Smelling via the mouth: effect of aging.
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Aged↗
Biomedical subjects
J C Stevens
Publications and source records attributed to J C Stevens.
Effect of aspirin on nasal resistance to airflow.
The effect of aspirin on nasal resistance to airflow was investigated by rhinomanometry in 25 healthy subjects before and after ingestion of aspirin or vitamin C in a double blind crossover trial. Aspirin caused a significant increase in nasal resistance compared with vitamin C. The effect of aspirin may be due to its inhibition of the synthesis of prostaglandins.
Adult↗
A sound stimulator with electronic memory for testing infants' hearing.
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Acoustic Stimulation↗
The effect of submucosal diathermy to the inferior turbinates on nasal resistance to airflow in allergic and vasomotor rhinitis.
Twenty-one patients with nasal obstruction due to allergic or vasomotor rhinitis were assessed rhinomanometrically before and after the operation of submucosal diathermy to the inferior turbinates. It was found that the operation significantly improved the nasal airway. Most patients with an objective improvement reported a corresponding reduction in nasal obstruction. There was no tendency for patients with allergic rhinitis to be dissatisfied with the operation.
Adolescent↗
Familial spastic paraplegia, mental retardation, and precocious puberty.
Two brothers had progressive spastic paraplegia and precocious puberty develop due to Leydig's cell hyperplasia when they were 2 years old. Both later had moderate mental retardation. Family members displayed brisk lower-extremity reflexes and dysarthria in a pedigree that suggested autosomal dominant inheritance with variable expression. Precocious puberty has been associated with other neurologic syndromes. Its occurrence in two brothers with spastic paraplegia has not, to our knowledge, been previously reported.
Adult↗
Sensory loss from whole sural nerve biopsy.
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Biopsy↗
A 32-year experience with the surgical treatment of selected brachial plexus lesions with emphasis on its reconstruction.
Twenty-five patients with brachial plexus injury were treated by anastomosis, neurolysis, and calvicular decompression. The patients treated by anastomosis are described in detail because evidence of regrowth of axons across the anastomosis can be documented, whereas the effects of neurolysis are difficult to judge. The techniques of brachial plexus reconstruction are illustrated. Clinical improvement occurred in 93% of patients treated with anastomosis, 89% of those treated with neurolysis, and 100% of those treated with decompression. Electromyographic studies provided valuable information in assessment before and after surgery. The benefits of surgical therapy of brachial plexus injuries outweigh the risks in carefully selected patients.
Adolescent↗
Electrical stimulation at the wrist as an aid for the profoundly deaf.
The development and evaluation of a sensory electrical substitution aid for the profoundly deaf is described. The aid is a small wrist-worn device which converts sound into an electrical stimulus at the wrist. The initial aim was to give profoundly deaf people useful information from ambient sounds. Evaluation of the Mark 1 aid on 15 hearing and five profoundly deaf people indicated that such a device might be of use to some deaf people. Investigation of the sensitivity of the peripheral nervous system to electrical pulse stimulation showed that information could be transmitted in a more efficient manner so a Mark 2 aid was developed which incorporated circuitry to transmit pitch information, potentially useful in lipreading. The Mark 2 aid was shown to give improved results over the Mark 1 aid in transmitting voice intonation, but gave no help in an isolated word lipreading test. A portable Mark 2 aid was developed to enable clinical trials to be carried out on profoundly deaf people.
Adult↗
A comparison of transtympanic and ear canal recorded electrocochleography in clinical practice.
Electrocochleograms were recorded in a routine clinic on 21 patients by the transtympanic method and from a surface electrode in the ear canal. This was to determine whether a non-invasive technique would give the same clinical information as the normal transtympanic technique. Taking the transtympanic technique as the standard for comparison, the ear canal technique produced a significant number of errors in compound action potential threshold and width. The summating potential/compound action potential ratio could only be measured in just over half the ear canal recordings compared with the transtympanic recordings. From these results and a retrospective study of the notes looking at the effect of electrocochleography on diagnosis and management, it was concluded that the ear canal technique was not a substitute for transtympanic electrocochleography where the use of an invasive technique is justified.
Action Potentials↗
Neurogenic arthropathy and recurring fractures with subclinical inherited neuropathy.
Some patients with radiologic findings of neurogenic arthropathy or multiple fractures do not exhibit overt neurologic signs. Results of nerve conduction velocity, computer-assisted sensory examination, periosteal nociception, and morphometric and graded teased-fiber evaluation of cutaneous nerves allowed us to recognize a mild neuropathic abnormality. Neurogenic arthropathy and subclinical neuropathy were also found in relatives. In three kinships, the underlying disorder was probably hereditary sensory neuropathy type 1 and in several others, it was recessively inherited sensory neuropathy. These arthropathies were often painful, and overt loss of superficial and deep pain sensation was not a prominent or necessary condition. An interplay of multiple factors including insensitivity, trauma, obesity, activity, abuse, personality, mental subnormality, and metabolic joint and bone disease are probably involved in the development of the bony lesions and thus provide further evidence that environmental factors affect expression of human mutant genes for inherited neuropathy.
Adolescent↗
Vincristine neuropathy with bowel and bladder atony, mimicking spinal cord compression.
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Diagnosis, Differential↗
"Burning feet" as the only manifestation of dominantly inherited sensory neuropathy.
