Autism is a behavior disorder with genetic influences indicated from twin and family studies and from the co-occurrence of autism with known genetic disorders. Tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) is a known genetic disorder with behavioral manifestations including autism. A literature review of these two disorders substantiates a significant association of autism and TSC with 17-58% of TSC subject...

Contact investigation to identify individuals with tuberculosis and latent infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis is an important component of tuberculosis control in low tuberculosis incidence countries. This document provides evidence-based and best-practice policy recommendations for contact tracing among high- and medium-priority contacts in a variety of settings. It provides a basis for...

In April 2007, Ireland’s first Regional Writing Centre at the University of Limerick was launched. This chapter outlines the various international, European, national, regional, and institutional winds to which the growing Centre responded. Trailing UL’s Regional Writing Centre through its path from inception to fruition, the profile reveals the influences that have shaped its ethos, guided its...

BACKGROUND Co-morbidity within anxiety disorders, and between anxiety disorders and depression, is common. According to the theory of Gray and McNaughton, this co-morbidity is caused by recursive interconnections linking the brain regions involved in fear, anxiety and panic and by heritable personality traits such as neuroticism. In other words, co-morbidity can be explained by one disorder bei...

The validity of diagnostic definitions in psychiatry is directly related to the extent to which their etiology can be specified. However, since detailed knowledge of causal or susceptibility factors is lacking for most psychiatric disorders with a known or suspected familial-genetic origin, the current widely accepted classification systems largely fail to achieve this ideal. To illustrate this...

Tuberculosis contact investigations are a top priority in TB infection control. The aim is to prevent the spread of infectious disease, identify potential TB sources, and treat individuals who are infected or actively ill. The contact investigation process is quite simple: identify close contacts; examine their symptoms and determine their clinical status; perform a chest X-ray; administer a tu...

Sibling recurrence data from the Baby Siblings Research Consortium (BSRC) recapitulate results from very large clinical family studies that demonstrate the absence of the Carter effect and provide clarification of the nature of the female protective effect in ASD. This legacy prospective data collection confirmed marked differences in the proportions of males versus females who lie along devian...

Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne infectious disease that is both preventable and curable, yet it kills more than a million people every year. Children are highly vulnerable, but often invisible casualties. Drug-resistant forms of TB are on the rise globally, and children are as vulnerable as adults but less likely to be counted as cases of drug-resistant disease if they become sick. Four factor...

KORA (Cooperative Health Research in the Region Augsburg) is a regional research platform for population-based surveys and subsequent follow-up studies in the fields of epidemiology, health economics, and health care research. KORA was established in 1996 to continue and expand the MONICA project in Augsburg, including the Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) Registry. The available pool of study ...

Family-based study design is commonly used in genetic research. It has many ideal features, including being robust to population stratification (PS). With the advance of high-throughput technologies and ever-decreasing genotyping cost, it has become common for family studies to examine a large number of variants for their associations with disease phenotypes. The yield from the analysis of thes...