30 research outputs found
Saudi normative data for the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Stroop Test, Test of Non-verbal Intelligence-3, Picture Completion and Vocabulary (subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised).
No full textThere are 2 aims for this study: first, to collect normative data for the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Stroop test, Test of Non-verbal Intelligence (TONI-3), Picture Completion (PC) and Vocabulary (VOC) sub-test of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised for use in a Saudi Arabian culture, and second, to use the normative data provided to generate the regression equations. To collect the normative data and generate the regression equations, 198 healthy individuals were selected to provide a representative distribution for age, gender, years of education, and socioeconomic class. The WCST, Stroop test, TONI-3, PC, and VOC were administrated to the healthy individuals. This study was carried out at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Riyadh Military Hospital, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from January 2000 to July 2002. Normative data were obtained for all tests, and tables were constructed to interpret scores for different age groups. Regression equations to predict performance on the 3 tests of frontal function from scores on tests of fluid (TONI-3) and premorbid intelligence were generated from the data from the healthy individuals. The data collected in this study provide normative tables for 3 tests of frontal lobe function and for tests of general intellectual ability for use in Saudi Arabia. The data also provide a method to estimate preinjury ability without the use of verbally based tests
Thrombolysis is associated with consistent functional improvement across baseline stroke severity: a comparison of outcomes in patients from the Virtual International Stroke Trials Archive (VISTA)
No full text<p><b>Background and Purpose:</b> Baseline stroke severity predicts outcomes among thrombolysed patients. The baseline National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) thresholds are sometimes used to select patients for thrombolysis, clinical trial enrollment, or both. Using data lodged with Virtual International Stroke Trials Archive, we compared adjusted outcomes between thrombolysed and nonthrombolysed patients enrolled in neuroprotection trials (1998-2007) to assess the influence of various levels of baseline NIHSS.</p>
<p><b>Method:</b> We assessed the association of treatment with outcome, measured across the modified Rankin scale score distribution, in patients categorized by baseline NIHSS in increments of 4. We used an age and baseline NIHSS adjusted Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test followed by proportional odds logistic regression analysis. We report the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel P values and estimated odds ratios (OR) for improved modified Rankin scale score distribution with treatment for patients within each baseline NIHSS category.</p>
<p><b>Results:</b> Data were available for 5817 patients (1585 thrombolysed and 4232 nonthrombolysed). Baseline severity was greater among thrombolysed than nonthrombolysed (median baseline NIHSS, 14 vs 13; P<0.05). An association of treatment with outcome was seen independently and was of similar magnitude within each of the baseline NIHSS categories 5 to 8 (P=0.04; OR, 1.25; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.0-1.6; N=278/934 thrombolysed/nonthrombolysed), 9 to 12 (P=0.01; OR, 1.3; 95% CI, 1.1-1.6; N=404/942), 13 to 16 (P<0.05; OR, 1.6; 95% CI, 1.3-2.1; N=342/814), 17 to 20 (P<0.05; OR, 1.7; 95% CI, 1.3-2.1; N=311/736), and 21 to 24 (P<0.05; OR, 1.6; 95% CI, 1.1-2.1; N=178/466). No association was observed within baseline NIHSS categories 1 to 4 (P=0.8; OR, 1.1; 95% CI, 0.3-4.4; N=8/161) or >= 25 (P=0.08; OR, 1.1; 95% CI, 0.7-1.9; N=64/179).</p>
<p><b>Conclusions:</b> In this nonrandomized comparison, outcomes after thrombolysis were significantly better than in untreated comparators across baseline NIHSS 5 to 24. The significant association was lost only at extremes of baseline NIHSS when sample sizes were small and confidence limits were wide.</p>
Screening for Social Determinants of Health in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
No full textPurpose/Background
Increased social determinants of health (SDoH) are associated with poorer health outcomes and decreased treatment compliance. Addressing SDoH can be associated with increased treatment compliance, although currently there is no standard for completing SDoH screening. The WE CARE screening tool is a validated screen that asks about 6 SDoH and whether the family is interested in assistance if the screen is positive. The purpose of this project was to implement the use of the WE CARE screening tool for patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at follow-up visits.
Methods
From October 17, 2022 through November 22, 2022, charts were reviewed for patients scheduled with the participating nurse practitioner and physicians who met inclusion criteria. The WE CARE screening tool was administered and reviewed by the provider, then a referral to social work could be initiated if needed.
