Premature Termination of Treatment among Adults Attending Treatment for Eating Disorders: A Critical Review

The article presents a critical review regarding the premature termination of eating disorder’s treatment among inpatients and outpatients, with the aim of identifying—emotional, psychodynamic and family-related aspects involved. The search strategy used the following MeSH terms combined by Boolean operators: “eating disorders” AND “treatment” OR “patient dropouts” OR “drop-out/dropouts” OR “attrition” OR “premature termination” AND “empirical study” OR “qualitative research”, for on Medline/PUBMED, PsycINFO and EMBASE databases. This article follows the PRISMA Guidelines. A total of 26 studies composed this review, of which 24 were original research articles, 1 was a review and 1 a theoretical article. Only two articles applied qualitative methods analyzing categories of content obtained by in-depth interviews, three combine quantitative and qualitative methods and other three present qualitative analyses while discussing quantitative studies. Further qualitative studies should be carried out to clarify meanings of dropout, premature termination of treatment, and attrition. Different expectations held by patients and by therapeutic teams, and the interpersonal difficulties of these types of patients, stand out as difficulties in constructing “therapeutic alliances”, with impacts on dropout, premature termination and attrition rates.

Antisense oligonucleotide technology can be used to investigate a circular but not linear RNA-mediated function for its encoded gene locus

As a class of powerful molecular tool,antisense oligonucleotides(ASOs)are not only broadly used in protein and RNA biology,but also a highly selective therapeutic strategy for many diseases.Although the concept that ASO reagents only reduce expression of the targeted gene in a post-transcriptional manner has long been established,the effect and mechanism of ASO reagents on RNA polymerase II(Pol II)transcription are largely unknown.This raised question is particularly important for the appropriate use of ASOs and the valid interpretation of ASO-mediated experiments.In this study,our results show that linear RNA ASO attenuates transcription of nascent transcripts by inducing premature transcription termination which is combinatorially controlled by Integrator,exosome,and Rat1 in Drosophila.However,circular RNA(circRNA)ASO transfection does not affect transcription activity of the encoded gene.These data suggest that the ASO technique can be applied to study a circRNA-mediated but not linear RNA-mediated function for its encoded gene locus.