This thesis aimed to examine the functioning of families with a sufferer of Anorexia Nervosa (AN), using self-report measures and a direct observation family discussion task. Researchers and clinicians have long been interested in the interactional patterns of these sufferers within the family unit, although few have furthered our understanding of the interplay between family functioning, cohesion and emotional expression and issues such as control, by directly examining these interactions. The construct of control has been another area of interest in recent research, although how it is constructed and operates within this disorder remains unclear and ambiguous. Thus the purpose of this research was to expand the study of adolescents suffering Anorexia Nervosa who still resided within the family unit, from merely studying self-report measures and retrospective surveys of recovery, to include a direct examination of sufferers and their families at the time of the disorder. Participants included 16 female sufferers of Anorexia Nervosa and their parents, 17 drug and alcohol sufferers, and 18 non-clinic families. Both parents and their daughters completed self-report inventories assessing their clinical status as well as family functioning and marital happiness. In addition, family members participated in a series of family discussion tasks which were coded for the dimensions of autonomy, cohesiveness, avoidance and control. In Study 1 (Chapter 7), the self-report measures of the anorexic families were examined specifically in relation to the construct of control acting as a mediating variable between level of dysfunction and severity of the disorder. Consistent with previous research, levels of marital happiness and family cohesion influenced the severity level of the daughter's Anorexia Nervosa. This study also explored the construct of control within the family system and found that the more moral-religious emphasis in the family, the more concerned the daughter was with her weight. At the same time daughters were reporting higher levels of moral-religious emphasis, they were reporting higher levels of self-control. The daughters in this study appeared to be inconsistent in their behavioural responses. The daughters' weight concern increased with their own reported levels of moral-religious emphasis in the family. However, as this emphasis increased, so too did their control scores. It was supposed that conflict may be created in a family when strong religious and/or strong moral values are emphasized, particularly when one of the family members suffers AN. This issue is discussed in depth. Study 2 sought to examine these variables further by using a direct observation family discussion task to compare an independent observer's ratings to the family's ratings of the discussion, across the three groups. The study examined the daughters' and mothers' perceptions and compared significant results to the observer's ratings. This study highlighted that the mothers of sufferers appeared not to be concerned about their own bodies and weight, and not distressed when discussing with their daughters the issues of control in the areas of family, body, school and friends. Furthermore, the anorexic daughters presented as more sad and anxious than the two other groups and indicated that their parents had more control over their bodies than they did themselves. Finally, for the majority of participating families, the fathers were absent and this issue is explored.

This thesis sought to develop and assess a novel scale to measure the experience of an anorexic voice in anorexia nervosa. It consists of three standalone papers. Papers one and two have been prepared for submission to two separate journals relevant to the methodology and research area for each, and comply with the journal guidelines. Paper one is a thematic synthesis of qualitative literature exploring "inner speech" for individuals with a diagnosed psychological disorder. Following a standardised procedure for thematic synthesis, six databases were searched and 10 studies were included. In total, three analytical themes were identified within the data: 1) Withdrawing to an inner world, 2) A fragmented and conflicted self and 3) Re-connecting with the outside world. The results found several similarities regarding the nature, function and negative consequences of engaging with critical inner dialogues across clinical samples. IS as both a coping mechanism and a maintaining factor of psychological distress was a key finding. The results indicated therapeutic approaches facilitating acceptance of internal experiences and disengagement from critical internal dialogues may be helpful. Paper two is a two-stage quantitative study that describes the development and assessment of a novel scale, the Experience of an Anorexic VoicE Questionnaire (EAVE-Q). Using data collected in an earlier qualitative study, Stage 1 generated scale items and tested for face and content validity using cognitive interviews with seven individuals with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. In Stage 2, 148 individuals with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa were recruited from mental health services, eating disorder charities, the community and online to complete the EAVE-Q and measures of eating disorder symptoms, mood and quality of life. The dimensionality of the scale was assessed using principle axis factoring and associations between the EAVE-Q domains and clinical outcomes were evaluated. Factor analysis derived an 18 item scale with five domains. Two domains related to negative consequences of the AV, two to positive functions and one to the externalisation of the AV from the self. There were significant associations between individual EAVE-Q domains and eating disorder symptoms, mood and quality of life. The results highlighted the value in further research to refine the EAVE-Q, and to use this in future research to assess if changes in AV experiences are associated with clinical change over time. Paper three is a critical appraisal of this research. It includes reflections on the research process, discussion of the methodological limitations, and consideration of the implications of the findings for existing theory, future research and clinical practice.