Results
Following chart review, 23 patients met eligibility criteria, and of these 12 (52%) completed a WE CARE form. Needs were identified on 2 of the completed forms (17 %), and no referrals were made to social work.
Implications for Nursing Practice
During the implementation period of this quality improvement project, only about half of eligible families had a screening form completed, either because the parent refused or because the physician or nurse practitioner forgot to give the form to the family. Based on the results of this initial implementation phase, more information is needed from the participating healthcare providers about whether they did not feel comfortable using the screen, thought the screen was helpful, or if there were other factors impacting the rate of form completion. It may also be helpful to try to use this screening tool with new patients first instead of follow-ups. The results of the current project do not yet support a change in practice by implementing this tool
Neural basis for priming of pop-out during visual search revealed with fMRI
No full textMalikovic and Nakayama first showed that visual search efficiency can be influenced by priming effects. Even "pop-out" targets (defined by unique color) are judged quicker if they appear at the same location and/or in the same color as on the preceding trial, in an unpredictable sequence. Here, we studied the potential neural correlates of such priming in human visual search using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that repeating either the location or the color of a singleton target led to repetition suppression of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activity in brain regions traditionally linked with attentional control, including bilateral intraparietal sulci. This indicates that the attention system of the human brain can be "primed," in apparent analogy to repetition-suppression effects on activity in other neural systems. For repetition of target color but not location, we also found repetition suppression in inferior temporal areas that may be associated with color processing, whereas repetition of target location led to greater reduction of activation in contralateral inferior parietal and frontal areas, relative to color repetition. The frontal eye fields were also implicated, notably when both target properties (color and location) were repeated together, which also led to further BOLD decreases in anterior fusiform cortex not seen when either property was repeated alone. These findings reveal the neural correlates for priming of pop-out search, including commonalities, differences, and interactions between location and color repetition. fMRI repetition-suppression effects may arise in components of the attention network because these settle into a stable 1. attractor state" more readily when the same target property is repeated than when a different attentional state is required
The Other Side of Silence: Using fiction to explore the resources and limitations in writing about women's lives
No full textThis dissertation consists of two distinct components: a creative manuscript, titled “The Other Side of Silence,” and an accompanying exegesis. Both pieces endeavour to answer key questions: What are the different ways fiction might be used to write about the life of a woman from the past? How might we write about such women, taking into account the constraints by which their stories have been forgotten, omitted or displaced? And what are the implications of foregrounding such silences in the writing and reading of narratives?
“The Other Side of Silence” tells the story of Alba, an Italian woman who, with her young family, is leaving her hometown of Salerno for Australia in 1952. The narrative focuses on Alba’s relationship with her mother, Serafina, who fears that Alba’s journey to Australia is motivated by a desire to distance herself from her past. Within this narrative I explore how each of these characters views and consequently deals with the past.
The exegesis discusses several texts that have influenced and inspired “The Other Side of Silence.” In reading contemporary texts about the lives of women in the past, I noted two distinct approaches in the ways women’s stories were written. Some writers use recuperative strategies that allow them to tell stories previously omitted from or distorted by historical discourse and dominant cultural ideologies. By contrast, other writers use poststructuralist narrative strategies to foreground the ways in which traditional realist narratives gloss over the gaps, contradictions and omissions in women’s stories. These alternative narratives indicate how revelation and closure in traditional realism can preclude the probing of some subtle and significant questions about narrating and making sense of women’s experiences. The exegesis examines the different ways writers have challenged and subsequently enlarged conventional notions of realist fiction to imagine and speculate on the possibilities for and limitations on narrative
The gendering of sports news: An investigation into the production, content and reception of sports photographs of athletes in New Zealand newspapers.
No full textThis study investigates the selection, content, meaning and reception of photographs of sportswomen featured in New Zealand newspapers, in order to establish the relationship between media representations and cultural understandings of sportswomen and women’s sport. The study adopts a feminist cultural studies perspective and questions how photographs of sportswomen are constructed and perceived through dominant discourses of gender, sport and nationalism by media decision-makers and audiences alike, within contexts that are shaped by gender power relations and hierarchies.
The first component of this tripartite study comprises two periods of participant observation and interviews conducted at a New Zealand media organization. The insights gained reveal how discourses of (sports) journalism impact on the choices media workers make about what constitutes sports news. Media practices, newsroom dynamics, organizational protocols, freedoms and constraints, and taken-for-granted work routines were all found to inform media workers’ decision making. Thus, journalistic discourses play a decisive role in constructing perceptions of newsworthiness that privilege a few professional men’s sports whilst marginalizing women’s sports and sportswomen, who are frequently stereotyped in representations where physical appearance and aesthetic beauty are emphasized rather than athleticism.