A young woman had chronic symptoms of "burning feet" but no clinical or neurophysiologic findings of neuropathy. These symptoms were aggravated by warmth and ameliorated by cooling. Extensive pathologic grading of teased sural nerve fibers, however, provided suggestive evidence of a low-grade pathologic abnormality. Other kin were discovered to have similar symptoms in an autosomal-dominant pattern, and some of these relatives had evidence of a subclinical sensory neuropathy. From this experience, we infer that a mild subclinical neuropathy may underlie the symptom of burning feet; burning pain of the feet may be dominantly inherited; hereditary sensory neuropathy may, therefore, manifest with only positive symptoms of burning pain, restless legs, and lancinating pain, rather than with mutilating acropathy, neurotrophic arthropathy, or severe distal sensory loss as is usually reported; and temperature may modulate physiologic mechanisms related to the experience of burning pain.
Adult↗
Minimal pathologic expression of a mutant gene for hereditary motor and sensory neuropathy.
Transverse sections of the sural nerve of a 46-year-old woman without neuropathic symptoms or abnormalities on nerve conduction, electromyography, or computer-assisted sensory examination contained minute regions with large onion bulbs intermingled with normal-appearing myelinated fibers and surrounded by fields of normal myelinated fibers. This woman's 19-year-old daughter had long-standing hypertrophic neuropathy with diffusely distributed large onion bulbs. Computer-imaging reconstruction of myelinated fibers and teased myelinated fiber studies of fascicles containing focal regions with onion bulbs of the mother's nerve provided evidence that onion bulbs surrounded atrophic axons with short internodes and demyelination. This is the least expression for inherited neuropathy which has been reported. These findings therefore suggest that an inherited neuropathy may be minimally expressed by a pathologic alteration of only selected neurons (axons).
Adult↗
A comparative study of human sensory thresholds: 2450-MHz microwaves vs far-infrared radiation.
Three male and female adults individually placed the ventral surface of the right and upright forearm against a 15-cm-diameter aperture in a wall of microwave-absorbent material. Ten-second exposures occurred to E-vector-vertically polarized, 2450-MHz-CW microwave (MW) fields. Comparable exposure to infrared (IR) waves was repeated with four of the six observers. Thresholds of detection of just-noticeable warming by MW and IR radiation were determined by the double-staircase psychophysical method. Although the exposed surface areas of male observers' arm were larger than those of female observers, thresholds of warming by either source of energy overlapped; the pooled means of irradiance at threshold are 26.7 mW/cm2 (MW) and 1.7 mW/cm2 (IR). Dosimetric measures on saline models indicated virtually perfect absorption of the incident IR, but nearly two-thirds of the MW energy was scattered. Accordingly, the 15-fold difference in means of MW and IR thresholds resolves to a 5-fold difference in threshold quantities of absorbed energy. In the light of the high correlation between thresholds of IR and MW irradiation (r = .97), it is concluded that the same set of superficial thermoreceptors was being stimulated, only less efficiently so, by the more deeply penetrating, more diffusely absorbed MW energy.
Adult↗
Lupus myositis.
Eleven patients met rigid criteria for having both polymyositis and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). The patients differed little in clinical features when compared with patients who had SLE and polymyositis in a previously reported series. The overall mortality rate of 18% and the finding that 56% of survivors were asymptomatic at latest follow-up (average four years) suggest that the prognosis for this subgroup of patients may be more favorable than that for patients with rheumatoid arthritis and scleroderma complicated by polymyositis and may be comparable to the prognosis of the overall group of patients with polymyositis.
Adolescent↗
Thermal stimulus thresholds: sources of variability.
Thresholds to warming and cooling by a small Peltier stimulator were measured and remeasured in 24 adults and children aged 7-9. The median thresholds to warming and cooling of the forearm were +1.04 and -.15 degrees C. respectively, and neither age nor sex mattered significantly. The test-retest correlation was significant, suggesting intra-subject reliability, despite a large range of thresholds across subjects-about an order of magnitude. Measurements of skin temperature revealed that the same stimulus can cause a greater degree of warming or cooling in one subject than another. These differences proved reliable on retesting. Surprisingly, however, there was no correlation between this physical variation among people and the size of their psychophysical thresholds. Some compensatory mechanism is suggested by these data; the implication is that people who are less responsive physically may be more sensitive neurally and vice versa.
Adult↗
Effects of temperature on the perceived sweetness of sucrose.
The sweetness of sucrose depends on the temperature as well as the concentration of a solution. The main effect is that relatively low concentrations gain sweetness as temperature increases. This effect diminishes with progressively higher concentration and finally becomes negligible at about 0.5 M. At this concentration the various functions that relate perceived sweetness to concentration for various temperatures converge. The mechanism of the taste-temperature interaction is speculative, but the interaction is large enough to be of practical interest in the perception of common foods and beverages as well as a variable to be strictly controlled in taste experiments. An examination of method of tasting showed that swallowing stimuli did not substantially increase perceived sweetness.
Female↗
Reduction of odor and nasal pungency associated with aging.
Aging can seriously blunt suprathreshold sensations mediated by the olfactory receptor system and by common chemical receptors. Despite large individual differences, on the average any given stimulus seemed only about half as intense to the elderly (20 subjects, 65-83 yrs) as to the young (20 subjects, 18-25 yrs). The nature of the loss was a constant percentage reduction of perceived magnitude at stimulus levels from weak to strong. The stimuli were iso-amyl butyrate (a nonirritating fruity odor) and CO2 (which is practically odorless but triggers common chemical sensations effectively). The method used was magnitude matching, by which subjects made numerical estimates of the perceived magnitude of various levels of the two chemical stimuli and of the loudness of low-pitched noises. The loudness estimates served to adjust each subject's chemical estimates to help compensate for individual idiosyncrasies in the use of numbers and potential biases associated with age. Common chemical and olfactory losses seem to be unrelated; aging can dull one sense and leave the other acute.
Adolescent↗