Early pancreatectomy experiments performed in ducks and pigeons at the end of the 19th century revealed that avians, unlike mammals, do not display signs of diabetes. Relative to mammals, birds are considered hyperglycemic, displaying fasting blood glucose concentrations twice that of a normal human. While circulating levels of insulin are similar in avians and mammals, and structure and function of the insulin receptor are also conserved among vertebrate species, birds do not experience deleterious effects of chronic hyperglycemia as observed in mammals. Understanding avian glucose homeostasis, particularly in chickens, has both agricultural and biomedical implications. Improvement of feed efficiency and accelerated growth in poultry may come from a greater understanding of the physiological processes associated with glucose utilization in muscle and fat. The chicken has also recently been recognized as an attractive model for human diabetes, where there is a great need for preventative and therapeutic strategies. The link between type 2 diabetes and obesity, coupled with the inherent hyperglycemic nature of chickens, make chickens artificially selected for juvenile low (LWS) and high (HWS) body weight a favorable model for investigating glucose regulation and pancreas physiology. Oral glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity tests revealed differences in threshold sensitivity to insulin and glucose clearance rate between the lines. Results from real-time PCR showed greater pancreatic mRNA expression of four glucose regulatory genes (preproinsulin, PPI; preproglucagon, PPG; glucose transporter 2, GLUT2; and pancreatic duodenal homeobox 1, Pdx1) in LWS, than HWS chickens. Histological analysis of pancreas revealed that HWS chickens have larger pancreatic islets, less pancreatic islet mass, and more pancreatic inflammation than LWS chickens, all of which presumably contribute to impaired glucose metabolism. In summary, results suggest that at selection age, there are differences in pancreas physiology that may explain the differences in glucose regulation between LWS and HWS. These data pave the way for future studies aimed at understanding the developmental regulation of endocrine pancreas function in chickens, as well as how aging affects homeostatic control of blood glucose in chickens. / Ph. D.

Following study is about the anorexic behavior and the pro-ana movement, which is a web-based subculture where the followers of this, stands for anorexia as an identity position and lifestyle, rather than a disease. The purpose of this study was that, from a sociological perspective give possible interpretations of the anorexic behavior, and interpret why some anorexics choose to be a part of and identify oneself with the pro-ana movement. The reason has been to conduce more knowledge and understanding of the topics, but also to contribute with a deeper perspective and sociological approach to the former research that is already available. To conduct the study, qualitative research has been used, and the chosen methodology was document analysis/text analysis. The collected empirical data consisted material from two pro-ana forums, four blogs and six twitter accounts, where all the users of those claimed to be supporters of the pro-ana. The empirical data has been interpreted by Howard S. Becker's theory of deviance, Erving Goffman's theory of stigma and his dramaturgical theory. In addition, previous research has also been used as a support. The study has shown that anorexics by being stigmatized for their deviant behavior may take different consequences for their actions. These are in the form of social isolation, concealment of behavior and resistance from the rest of society etcetera. Furthermore, the study also revealed that the major reason that anorectics choose to be a part of the pro-ana is because they are in need of interaction with likeminded people. Through membership the anorectics may get the status and attention they need, and at the same time take part of a community where they are not questioned, but rather perceived as fully normal.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:31:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Claudia Mazur Lopes.pdf: 749080 bytes, checksum: d20c77d2913056c7ca03fe2f0679609e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-09-12 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Feeding disruption has been occupying the psychopathological scene no wa days, defying science, flirting with death, denying the body limit sand denouncing the discomfort in present times. This stereotyped and repetitive symptomis more than a game of eating and vomiting and does not seem as obvious as anorexia. This impulsive and voracious fooding estion followed by a purgative behavior, initially has the character of avoiding weight gain. Once this symptomis established, the fear of not being abletoget it under control starts to arise. Generally, bulimia accesses are triggered by an episode of diet, this, in most cases, and developed adolescent women. The extreme manipulation of the body maybe an attempt to control the hazards of life, in other words, another form of engagement with the outside world than a defensive retreat from it. The body space became a privileged scenario to the engenderment of singularities. In the face of consumer culture, the body becomes an object to be desired, molded and more enjoyed. The guy agrees to pay a high price and with pleasure. Therefore, the social networks have been serving us as a place of presentation so four own selves as well as a place of exchange am on groupers. To a better understanding on this matter Closed Communities will be analyzed, Pro anorexia and Bulimia. This article aims tan an alysis of these new forms of communication that result in new perspectives on the social link, in which the public and private mixand produce effects in subjectivity / Os Transtornos Alimentares vêm ocupando a cena psicopatológica da atualidade, desafiando a ciência, flertando com a morte, negando os limites do corpo e denunciando o mal estar na atualidade. A bulimia, sintoma repetitivo e estereotipado é muito mais que um jogo de comer e vomitar e não se mostra tão evidente quanto a anorexia. Esta ingestão impulsiva e voraz de alimento seguido de um comportamento purgativo, inicialmente, tem o caráter de evitar o ganho de peso. Estabelecido este sintoma, começa a surgir o medo de não mais se conseguir controlá-lo. Geralmente, os acessos bulímicos são desencadeados por um episódio de dieta, este, na maior parte das vezes, desenvolvido na adolescência e por mulheres. A extrema manipulação do corpo pode ser uma tentativa de controlar os perigos da vida, ou seja, mais uma forma de envolvimento com o mundo exterior do que uma retirada defensiva dele. O espaço corpóreo tornou-se um cenário privilegiado para o engendramento das singularidades. O corpo é idealizado e ao mesmo tempo é um destino pulsional. Diante da cultura do consumo, o corpo transforma-se em objeto a ser desejado, moldado e mais gozado. O sujeito aceita pagar com alto preço e com prazer. Para tanto, as redes sociais tem nos servido como lugar de maiores trocas entres seus pares, como também um deslumbramento ao mundo novo como é o caso das Comunidades Pró-Anorexia e Bulimia, ou melhor, as famosas: Pró-Ana e Mia, cujo objetivo é um estudo sobre a identidade bulímica, no contexto das redes sociais. As novas formas de comunicação implicam em novos olhares sobre o laço social, no qual o público e privado misturam-se e produzem efeitos nas subjetividades. A partir da apresentação do que foi observado nas comunidades partirei para articulação teórica destas com as questões de nosso tempo

