Australian Rett syndrome database (ARSD). It also explored the strengths and limitations of InterRett in comparison with other…