Perceived parental rearing in subjects with obsessive-compulsive disorder and their siblings.

OBJECTIVE: Perceived parenting in patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is examined. We attempted to overcome some methodological limitations of prior studies by taking age of onset, parental OCD and comorbid depression into consideration. In addition, we included data from unaffected siblings to corroborate information on parental rearing. METHOD: One hundred and twenty-two cases with OCD and 41 of their siblings as well as 59 healthy controls and 45 of their siblings completed the German short-version of the EMBU (FEE). RESULTS: Obsessive-compulsive disorder cases reported less parental warmth and more parental rejection and control. Further analyses indicated that parenting is also associated with OCD in cases with late onset and cases without parents affected by OCD. OCD cases with comorbid depression described their parents particularly negatively. Data from siblings indicated good validity of perceived parenting in OCD. CONCLUSION: This study provides further evidence for dysfunctional child rearing being relevant to the development of OCD and depression.

Adapters, shims, and glue--service interoperability for in silico experiments.

MOTIVATION: Computationally, in silico experiments in biology are workflows describing the collaboration of people, data and methods. The Grid and Web services are proposed to be the next generation infrastructure supporting the deployment of bioinformatics workflows. But the growing number of autonomous and heterogeneous services pose challenges to the used middleware w.r.t. composition, i.e. discovery and interoperability of services required within in silico experiments. In the IRIS project, we handle the problem of service interoperability by a semi-automatic procedure for identifying and placing customizable adapters into workflows built by service composition. RESULTS: We show the effectiveness and robustness of the software-aided composition procedure by a case study in the field of life science. In this study we combine different database services with different analysis services with the objective of discovering required adapters. Our experiments show that we can identify relevant adapters with high precision and recall.

High neuroticism and depressive temperament are associated with dysfunctional regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical system in healthy volunteers.

OBJECTIVE: Elevated neuroticism, depressive temperament and dysfunctional regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) system are considered as risk factors for unipolar depression. An interaction of these vulnerability factors was suggested, but controversially discussed. In absence of other informative studies we set out for a replication test and for elucidation of the underlying mechanism. METHOD: Ninety-two subjects recruited in the community-performed assessments of personality and temperament as well as measurement of HPA function with the dexamethasone/corticotropin-releasing hormone (Dex/CRH) test. RESULTS: Cortisol levels subsequent to Dex/CRH challenge were associated with neuroticism; high-neuroticism subjects revealed a higher HPA activation. This difference was mainly because of male subjects >/=25 years. A similar relationship was observed for depressive temperament. CONCLUSION: This constellation may propose that HPA dysregulation is the endocrinological basis for neuroticism and depressive temperament; this result supports the view that distinct personality factors and HPA vulnerability interact in mediating depression.