Museum engagement may be an effective approach for decreasing social disconnection and pain among individuals living with chronic pain. In October 2019, we launched a randomized controlled trial to assess the feasibility of museum engagement for individuals living with chronic pain; the study was halted in March, 2020 due to Covid-19-related safety concerns. This paper describes the process of transitioning from in-person to virtual museum programing in order to continue the study. Virtual museum programing is a feasible option for individuals living with chronic pain that is amenable to research and which may improve accessibility, inclusivity, and scalability relative to in-person programing.

Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88) presented a critique of our recently published paper in Cell Reports entitled ‘Large-Scale Cognitive GWAS Meta-Analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets’ (Lam et al., Cell Reports, Vol. 21, 2017, 2597–2613). Specifically, Hill offered several interrelated comments suggesting potential problems with our use of a new analytic method called Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS (MTAG) (Turley et al., Nature Genetics, Vol. 50, 2018, 229–237). In this brief article, we respond to each of these concerns. Using empirical data, we conclude that our MTAG results do not suffer from ‘inflation in the FDR [false discovery rate]’, as suggested by Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88), and are not ‘more relevant to the genetic contributions to education than they are to the genetic contributions to intelligence’.

Learning and memory were assessed in 24 monozygotic (MZ) pairs of individuals discordant for schizophrenia or delusional disorder and seven normal pairs of MZ twins. On declarative memory tasks, the affected group displayed a pattern that might best be characterized as dysmnesic in that they performed significantly worse than the discordant unaffected group on story recall, paired associated learning, and visual recall of designs, but they learned over time, had relatively preserved recognition memory, and did not show profoundly accelerated rates of forgetting. Effortful, volitional retrieval from the lexicon, measured by verbal fluency, was also compromised in the affected group. On the other hand, procedural learning of the motor skill in a pursuit rotor task was relatively intact in the affected group. Comparisons of the normal group and unaffected group indicated that the latter group had very mild impairments in some aspects of episodic memory, namely, immediate and delayed recall of stories and delayed recall of designs. It is highly unlikely that the impairments observed in the affected group can be attributed to differences in genome, family environment, socioeconomic circumstance, or educational opportunity, as all of these were controlled by the twin paradigm. Rather, the impairments appear to be related to the intercession of disease. The neuropsychological profile is consistent with frontal lobe and medial temporal lobe dysfunction, as noted in this sample as well as other samples of schizophrenic singletons. Significant correlations between many measures of memory and global level of social and vocational functioning within the discordant group were also found. Thus difficulties in rapidly acquiring new information and propitiously retrieving old information may burden patients with schizophrenia in many of the transactions of everyday life.

Depression is often associated with social withdrawal. However, especially among children from traumatic backgrounds, dysphoric affect may also be manifested by increased demands for social contact. The present research employed intensive observations, children's self-reports, and therapist and staff ratings to investigate associations between affect regulation and interpersonal behavior among 32 emotionally disturbed children (ages 7 to 12 years) in residential or day treatment. As predicted, children who reported dysphoric moods on the Children's Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1980/81) were most socially engaged and presented themselves as relatively vulnerable and dependent on others. These children not only expressed more overt sadness but also exhibited higher rates of excited/hyperactive behavior. The subgroup of children who were most prone to deny even normative levels of negative affect were least interpersonally involved as well as least impulsive. The results highlight the importance of individual differences in coping with traumatic relationship histories and the need for further study of the interplay between affect and interpersonal behavior in childhood psychopathology.

There has been increasing interest in the semantic cognitive system in schizophrenia. Recent findings suggest a possible breakdown of semantic information processing in this disorder. The current study attempts to further examine semantic organization in schizophrenia. Twenty-eight chronic, early-onset schizophrenic patients and 32 controls were matched for prcmorbid intelligence and compared in their ability to spontaneously cluster exemplars from a specific category during a fluency task. Using multidimensional scaling and clustering techniques, 11 exemplars occurring most frequently in both groups were chosen for examination of their relative “proximity” during word generation. Patients with schizophrenia showed a less stable two-dimensional organization of exemplars and were less likely to group exemplars into subordinate clusters than were normals. These results suggest that semantic networks arc disorganized in these patients. These findings may have some implications for the debate over the origin of “thought disorder” in schizophrenia. (JINS, 1996, 2, 267–273.)

A complication is an event or occurrence that is associated with a disease or a healthcare intervention, is a departure from the desired course of events, and may cause, or be associated with suboptimal outcome. A complication does not necessarily represent a breech in the standard of care that constitutes medical negligence or medical malpractice. An operative or procedural complication is any complication, regardless of cause, occurring (1) within 30 days after surgery or intervention in or out of the hospital, or (2) after 30 days during the same hospitalization subsequent to the operation or intervention. Operative and procedural complications include both intraoperative/intraprocedural complications and postoperative/postprocedural complications in this time interval.

The MultiSocietal Database Committee for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease has set forth a comprehensive list of complications associated with the treatment of patients with congenital cardiac disease, related to cardiac, pulmonary, renal, haematological, infectious, neurological, gastrointestinal, and endocrine systems, as well as those related to the management of anaesthesia and perfusion, and the transplantation of thoracic organs. The objective of this manuscript is to examine the definitions of operative morbidity as they relate specifically to the neurological system. These specific definitions and terms will be used to track morbidity associated with surgical and transcatheter interventions and other forms of therapy in a common language across many separate databases.

Although neurological injury and adverse neurodevelopmental outcome can follow procedures for congenital cardiac defects, much of the variability in neurological outcome is now recognized to be more related to patient specific factors rather than procedural factors. Additionally, the recognition of pre and postoperative neurological morbidity requires procedures and imaging modalities that can be resource-intensive to acquire and analyze, and little is known or described about variations in “sampling rate” from centre to centre.

The purpose of this effort is to propose an initial set of consensus definitions for neurological complications following congenital cardiac surgery and intervention. Given the dramatic advances in understanding achieved to date, and those yet to occur, this effort is explicitly recognized as only the initial first step of a process that must remain iterative. This list is a component of a systems-based compendium of complications that may help standardize terminology and possibly enhance the study and quantification of morbidity in patients with congenital cardiac malformations. Clinicians caring for patients with congenital cardiac disease may be able to use this list for databases, initiatives to improve quality, reporting of complications, and comparing strategies of treatment.

Schizophrenia is being increasingly viewed as a neurodevelopmental disorder, that is, one in which early, fixed pathology becomes manifest clinically during the normal course of maturation of the brain. Evidence for this position comes first from neuroimaging research, such as (1) studies that demonstrate morphologic brain changes (such as ventriculomegaly on CT scans) even in first break patients; and (2) a lack of correlation between these morphologic changes and duration of illness. Another source of evidence is studies of normal brain development in rodents and primates, including research that shows (1) the prefrontal cortex is a late maturing part of the brain, and (2) lesions of the prefrontal cortex may be initially silent and show delayed onset of dysfunction as the brain matures. A neurodevelopmental approach to schizophrenia, in turn, has stimulated further work into the normal development of brain regions implicated in the illness, such as the frontal cortex. Thus, the fields of neuropsychiatry and neurodevelopment have been mutually stimulated during the course of this work. In addition, viewing schizophrenia in developmental terms may have implications for the understanding of changes in cognition and behavior during normal adolescence.