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Biomedical subjects

D Hellawell

Publications and source records attributed to D Hellawell.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Survey of the late consequences of polio in Edinburgh and the Lothians.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to identify the nature and frequency of new symptoms and associated disabilities experienced by people who suffered poliomyelitis many years ago, and their access to hospital services. DESIGN: Postal survey regarding symptoms, disability (Office of Population Censuses & Surveys (OPCS) disability questionnaire), and experience of services. SUBJECTS & SETTING: People known to the British Polio Fellowship and the regional rehabilitation service who had previously had polio and were resident in Edinburgh and the Lothians. RESULTS: The study population of 125 people had a median age of 59 years, and 60% were female. The most common symptoms, present in over 60%, were: cold intolerance, fatigue, increased and new muscle weakness, muscle and joint pain, and sleep disturbance. Motor disabilities, particularly of lower limbs, were prominent. Patient contact with hospital services in the preceding five years was: clinic (62%); physiotherapy (46%); occupational therapy (29%); speech therapy (2%); wheelchair service (42%); orthotics (40%). CONCLUSIONS: New problems are sufficiently frequent and severe to warrant a more detailed study to quantify the health care requirements of the post-polio population.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Implicit access to semantic information.

Three experiments investigating the patient M.S.'s semantic memory are reported. Experiments 1 and 2 involved a category-membership decision task, in which M.S. was asked to determine whether a noun was a member of a specified semantic category. His performance in Experiment 1 was impaired for nouns from living categories in comparison with nouns from nonliving categories, and this impairment was especially marked for nouns of low typicality. Experiment 2 demonstrated an equivalent pattern of very poor performance to nouns of low familiarity from living categories. In Experiment 3 the effect of a category label on lexical decision was examined, using category labels as primes preceding nouns or pronounceable nonwords. Facilitation from related category label primes was found for typical and untypical members of living and nonliving semantic categories. These findings demonstrate that M.S. has impaired knowledge of the structure of living semantic categories when explicit access to this information is required (Experiments 1 and 2), but that some form of preserved category structure can be demonstrated in tasks which assess this implicitly (Experiment 3).

Agnosia↗
PubMed1987

Configurational information in face perception.

A new facial composites technique is demonstrated, in which photographs of the top and bottom halves of different familiar faces fuse to form unfamiliar faces when aligned with each other. The perception of a novel configuration in such composite stimuli is sufficiently convincing to interfere with identification of the constituent parts (experiment 1), but this effect disappears when stimuli are inverted (experiment 2). Difficulty in identifying the parts of upright composites is found even for stimuli made from parts of unfamiliar faces that have only ever been encountered as face fragments (experiment 3). An equivalent effect is found for composites made from internal and external facial features of well-known people (experiment 4). These findings demonstrate the importance of configurational information in face perception, and that configurations are only properly perceived in upright faces.

Adult↗