The second component of this research comprises a systematic analysis of 2,787 sports photographs featured in four New Zealand newspapers during two distinct sample periods. The three main themes that emerged demonstrate that:
◙ Sports media reinforce an articulation of sport and masculinity;
◙ When sportswomen are featured, the media reinforce an articulation of sportswomen and femininity; and
◙ When major international sporting events occur, dominant discourses affirming an articulation of sports are momentarily disrupted, as the articulation of sport and nationalism creates space for greater coverage of sportswomen.
However, despite the increased focus on sportswomen during the context of a major international sporting event, the content of photographs continues to reinforce discourses of femininity, emphasizing potential or actual medal winners and/or their physical attractiveness as sportswomen. A number of representative photographs of sportswomen are subjected to further in-depth evaluation using Peircean semiotic analysis, to establish how sports photographs convey gender differences. This analysis demonstrates how media draw attention to gender by using close-up photographs of sportswomen in tight fitting, body-hugging sportswear that is culturally defined as gender appropriate for women, which accentuates their physical attractiveness and femininity.
The third component of this study involves in-depth interviews with seven elite New Zealand sportswomen, who describe their engagement with sports photographs and the challenges faced in determining what it means to be an athlete and a woman. Participants’ comments highlight how they often perceive photographs of themselves negatively, and in relation to the powerful discursive messages media convey about athleticism and gender, which associate sport with men and masculinity. Moreover, these media messages further result in sportswomen featuring in ambivalent and ambiguous ways, due to perceived contradictions in the articulation of sports with women and femininity.
Conclusions are drawn on the powerful role discourses of sport play in media workers’ and audiences’ perceptions of sports newsworthiness, which are predominantly gender-based and gender-biased. Although discourses of nationalism encourage greater attention to medal winning sportswomen during major international sporting events, this focus continues to be constrained within discourses of femininity, and thus highlights those sports deemed appropriate for women, with emphasis given to sportswomen who embody idealized modes of femininity. Moreover, the findings of this research highlight the necessity for sports media studies to incorporate the voices of media workers and audiences, as their actions, reactions and perceptions reveal the real issues that they experience and what is important to them in producing and consuming sports news. This study therefore takes a step forward in highlighting crucial questions about the role of gender in shaping sporting representations as they are constructed and consumed in New Zealand
Post 1990s Dance Theatre and (the idea of) the Neutral
No full textPhDThe thesis focuses on the concept of neutrality in the works of contemporary
European (post 1990s) choreographers. While broad ideas around neutrality are
considered, the thesis primarily engages with Roland Barthes’ definition of
neutrality as a structural term: 'every inflection that, dodging or baffling the
paradigmatic, oppositional structure of meaning, aims at the suspension of the
conflictual basis of discourse'. I argue that the minimalist work of Judson
Church, New York City, is anticipating the interest in the neutral that will more
strongly formulate itself in dance theatre after the 1990s. In the first chapter on
Jérôme Bel, the concept of neutrality is introduced as a general idea, together with
its inherent problem. The 'problem' is not that this or that element that Bel
chooses cannot be perceived as neutral, but that neutral or stage zero can never be
neutral enough. The second chapter, dedicated to the work of Thomas Lehmen,
explores the idea of 'neutralization' in relation to the notion of the self in
Lehmen's performance, where 'It is not I or you who lives: 'one' (une vie) lives in
us' (P. Hallward). In the third chapter I argue that in Raimund Hoghe’s
performances, love is conceived essentially as a balance between narcissism and
pure object-love – as a neutral state. The fourth chapter, on Croatia’s BADco.,
gravitates around the ways in which group processes function, arguing that the
idea of the neutral is located in the ‘invisible hand’ of emergence. The thesis shifts
academic performance analysis towards a more concept-based approach,
unpicking and/or constructing timeless, abstract and broad concepts and ideas that
the work of these choreographers resonates with
AlloViz: A tool for the calculation and visualisation of protein allosteric communication networks
