A Blog Around The Clock

There are 16 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:

Genetic Determinants of Financial Risk Taking:

Individuals vary in their willingness to take financial risks. Here we show that variants of two genes that regulate dopamine and serotonin neurotransmission and have been previously linked to emotional behavior, anxiety and addiction (5-HTTLPR and DRD4) are significant determinants of risk taking in investment decisions. We find that the 5-HTTLPR s/s allele carriers take 28% less risk than those carrying the s/l or l/l alleles of the gene. DRD4 7-repeat allele carriers take 25% more risk than individuals without the 7-repeat allele. These findings contribute to the emerging literature on the genetic determinants of economic behavior.

Empathy Is Moderated by Genetic Background in Mice:

Empathy, as originally defined, refers to an emotional experience that is shared among individuals. When discomfort or alarm is detected in another, a variety of behavioral responses can follow, including greater levels of nurturing, consolation or increased vigilance towards a threat. Moreover, changes in systemic physiology often accompany the recognition of distressed states in others. Employing a mouse model of cue-conditioned fear, we asked whether exposure to conspecific distress influences how a mouse subsequently responds to environmental cues that predict this distress. We found that mice are responsive to environmental cues that predict social distress, that their heart rate changes when distress vocalizations are emitted from conspecifics, and that genetic background substantially influences the magnitude of these responses. Specifically, during a series of pre-exposure sessions, repeated experiences of object mice that were exposed to a tone-shock (CS-UCS) contingency resulted in heart rate deceleration in subjects from the gregarious C57BL/6J (B6) strain, but not in subjects from the less social BALB/cJ (BALB) strain. Following the pre-exposure sessions, subjects were individually presented with the CS-only for 5 consecutive trials followed by 5 consecutive pairings of the CS with the UCS. Pre-exposure to object distress increased the freezing responses of B6 mice, but not BALB mice, on both the CS-only and the CS-UCS trials. These physiological and behavioral responses of B6 mice to social distress parallel features of human empathy. Our paradigm thus has construct and face validity with contemporary views of empathy, and provides unequivocal evidence for a genetic contribution to the expression of empathic behavior.

Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospital In-Patients: A Prospective Analysis of 3695 Patient-Episodes:

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a major cause of hospital admissions, but recent data on the incidence and clinical characteristics of ADRs which occur following hospital admission, are lacking. Patients admitted to twelve wards over a six-month period in 2005 were assessed for ADRs throughout their admission. Suspected ADRs were recorded and analysed for causality, severity and avoidability and whether they increased the length of stay. Multivariable analysis was undertaken to identify the risk factors for ADRs. The 5% significance level was used when assessing factors for inclusion in multivariable models. Out of the 3695 patient episodes assessed for ADRs, 545 (14.7%, 95% CI 13.6-15.9%) experienced one or more ADRs. Half of ADRs were definitely or possibly avoidable. The patients experiencing ADRs were more likely to be older, female, taking a larger number of medicines, and had a longer length of stay than those without ADRs. However, the only significant predictor of ADRs, from the multivariable analysis of a representative sample of patients, was the number of medicines taken by the patient with each additional medication multiplying the hazard of an ADR episode by 1.14 (95% CI 1.09, 1.20). ADRs directly increased length of stay in 147 (26.8%) patients. The drugs most frequently associated with ADRs were diuretics, opioid analgesics, and anticoagulants. In conclusion, approximately one in seven hospital in-patients experience an ADR, which is a significant cause of morbidity, increasing the length of stay of patients by an average of 0.25 days/patient admission episode. The overall burden of ADRs on hospitals is high, and effective intervention strategies are urgently needed to reduce this burden.