Covert self-injurious behavior (i.e., behavior that occurs in the absence of other people) can be difficult to treat. Traditional treatments typically have involved sophisticated methods of observation and often have employed positive punishment procedures. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of a variable momentary differential…

Institutional care has been shown to lead to insecure and disorganized attachments and indiscriminate friendliness. Some children, however, are surprisingly resilient to the adverse environment. Here the protective role of the long variant of the serotonin receptor gene (5HTT) is explored in a small hypothesis-generating study of 37 Ukrainian…

There is accumulating evidence that genetic influences on achievement are more pronounced among children living in higher socioeconomic status homes, and that these gene-by-environment interactions occur prior to children's entry into formal schooling. We hypothesized that one pathway through which socioeconomic status promotes genetic influences…

In this study, based on Family Interactional Theory (FIT), the authors tested a longitudinal model of the intergenerational effects of the grandmothers' parent-child relationships and the grandparents' smoking on the grandchildren's externalizing behavior via parents' psychological symptoms, tobacco use, and child rearing. Using Mplus, the authors…

Klinefelter (47,XXY) syndrome (KS), the most common form of sex-chromosomal aneuploidy, is characterized by physical, endocrinologic, and reproductive abnormalities. Individuals with KS also exhibit a cognitive/behavioral phenotype characterized by language and language-based learning disabilities and executive and attentional dysfunction in the…

"Monocarboxylate transporter 8" ("MCT8" or SLC16A2) is important for the neuronal uptake of triiodothyronine (T3) in its function as a specific and active transporter of thyroid hormones across the cell membrane, thus being essential for human brain development. We report on a German male with Allan-Herndon-Dudley syndrome…

Down syndrome or trisomy 21 can be caused by three types of chromosomal abnormalities: free trisomy 21, translocation or mosaicism. The cytogenetic diagnosis, made through karyotypic examination, is important mainly to determine recurrence risks to assist genetic counselling. The object of this work was to carry out a cytogenetic profile of…

Personalized medicine refers to medical care that involves genetically screening patients for their likelihood to develop various disorders. Commercial genome screening only involves identifying a consumer's genotype for a few single nucleotide polymorphisms. A phenotype (such as an illness) is greatly influenced by three factors: genes, gene…

Executive function (EF) skills are the attention-regulation skills that make it possible to sustain attention, keep goals and information in mind, refrain from responding immediately, resist distraction, tolerate frustration, consider the consequences of different behaviors, reflect on past experiences, and plan for the future. As EF research…

In recent years, new bioinformatics technologies, such as gene expression microarray, genome-wide association study, proteomics, and metabolomics, have been widely used to simultaneously identify a huge number of human genomic/genetic biomarkers, generate a tremendously large amount of data, and dramatically increase the knowledge on human…

The pace of discovery in biochemistry and genetics and its effect on clinical medicine places new curricular challenges in medical school education. We sought to evaluate students' understanding of neurogenetics and its clinical applications to design a pilot curriculum into the clinical neurology clerkship. We utilized a needs assessment and a…

Gel electrophoresis DNA fingerprints offer a graphical and visually appealing illumination of the similarities and differences between DNA sequences of different species and individuals. A polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and restriction digest protocol was designed to give high-school students the opportunity to generate simple fingerprints of…

Peru's prehistory, climate, and terrain are the landscape upon which one of humankind's longest migrations occurred. When the glacial period ended, a geographic and cultural transition began when the meltwaters carved river valleys across the South American continent. Culture-rich communities of fishers, miners, artisans, and morticians populated…

It is relatively easy to incorporate plants into a curriculum and extend their use beyond the botany unit into other scientific arenas. There are numerous web-based resources for teachers, including the Human Flower Project (HFP) website, which offers numerous vignettes on all aspects of flowering plants. In addition to botany and invasive plant…

This study examined the longitudinal association between marital instability and child sleep problems at ages 9 and 18 months in 357 families with a genetically unrelated infant adopted at birth. This design eliminates shared genes as an explanation for similarities between parent and child. Structural equation modeling indicated that T1 marital…