No full textAllostery, the presence of functional interactions between distant parts of proteins, is a critical concept in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology, particularly in the context of protein function and regulation. Understanding the principles of allosteric regulation is essential for advancing our knowledge of biology and developing new therapeutic strategies. This paper presents AlloViz, an open-source Python package designed to quantitatively determine, analyse, and visually represent allosteric communication networks on the basis of molecular dynamics (MD) simulation data. The software integrates well-known techniques for understanding allosteric properties simplifying the process of accessing, rationalising, and representing protein allostery and communication routes. It overcomes the inefficiency of having multiple methods with heterogeneous implementations and showcases the advantages of using MD simulations and multiple replicas to obtain statistically sound information on protein dynamics; it also enables the calculation of "consensus-like" scores aggregating methods that consider multiple structural aspects of allosteric networks. We demonstrate the features of AlloViz on two proteins: β-arrestin 1, a key player for regulating G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) signalling, and the protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B, an important pharmaceutical target for allosteric inhibitors. The software includes comprehensive documentation and examples, tutorials, and a user-friendly graphical interface.DAG acknowledges financial support from the Catalan Department of Business and Innovation [2020FISDU/487]. TG acknowledges funding from the Spoke 7 of the National Centre for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing [CN00000013, CUP B93C22000620006] and from PRIN 2022 [BioCat4BioPol, CUP B53D23015140006] from the Ministero dell'Università e Ricerca, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU. JS acknowledges funding from MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the ERDF/EU (grant number PID2022-137161OB-I00). JS acknowledges further funding from the Horizon Europe Project OBELISK under the grant agreement 101080465. JS has been financially supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III FEDER [PI18/00094] and the ERA-NET NEURON & Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness [AC18/00030]. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. We acknowledge the CINECA awards under the ISCRA initiative for the availability of high performance computing resources and support. FNF, AMP, MLB, DAG, TG and JS have been members of COST Action CA18133 “ERNEST”
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International Medical Graduates Representation at International Oncology Conference Meetings: An Analysis of ASCO Annual Meetings
No full textDespite international medical graduates (IMGs) accounting for up to one third of all practicing oncologists in the United States, and nearly half of fellowship trainees, little is known about their contributions to presentations at international oncology meetings. Therefore, we investigated the representation of IMGs in invited faculty roles at the ASCO Annual Meeting as a representative example.
Presentation data from ASCO 2022 and 2023 Annual Meetings were obtained from program guides. We collected presentation-level and speaker-level variables of invited faculty roles and original research. Speakers were categorized as American medical graduate (AMG), IMG, non-US-based, or non-MD (Doctor of Medicine). Univariable and multivariable analyses assessed factors influencing selection for invited faculty roles.
A total of 2,590 presentations by 2,109 unique speakers were reviewed, including primary research presenters and invited faculty. Among the 1,352 presentations by AMGs, 30% were primary research and 70% were invited faculty roles. For the 374 presentations by IMGs, 41% were primary research and 59% were invited faculty roles. Notably, first-author IMGs were significantly less likely to receive invited faculty roles relative to their primary research output compared with first-author AMGs (adjusted odds ratio, 0.69 [95% CI, 0.53 to 0.90];
= .006), even when accounting for academic rank, presumed sex, and year.
Relative to IMGs' original research output, IMGs appear to receive fewer invitations for ASCO Annual Meeting invited faculty roles compared with AMGs. Our findings suggest potential underrepresentation and under-recognition of IMGs in these roles, despite their contributions to the oncology workforce in the United States
Memory, language and trauma in the work of Félix Grande
No full textPhDMy thesis explores how memory and trauma permeate the work of the poet Félix Grande
(Mérida, Spain, 1937). It addresses the question of how his particular understanding of
memory is opposed to a rather bleak view of it held by many other Spanish poets of the
time. Grande does not yield to a generalized discrediting of memory. On the contrary,
memory is the driving force behind his writing, and this thesis constitutes an analysis of
its mechanisms. The originality of Grande’s work stems from the ways in which it shares
common ground with contemporary research carried out by disciplines that integrate
Memory and Trauma Studies. His poetic voice struggles to grasp aspects of memory
whose articulation proves traumatic. These elements resist symbolic translation and turn
his poetry into a work of constant rumination without closure. Grande’s work illustrates
that literature is both inextricably linked to memory, and is well equipped to deal with
trauma, as the labour carried out by memory, weaving and un-weaving, especially in its
attempts to mourn, is at the heart of his artistic production. Finally, his work instantiates a
relationship with language and memory which, while recognising the limits of language
to express and of memory to retrieve the past, goes beyond this initial distrust to offer a
positive perspective on these faculties, as the means for establishing modes of survival
and rethinking our connections to the unknown
