Karen Duca | Search PubMed

PubMed2002

The effect of a novel dietary intervention on weight loss in psychotropic drug-induced obesity.

Weight gain associated with the use of psychotropic drugs may be related to their blockade of serotonin receptors which mediate satiety. Obese individuals whose weight gain followed psychotropic drug use, or control nondrug-treated obese subjects, were treated with a 12-week weight loss program that included a carbohydrate-rich, protein-poor beverage thought to increase brain serotonin.The 38 psychotropic drug treated females lost slightly more weight than their 60 nondrug-treated controls, ie, 13.4-/+1.8 pounds versus 12.1-/+1.1 pounds. The eight drug-treated males lost 26-/+4.1 pounds and their 12 nondrug-treated controls lost 22.2-/+3.2 pounds. Weight loss was significant in all groups (all P<.001). A treatment program that included a high carbohydrate dietary supplement caused as much weight loss among patients on psychotropic drugs as among control obese patients, without blocking the drugs' therapeutic effects.

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

An insight-based methodology for evaluating bioinformatics visualizations.

High-throughput experiments, such as gene expression microarrays in the life sciences, result in very large data sets. In response, a wide variety of visualization tools have been created to facilitate data analysis. A primary purpose of these tools is to provide biologically relevant insight into the data. Typically, visualizations are evaluated in controlled studies that measure user performance on predetermined tasks or using heuristics and expert reviews. To evaluate and rank bioinformatics visualizations based on real-world data analysis scenarios, we developed a more relevant evaluation method that focuses on data insight. This paper presents several characteristics of insight that enabled us to recognize and quantify it in open-ended user tests. Using these characteristics, we evaluated five microarray visualization tools on the amount and types of insight they provide and the time it takes to acquire it. The results of the study guide biologists in selecting a visualization tool based on the type of their microarray data, visualization designers on the key role of user interaction techniques, and evaluators on a new approach for evaluating the effectiveness of visualizations for providing insight. Though we used the method to analyze bioinformatics visualizations, it can be applied to other domains.

Algorithms↗