Le mycobiome digestif comprend l’ensemble des espèces de champignons contenu dans le tube digestif. Au cours de cette thèse, nous avons réalisé dans un premier temps une revue de la littérature sur le mycobiome digestif afin d’établir le répertoire des espèces de champignons décrites dans le tube digestif et leur implication dans les infections digestives et systémiques. Puis dans un second temps, notre travail expérimental a combiné l’approche culture et l’approche moléculaire basée sur le séquençage des clones pour explorer la diversité du mycobiome digestif. Nous avons répertorié une variété d’amorces PCR dans la littérature ciblant le gène 18S rRNA et ITS rRNA. En appliquant ces outils moléculaires et la culture à l’analyse d’une selle chez un sujet obèse nous avons détecté 16 espèces de champignons dont 11 espèces sont associées à l’alimentation avec 8 espèces de champignons observées pour la première fois dans les selles.Ensuite, la même approche appliquée à une selle collectée chez un sujet anorexique a permis de détecter 8 espèces de champignons dont 5 espèces associées au régime alimentaire du sujet et 3 espèces retrouvées pour la première fois dans les selles humaines.Dans un dernier temps en utilisant la même méthodologie, nous nous sommes intéressés à la diversité du mycobiome en fonction de l’origine géographique des sujets. Pour cela, nous avons exploré la communauté du mycobiome dans les selles provenant des quatre continents Afrique, Asie, Amérique et l’Europe. Dans ce travail, nous avons détecté 40 espèces de champignons provenant de l’environnement dont certains pathogènes opportunistes. / The human gut mycobiome, comprising of all fungal species detected in the gut. The Human Microbiome Project and the Metagenomics of the Human intestinal tract projects has led to new interest in the study of the human gut mycobiome. Recently, culture-independent approaches including PCR-based molecular clone libraries sequencing and high-throughput sequencing allowed to explore the diversity of gut mycobiota. In this thesis, firstly, we reviewed fungal species described in the human gut and their implication in systemic infections. We reported from literature fungal species described in healthy individuals compared to repertoire described in diseased individuals.Secondly, in our experimental work we used molecular and culture approaches to explore gut mycobiota diversity related to host physiology. We selected various set of PCR primers from literature targeting 18S rRNA gene and ITS rRNA gene. Combining molecular and culture tools in stool specimen from an obese individual we detected 16 fungal species, 11 were linked to food and 8 species were found for first in the human stools. Using the same approaches in an anorexic individual stool we identified 8 fungal species, five were associated to subjected diet collected and three fungal species were observed for the first time in the human stools. From these two studies, we observed that the gut mycobiome diversity is part associated to diet.Using the same methodology, we to explored gut mycobiota diversity according to different geographical locations. For this, fungal diversity was screened in stools samples from four continents Africa, America, Asia and Europe.

