Leonardo Machado da Silva

Correlação entre traços de psicopatia e abuso de drogas em uma amostra de adolescentes brasileiros em conflito com a lei

Os estudos demonstram que na maior parte dos episodios de violencia, o uso de drogas pode tornar-se facilitador, ou mesmo motivador de acoes violentas e criminosas. As drogas podem ser estimulos, motivos, respostas ou mediadoras de comportamentos. Neste estudo realizamos uma avaliacao de tracos psicopaticos de adolescentes infratores com o uso do Inventario de Psicopatia de Hare: Versao Jovens (PCL:YV) e relacionamos os escores obtidos com dados socio demograficos, historia criminal e uso de substâncias. Para a analise dos dados foi utilizado o pacote estatistico SPSS 11.0. As comparacoes das medias dos escores obtidos no PCL:YV e das variaveis socio-demograficas e uso de substâncias foram efetuadas com Analise de Variância (ANOVA), Correlacao de Pearson, diagramas de dispersao, e teste t. Os resultados apontam que o maior consumo de substâncias quanto a frequencia, diversidade de substâncias e idade de inicio estao relacionadas com a violencia e tracos psicopaticos.

Instruments for assessing social phobias in infants and adolescents in the Portuguese language

The diagnosis of social phobia is the most prevalent of the anxiety disorders. Some diagnostic evaluation tools have been validated in Brazil targeting more precise and specific evaluations for each age group. The main objective of this study is to review the tools for assessing social phobias in infants and adolescents, currently validated in Brazil. The most commonly used tools and their purpose to evaluate social phobias are discussed, as well as their interventions. With this goal in mind, a bibliographical review was conducted in databases. The existence was observed of a significant number of studies about tools that have already been evaluated for the assessment of social phobias in infants and adolescents, though with little relevance and narrow application in the clinical setting. Psychotherapeutic interventions for social phobias in Brazil show themselves to be structured and systematic, though there has been no widely employed, validated protocol to help the diagnosis.

Selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor and norepinephrine dopamine reuptake inhibitor antidepressants do not affect natural killer cell activity in vitro

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to evaluate the citotoxic activity of two commonly used anti-depressants: paroxetine and bupropion. We also evaluated the in vitro natural killer activity (NKA) after incubating the blood samples with the antidepressants. METHODS: Peripheral blood samples from 15 healthy volunteers were collected and the mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were isolated and incubated for 24h with (or without = control cells) paroxetine and bupropion, in concentrations of 30, 100 and 1000 ng/ml. After the incubation period in both groups, the amount of dead cells was calculated using trypam blue technique. NKA was evaluated using the classic51Cr release assay. CONCLUSIONS: PBMCs dead cells occurred in both groups and in proportion to all pharmacological concentrations. Nevertheless, the NKA was not affected, even with the reduction in the number of effective cells.