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Schizophrenia is one of the most severe psychiatric diseases with a significant impact on the psychosocial functioning of the patients. People with schizophrenia are at risk to die prematurely because of their illness with their poor lifestyle contributing to the excess morbidity and higher mortality rate. In particular, lifestyle (e.g. poor diet, low rates of physical activity and increased likelihood to smoke cigarettes) predisposes them to poor physical health and comorbid medical diseases. In addition, the treatment of schizophrenia usually involves the long-term administration of antipsychotic drugs and some of these medications are implicated in the increased risk of metabolic and cardiovascular effects. The antipsychotic-induced hyperprolactinemia was ascertained for the first time by Kleinberg in 1971 and was considered for this treatment. Antipsychotics are the most common pharmacological agents which cause hyperprolactinemia The aim of this review is to describe PRL physiology, PRL biological effects and pathway to the diagnosis, causes, consequences of HPRL focusing on the antipsychotic effects on the PRL. We conducted a review of studies published between 1974 and December 2014. The search was performed using the following PubMed search terms: "Hyperprolactinemia" and "antipsychotic" and 827 papers were detected. The articles were examined and the overlapping or insufficiently clear works were excluded. Finally we chose 104 titles. We added to the selected articles additional articles, including 28 articles regarding the latest international guidelines, the pathophysiology of hyperprolactinemia and the various therapeutic choices.

BackgroundResearch shows that impairment in the expression and recognition of emotion exists in multiple psychiatric disorders. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the way that patients with schizophrenia and those with obsessive-compulsive disorder experience and display emotions in relation to specific emotional stimuli using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).MethodsThirty individuals participated in the study, comprising 10 patients with schizophrenia, 10 with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and 10 healthy controls. All participants underwent clinical sessions to evaluate their symptoms and watched emotion-eliciting video clips while facial activity was videotaped. Congruent/incongruent feeling of emotions and facial expression in reaction to emotions were evaluated.ResultsPatients with schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder presented similarly incongruent emotive feelings and facial expressions (significantly worse than healthy participants). Correlations between the severity of psychopathological condition (in particular the severity of affective flattening) and impairment in recognition and expression of emotions were found.DiscussionPatients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia seem to present a similarly relevant impairment in both experiencing and displaying of emotions; this impairment may be seen as a chronic consequence of the same neurodevelopmental origin of the two diseases. Mimic expression could be seen as a behavioral indicator of affective flattening. The FACS could be used as an objective way to evaluate clinical evolution in patients.

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Biomineralization is the process by which living organisms generate organized mineral crystals. In human cells, this phenomenon culminates with the formation of hydroxyapatite, which is a naturally occurring mineral form of calcium apatite. The mechanism that explains the genesis within the cell and the propagation of the mineral in the extracellular matrix still remains largely unexplained, and its characterization is highly controversial, especially in humans. In fact, up to now, biomineralization core knowledge has been provided by investigations on the advanced phases of this process. In this study, we characterize the contents of calcium depositions in human bone mesenchymal stem cells exposed to an osteogenic cocktail for 4 and 10 days using synchrotron-based cryo-soft-X-ray tomography and cryo-XANES microscopy. The reported results suggest crystalline calcite as a precursor of hydroxyapatite depositions within the cells in the biomineralization process. In particular, both calcite and hydroxyapatite were detected within the cell during the early phase of osteogenic differentiation. This striking finding may redefine most of the biomineralization models published so far, taking into account that they have been formulated using murine samples while studies in human cell lines are still scarce.