Comparability of Functional MRI Response in Young and Old During Inhibition

When using fMRI to study age-related cognitive changes, it is important to establish the integrity of the hemodynamic response because, potentially, it can be affected by age and disease. However, there have been few attempts to document such integrity and no attempts using higher cognitive rather than perceptual or motor tasks. We used fMRI with 28 healthy young and older adults on an inhibitory control task. Although older and young adults differed in task performance and activation patterns, they had comparable hemodynamic responses. We conclude that activation during cognitive inhibition, which was predominantly increased in elders, was not due to vascular confounds or specific changes in hemodynamic coupling

Asylum in Ireland - a public health perspective

This report has two elements, first a review of the literature on refugees and asylum seekrs, with particular to the legal and practical situation in Ireland, and secondly a report of a survey of refugees and asylum seekers carried out in part fulfillment of the requirments for the MPH. The survey had two elements, one a quantitaitve stuy carried out in Dublin and Ennis, and the second a series of focus groups

HeSSOP Health and Social Services for Older People : Survey of service use, evaluation and preceived need by older people in two health board areas. INTERM REPORT II

HeSSOP is a collaboration across the National Council on Ageing and Older People and two health boards: the Eastern Regional Health Authority and the Western Health Board. Information on service use, service evaluation and perceptions of service need of a large community-dwelling group will be reported separately for each board in the first instance; this is to assist service planning for 2000. A combined report will allow further analysis of patterns of use etc., including comparisons across boards to identify common and locationspecific challenges to service delivery. While the project will cover only two of the country’s health boards as constituted at the time of the work, the particular boards involved represent the most urban and one of the most rural of the boards. Thus findings are expected to have value for other health boards. The wider issue of consultation strategies to involve older people will be addressed and will be included in the combined survey report

The SAVI Report: Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland. Executive Summary

The SAVI Report: Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland. Executive Summar

HeSSOP Health and Social Services for Older People Summary

The views of older people living in the community on the health and social services available to them had not previously been assessed on a large scale in Ireland. The National Council on Ageing and Older People, in partnership with the Western Health Board (WHB) and the Eastern Regional Health Authority (ERHA) which was formerly the Eastern Health Board, has now carried out such an assessment. It is anticipated that this will assist in planning for services for older people. A survey instrument was developed based on both literature review and focus group work. Groups of older people and key health and social service professionals in the two board areas were consulted to identify the most important concerns to be addressed in the study

Secular trends in child and adult sexual violence--one decreasing and the other increasing: a population survey in Ireland.

BACKGROUND: Sexual violence is a worldwide problem affecting children and adults. Knowledge of trends in prevalence is essential to inform the design and evaluation of preventive and intervention programmes. We aimed to assess the prevalence of lifetime sexual violence for both sexes and to document the prevalence of adult and child abuse by birth year in the general population. METHODS: National cluster-randomized telephone interview study of 3120 adults in Ireland was done. RESULTS: Child sexual abuse involving physical contact was reported by 20% of women and 16% of men. In adulthood, figures were 20% and 10% for women and men, respectively. Prevalence of any form of sexual violence across the lifespan was 42% (women) and 38% (men). Analysis by year of birth indicated a curvilinear pattern for child sexual abuse with lower prevalence in the oldest and youngest participants. Sexual violence in young adulthood showed a linear pattern with higher prevalence in the youngest participants. CONCLUSION: The trend of lower rates of experience of child sexual abuse in younger adults in the sample is in keeping with findings from other countries. The trend of higher rates of adult sexual violence in younger adults is worrying, particularly since the same participants reported less experience of child sexual abuse than the preceding generations. There is a paucity of international data addressing the issue of cohort differences in exposure to sexual violence. Within-study analysis, and follow-up studies designed to maximize replicability, are needed to inform discussion about societal trends in different types of sexual violence

SAVI and SAVI Revisited

SAVI and SAVI Revisite

Robust regression for large-scale neuroimaging studies

Multi-subject datasets used in neuroimaging group studies have a complex structure, as they exhibit non-stationary statistical properties across regions and display various artifacts. While studies with small sample sizes can rarely be shown to deviate from standard hypotheses (such as the normality of the residuals) due to the poor sensitivity of normality tests with low degrees of freedom, large-scale studies (e.g. > 100 subjects) exhibit more obvious deviations from these hypotheses and call for more refined models for statistical inference. Here, we demonstrate the benefits of robust regression as a tool for analyzing large neuroimaging cohorts. First, we use an analytic test based on robust parameter estimates; based on simulations, this procedure is shown to provide an accurate statistical control without resorting to permutations. Second, we show that robust regression yields more detections than standard algorithms using as an example an imaging genetics study with 392 subjects. Third, we show that robust regression can avoid false positives in a large-scale analysis of brain–behavior relationships with over 1500 subjects. Finally we embed robust regression in the Randomized Parcellation Based Inference (RPBI) method and demonstrate that this combination further improves the sensitivity of tests carried out across the whole brain. Altogether, our results show that robust procedures provide important advantages in large-scale neuroimaging group studies

Predicting Fluid Intelligence of Children using T1-weighted MR Images and a StackNet

In this work, we utilize T1-weighted MR images and StackNet to predict fluid intelligence in adolescents. Our framework includes feature extraction, feature normalization, feature denoising, feature selection, training a StackNet, and predicting fluid intelligence. The extracted feature is the distribution of different brain tissues in different brain parcellation regions. The proposed StackNet consists of three layers and 11 models. Each layer uses the predictions from all previous layers including the input layer. The proposed StackNet is tested on a public benchmark Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Neurocognitive Prediction Challenge 2019 and achieves a mean squared error of 82.42 on the combined training and validation set with 10-fold cross-validation. In addition, the proposed StackNet also achieves a mean squared error of 94.25 on the testing data. The source code is available on GitHub.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, Accepted by MICCAI ABCD-NP Challenge 2019; Added ND