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The present study compared methadone maintenance alone to methadone maintenance in combination with 16 weeks of either Intensive Twelve-Step Facilitation (ITSF) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in a preliminary efficacy trial with polysubstance-abusing opiate addicts who were continuing to use drugs while on methadone maintenance. Results showed that the addition of ACT was associated

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To explore further the potential for cognitive enhancement utilizing nicotinic stimulation in Alzheimer's disease (AD), six otherwise healthy subjects with moderate AD received placebo and three doses (6, 12, and 23 mg) of the novel selective cholinergic channel activator (ChCA) (nicotinic agonist) ABT-418 over 6 h in a double-blind, within-subjects, repeated-measures design. Subjects showed significant improvements in total recall and a decline in recall failure on a verbal learning task. Qualitatively similar improvements were seen in non-verbal learning tasks such as spatial learning and memory, and repeated acquisition. No significant behavioral, vital sign, or physical side effects were seen. These results confirm that stimulating central nicotinic receptors has acute cognitive benefit in AD patients. These findings suggest that selective ChCAs have a potential therapeutic role in dementing disorders, and that further studies with this or similar agents in AD and/or Parkinson's disease are warranted.

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP, Barnes-Holmes et al. in Psychol Rec 60:527-542, 2010) was utilized as a relatively new tool to measure implicit weight bias in first- and third-year medical students. To date, only two studies (Miller et al. in Acad Med 88:978-982, 2013; Phelan et al. in Med Educ 49:983-992, 2015) have investigated implicit weight bias with medical students and both have found pro-thin/anti-fat implicit attitudes, on average, using the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald and Banaji in Psychol Rev 102:4-27, 1995) as the assessment tool. The IRAP, however, allows for a deeper analysis of implicit attitudes with respect to both thin and fat in isolation, and it was found that medical students are, on average, actually both pro-thin and pro-fat, and on average are more pro-thin than pro-fat, as opposed to anti-fat. Additionally, it was found that medical students' implicit weight bias against fat/obese individuals improved over the first 2 years of medical training, and this improvement was specifically driven by improved implicit attitudes toward overweight and obese, while implicit attitudes toward thin remained constant over that time. The implications of more sensitive implicit bias assessment and specific changes in bias over time are discussed within the context of medical education curriculum development.