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Recent genome-wide association studies have demonstrated that the genetic burden associated with depression correlates with depression severity. Therefore, conducting genetic studies of patients at the most severe end of the depressive disorder spectrum, those with treatment-resistant depression and who are prescribed electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), could lead to a better understanding of the genetic underpinnings of depression. Despite ECT being one of the most effective forms of treatment for severe depressive disorders, it is usually placed at the end of treatment algorithms of current guidelines. This is perhaps because ECT has controlled risk and logistical demands including use of general anaesthesia and muscle relaxants and side-effects such as short-term memory impairment. Better understanding of the genetics and biology of ECT response and of cognitive side-effects could lead to more personalized treatment decisions. To enhance the understanding of the genomics of severe depression and ECT response, researchers and ECT providers from around the world and from various depression or ECT networks, but not limited to, such as the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, the Clinical Alliance and Research in ECT, and the National Network of Depression Centers have formed the Genetics of ECT International Consortium (Gen-ECT-ic). Gen-ECT-ic will organize the largest clinical and genetic collection to date to study the genomics of severe depressive disorders and response to ECT, aiming for 30,000 patients worldwide using a GWAS approach. At this stage it will be the largest genomic study on treatment response in depression. Retrospective data abstraction and prospective data collection will be facilitated by a uniform data collection approach that is flexible and will incorporate data from many clinical practices. Gen-ECT-ic invites all ECT providers and researchers to join its efforts. ispartof: EUROPEAN ARCHIVES OF PSYCHIATRY AND CLINICAL NEUROSCIENCE vol:270 issue:7 pages:921-932 ispartof: location:Germany status: published

Estrogen receptor (ER)-negative tumors represent 20-30% of all breast cancers, with a higher proportion occurring in younger women and women of African ancestry. The etiology and clinical behavior of ER-negative tumors are different from those of tumors expressing ER (ER positive), including differences in genetic predisposition. To identify susceptibility loci specific to ER-negative disease, we combined in a metaanalysis 3 genome-wide association studies of 4,193 ER-negative breast cancer cases and 35,194 controls with a series of 40 follow-up studies (6,514 cases and 41,455 controls), genotyped using a custom Illumina array, iCOGS, developed by the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS). SNPs at four loci, 1q32.1 (MDM4, P= 2.1 x 10(-12) and LGR6, P = 1.4 x 10(-8)), 2p24.1 (P = 4.6 x 10(-8)) and 16q12.2 (FTO, P = 4.0 x 10(-8)), were associated with ER-negative but not ER-positive breast cancer (P> 0.05). These findings provide further evidence for distinct etiological pathways associated with invasive ER-positive and ER-negative breast cancers.

Chronic total occlusion (CTO) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) has significantly evolved during recent years. High success rates are being achieved by experienced centers and operators, but not at less-experienced centers. Use of CTO crossing algorithms can help improve the success and efficiency of these potentially lengthy procedures. There is a paucity of clinical trial data examining clinical outcomes of CTO PCI, which is critical for further adoption and refinement of the procedure. We provide a detailed overview of the clinical evidence and current available crossing strategies, with emphasis on recent developments and techniques.

We present a recurrent encoder-decoder deep neural network architecture that directly translates speech in one language into text in another. The model does not explicitly transcribe the speech into text in the source language, nor does it require supervision from the ground truth source language transcription during training. We apply a slightly modified sequence-to-sequence with attention architecture that has previously been used for speech recognition and show that it can be repurposed for this more complex task, illustrating the power of attention-based models. A single model trained end-to-end obtains state-of-the-art performance on the Fisher Callhome Spanish-English speech translation task, outperforming a cascade of independently trained sequence-to-sequence speech recognition and machine translation models by 1.8 BLEU points on the Fisher test set. In addition, we find that making use of the training data in both languages by multi-task training sequence-to-sequence speech translation and recognition models with a shared encoder network can improve performance by a further 1.4 BLEU points. Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Interspeech 2017

Abstract This study evaluated the effects of dietary replacement of soybean meal (SBM) with graded levels of faba bean (FB) seeds with high or low tannin content (HT or LT) on the gastrointestinal function and growth performance of turkeys at 13–18 weeks of age. Hybrid Converter turkeys were distributed into 7 treatments corresponding to 7 different finisher diets: a control wheat-soybean meal-based (FB0) diet and experimental diets where SBM was partially replaced with HT or LT seeds at 100, 200 and 300 g/kg. Each treatment comprised 210 turkeys, with seven replicate pens and 30 birds per pen. The LT treatment decreased jejunal crypt depth (vs. FB0; P = 0.049) and the experimental factors had no significant effect on the analysed caecal histological parameters. In comparison with the FB0 diet, diets containing HT and LT FB contributed to an increase in the total bacterial counts (P = 0.001 and P = 0.033) and Bacteria domain (P = 0.001 and P = 0.060), and a decrease in the counts of Bacteroides (P = 0.002 and P = 0.013). Diets containing LT FB reduced the abundance of Salmonella bacteria, relative to the FB0 diet (P = 0.011) and diets with HT FB (P = 0.023). The LT treatment decreased the counts of total bacteria and Bacteria domain (P = 0.005), in comparison with the HT treatment. The highest ileal short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) concentrations were observed in response to the LT200 diet. LT diets stimulated increased SCFA production in the caeca, relative to the FB0 diet (P = 0.022), and the opposite effect was noted when HT and SBM dietary treatments were compared. In comparison with HT diets, LT diets led to a desirable increase in the concentrations of all major fatty acids (acetic, propionic and butyric) in the caecal contents. It can be concluded that FB seeds enhanced fermentation processes in the gastrointestinal tract of turkeys. In comparison with HT FB, LT seeds improved selected parameters of intestinal function, including a decrease in the counts of Salmonella bacteria (P = 0.023), increased SCFA production (including butyrate; P = 0.001), and a decrease in the pH of intestinal digesta (P = 0.105). In conclusion, both LT and HT FB seeds, the latter containing up to 7.1 g/kg tannins, can be included in finisher turkey diets at up to 300 g/kg as a safe and effective substitute for SBM.