Episodic (recall of passages) and semantic (letter and category fluency) memory tasks were administered to Alzheimer's Disease (early stages), Huntington's Disease (HD), and alcoholic Korsakoff patients matched for overall severity of dementia. Although all three patient groups were severely (and equally) impaired on memory for passages, only the Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients emitted numerous intrusion errors. On the fluency tasks, the performance of the mild Alzheimer patients was distinguishable from that of the other two patient groups. On both fluency tasks, the HD and Korsakoff patients demonstrated severe and moderate deficits, respectively, whereas the mild Alzheimer patients were impaired only on the category fluency task. As with the episodic memory test, the Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients made more perseverative errors than did the HD patients on letter fluency. These findings suggest that Alzheimer and HD patients' impairments on episodic and semantic memory tasks reflect different underlying processes. The performance of Alzheimer patients is affected by their language dysfunction and an increased sensitivity to proactive interference; the deficits of the HD patients appear due to a general retrieval problem. Similarities in the error patterns (i.e., perseveration errors) of Alzheimer and Korsakoff patients are discussed with regard to recent neuropathological findings.

An ambitious, yet fundamental goal for comparative biology is to understand the evolutionary relationships for all of life. However, many important taxonomic groups have remained recalcitrant to inclusion into broader scale studies. Here, we focus on collection of 9 new 454 transcriptome data sets from Ostracoda, an ancient and diverse group with a dense fossil record, which is often undersampled in broader studies. We combine the new transcriptomes with a new morphological matrix (including fossils) and existing expressed sequence tag, mitochondrial genome, nuclear genome, and ribosomal DNA data. Our analyses lead to new insights into ostracod and pancrustacean phylogeny. We obtained support for three epic pancrustacean clades that likely originated in the Cambrian: Oligostraca (Ostracoda, Mystacocarida, Branchiura, and Pentastomida); Multicrustacea (Copepoda, Malacostraca, and Thecostraca); and a clade we refer to as Allotriocarida (Hexapoda, Remipedia, Cephalocarida, and Branchiopoda). Within the Oligostraca clade, our results support the unresolved question of ostracod monophyly. Within Multicrustacea, we find support for Thecostraca plus Copepoda, for which we suggest the name Hexanauplia. Within Allotriocarida, some analyses support the hypothesis that Remipedia is the sister taxon to Hexapoda, but others support Branchiopoda + Cephalocarida as the sister group of hexapods. In multiple different analyses, we see better support for equivocal nodes using slow-evolving genes or when excluding distant outgroups, highlighting the increased importance of conditional data combination in this age of abundant, often anonymous data. However, when we analyze the same set of species and ignore rate of gene evolution, we find higher support when including all data, more in line with a "total evidence" philosophy. By concatenating molecular and morphological data, we place pancrustacean fossils in the phylogeny, which can be used for studies of divergence times in Pancrustacea, Arthropoda, or Metazoa. Our results and new data will allow for attributes of Ostracoda, such as its amazing fossil record and diverse biology, to be leveraged in broader scale comparative studies. Further, we illustrate how adding extensive next-generation sequence data from understudied groups can yield important new phylogenetic insights into long-standing questions, especially when carefully analyzed in combination with other data.

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Fifty-two women who served during the Vietnam era were assessed for war-zone exposure, traumatic life events, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and self-reported health status. Symptoms of PTSD were examined as mediators in the relationship between traumatic exposure and subsequent reports of health problems. Results showed that PTSD symptoms accounted significantly for variance in health problems reported by women with prior traumatic stressor exposure. When the cardinal symptom domains of PTSD (re-experiencing, numbing, avoidance, hyper-arousal) were analyzed separately, the symptom cluster representing hyper-arousal accounted uniquely for the variance associated with health complaints, beyond that contributed by other symptom clusters. Discussion of the results focuses on mechanisms underlying the relationship between specific symptoms of PTSD and self-reported health. Implications for intervention within the medical system are also considered.

Veterans deployed to the Persian Gulf have higher self-reported prevalence of health symptoms compared to PGW veterans who were deployed only as far as Germany. Several Gulf-service environmental exposures are associated with increased health symptom reporting involving predicted body-systems, after adjusting for war-zone stressor exposures and PTSD.