Modern database systems use a query optimizer to identify the most efficient strategy, called "plan", to execute declarative SQL queries. Optimization is a mandatory exercise since the difference between the cost of best plan and a random choice could be in orders of magnitude. The role of query optimization is especially critical for the decision support queries featured in data warehousing and data mining applications. For a query on a given database and system configuration, the optimizer's plan choice is primarily a function of the selectivities of the base relations participating in the query. A pictorial enumeration of the execution plan choices of a database query optimizer over this relational selectivity space is called a "plan diagram". It has been shown recently that these diagrams are often remarkably complex and dense, with a large number of plans covering the space. An interesting research problem that immediately arises is whether complex plan diagrams can be reduced to a significantly smaller number of plans, without materially compromising the query processing quality. The motivation is that reduced plan diagrams provide several benefits, including quantifying the redundancy in the plan search space, enhancing the applicability of parametric query optimization, identifying error-resistant and least-expected-cost plans, and minimizing the overhead of multi-plan approaches. In this thesis, we investigate the plan diagram reduction issue from theoretical, statistical and empirical perspectives. Our analysis shows that optimal plan diagram reduction, w.r.t. minimizing the number of plans in the reduced diagram, is an NP-hard problem, and remains so even for a storage-constrained variation. We then present CostGreedy, a greedy reduction algorithm that has tight and optimal performance guarantees, and whose complexity scales linearly with the number of plans in the diagram. Next, we construct an extremely fast estimator, AmmEst, for identifying the location of the best tradeoff between the reduction in plan cardinality and the impact on query processing quality. Both CostGreedy and AmmEst have been incorporated in the publicly-available Picasso optimizer visualization tool. Through extensive experimentation with benchmark query templates on industrial-strength database optimizers, we demonstrate that with only a marginal increase in query processing costs, CostGreedy reduces even complex plan diagrams running to hundreds of plans to "anorexic" levels (small absolute number of plans). While these results are produced using a highly conservative upper-bounding of plan costs based on a cost monotonicity constraint, when the costing is done on "actuals" using remote plan costing, the reduction obtained is even greater - in fact, often resulting in a single plan in the reduced diagram. We also highlight how anorexic reduction provides enhanced resistance to selectivity estimate errors, a long-standing bane of good plan selection. In summary, this thesis demonstrates that complex plan diagrams can be efficiently converted to anorexic reduced diagrams, a result with useful implications for the design and use of next-generation database query optimizers.

This explorative qualitative research investigates whether there is a difference in the symbolic meanings between the bulimic’s behaviour of purposefully expelling food versus the anorexic’s deprivation of food by administering the Thematic Apperceptive Test, as well as, conducting in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews with two bulimic women, two anorexic women of the restrictive sub-type and one anorexic woman of the binge-eating/ purging sub-type, whose ages ranged from twenty-one to thirty-five years of age. Both the conscious and unconscious themes that emerge from their stated relationship with food and their TAT responses are explored, with particular interest being focused on whether the symbolic meaning of food is in essence a “symbolic equation” for an object, specifically the mother and parental couple. The concept of “symbolic equation” is explored analytically from a Kleinian perspective to ascertain whether it is not food, per se that the anorexic is depriving herself of or that the bulimic suddenly and uncontrollably ingests, but then rapidly and violently expels. On the contrary, it appears that the refusal to introject or the ambivalent battle between introjection and expulsion of food is used as a disguise for the underlying conflictual object relation/s. The modified version of the Bellak Scoring System (1986) was used to analyse their TAT responses in order to elicit the themes that represent their internal worlds and object relations. Individual thematic content analysis was conducted on each interview transcript separately, and then a comparative analysis performed to explore commonalities and differences across the transcripts and TAT responses amongst the three anorexic women as a group and the bulimic women as a separate group. After which, the two different eating disorder groups were compared to explore both their differences and similarities. The findings suggest that a variety of conscious and unconscious motives might best be understood within the historical context of each participant’s early development and family dynamics. It appears that the anorexic is unconsciously motivated, at least partly, by her desire to repudiate any experience of dependency, separateness, loss, frustration, envy, fear, guilt and helplessness. Conversely, the bulimic appears to be motivated, at least partly, by the repetitive magical quest to restore a ‘good’ self-object bond and to stifle her destructiveness. Nonetheless, underlying both the anorexic’s and the bulimic’s illness is an ambivalent struggle with internalising a gainful and durable link to an object, which can in some way be permitted to be ‘good’. This appears to have its origin in the mother-daughter relationship, father-daughter relationship, parental couple, as well as, the triangular space between the mother-daughter-father link. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Psychology / unrestricted

The fields of psychology and rhetoric share the goal of improving human mental health and behavior through persuasion. This thesis traces the history of rhetoric and psychology theory, focusing on the parallel theories of Nienkamp's internal rhetoric and Herman's dialogical self. Both theories model the human mind as having multiple psyches that actively interact to interpret human experience and project human behavior. I conclude with a case study of anorexic patients using ethos, pathos, and logos in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), arguing that principles of rhetoric can help patients with mental disorders cognitively realign their thinking more effectively than drug treatments can.