Quality and Correlates of Peer Relationships in Youths with Chronic Pain.

Youths with chronic pain may experience difficulties with peer relationships. We investigated the quality and correlates of peer relationships in a sample of 181 youths with chronic pain. A majority of youths were satisfied with their relationships with peers; however, levels were highly variable. Higher functional impairment and depression levels predicted lower peer relationship quality, controlling for demographic and other pain-related factors. In addition, peer relationship quality and pain severity predicted child depression and anxiety symptoms, whereas peer relationship quality only predicted anger symptoms. Relationship quality moderated the association between pain severity and functional impairment, suggesting that strong relationships with peers may buffer the effects of pain on functioning. Peer relationships seem particularly important for the adjustment and psychological well-being of youths with chronic pain. Particular attention should be given to functionally impaired and depressed children, who may be at higher risk of peer difficulties.

A cautious note advocating the use of ensembles of models and driving data in modeling of regional ozone burdens.

We investigate the performance of two widely used chemistry-transport models (CTMs) with different chemical mechanisms in reproducing the ambient maximum daily 8-h average ozone (MDA8 O3) burden over Central Europe. We explore a base case setup with boundary conditions (BC) for meteorology from the ERA-Interim reanalysis and chemical BC from CAM-Chem as well as effects of alterations in these BC based on global model fields. Our results show that changes in meteorological BC strongly affect the correlation with observations but only marginally affect the model biases, while changes in chemical BC increase model biases while correlation patterns remain largely unchanged. Furthermore, our study highlights that CTM choice (and choice of chemical mechanism) has a similar or even larger impact on MDA8 O3 levels as the impact of altered BC. In summary, our study calls for a multi-model strategy combining different CTM and BC combinations to explore the bandwidth of MDA8 O3 distributions and thus uncertainty in hindcasts and future projections, in analogy to climate studies considering ensemble simulations under the same anthropogenic emissions but with slightly different initial conditions. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11869-024-01516-3.

Contribution of GABA(B) receptor-mediated inhibition to the expression and termination of group I mGluR-induced ictaform bursts.

In guinea pig hippocampal slices, the GABA(B) receptor antagonist CGP 35348 increased the length of picrotoxin-induced interictal bursts by only 22%, yet it increased the length of group I mGluR-induced ictaform bursts by 85%. These data suggest that (1) suppression of GABAergic inhibition is insufficient to account for group I mGluR agonist-induced ictaform bursts, and (2) although GABA(B) plays a minor role in terminating interictal bursts, it is a major contributor to the termination of mGluR-induced ictaform bursts.