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Biomedical subjects

J Morton

Publications and source records attributed to J Morton.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources
PubMed1983

Acute appendicitis: a quality assurance analysis.

The management of 722 patients admitted to Christchurch Hospital in 1979 with acute appendicitis (308) or non-specific abdominal pain (414) was such that 86% of the appendicitis patients had a timely removal of an inflamed but not perforated appendix and 9.2% of the patients with non-specific abdominal pain had an unnecessary appendicectomy. The mean stay in hospital was 4.8 days for patients who had a timely operation for acute appendicitis, 8.1 days for patients undergoing operation for perforated appendicitis, 6.1 days for patients who had non-specific abdominal pain and appendicectomy, and 2.7 days for patients who had non-specific abdominal pain without appendicectomy. There was no mortality.

Abdomen↗
PubMed1983

Evidence that the insulin secretagogue, beta-cell-tropin, is ACTH22-39.

The pituitary neurointermediate lobe of genetically obese (ob/ob) mice contains a hormone which stimulates insulin release and which cross-reacts with a -COOH-terminal ACTH antiserum, suggesting that it is related to corticotropin-like intermediate lobe peptide (CLIP), the 18-39 fragment of ACTH. The hormone, which we have called beta-cell-tropin, has been shown to be present in the plasma of the ob/ob mouse and to potentiate glucose induced insulin secretion. We have now shown that ACTH22-39 prepared by tryptic digestion of human synthetic CLIP behaves similarly on Biogel chromatography and on reverse-phase HPLC to the naturally occurring beta-cell-tropin. Furthermore, beta-cell-tropin and ACTH22-39 have indistinguishable antigenic and insulin releasing properties.

Adrenocorticotropic Hormone↗
PubMed1983

Interfacing a microcomputer to a spectrophotometer for EMIT assays.

Details of how to connect a microcomputer to a spectrophotometer are given. Four BASIC subroutines are described which allow the user to: sense sample input, transfer data to the microcomputer, purge the flowcell, and set a time delay loop. Initially designed for EMIT assays, the microcomputer could easily be adapted to other laboratory tests.

Humans↗
PubMed1983

The flexure modulus of elasticity of orthodontic wires.

The flexure moduli of elasticity of solid and multi-stranded orthodontic wires were determined. Results for the solid wires approximated their tensile values, but the differences were statistically significant for the stainless steel, chromium-cobalt-nickel, and nickel-titanium alloys. The flexure moduli of the multi-stranded wires ranged from 0.89 to 5.11 X 10(6) psi, and were dependent on the direction of activation.

Chromium Alloys↗
PubMed1982

The word frequency effect and lexical access.

Some recent experiments suggest that only open class words show a frequency effect. Closed class items are accessed independently of their frequency. We carried out five experiments to test the validity of this hypothesis for the French language. All our results suggest that the frequency effect applies equally well to the open and closed class items.

France↗
PubMed1982

The effects of priming on picture recognition.

In two experiments we show that the prior presentation of a picture serves to facilitate the recognition of that picture in a tachistoscope up to 45 minutes later. Facilitation of recognition also occurred with prior presentation of a different picture with the same name. This cannot be explained items of a response bias, since the presentation of a word, which the subject read aloud, had no effect whatsoever upon the subsequent recognition of the picture. The data are interpreted in terms of a categorization stage for pictures which is completely independent of the verbal system. Data from other experimental paradigms are also examined. Our categorization model enables consistent interpretation of these data, which otherwise appear contradictory.

Discrimination Learning↗
PubMed1982

The effects of priming with regularly and irregularly related words in auditory word recognition.

The experiment examines the effects of relatively long-term (10-40 minutes) priming on the recognition of spoken words presented in noise. The focus of the experiment was the extent to which the priming was lexical (i.e. whole word), morphological or physical. First, no priming was found for physically related words. Thus 'deflecting' spoken clearly in the pre-training task had no effect on the identification of 'reflecting' in the test phase. Second, there was very strong facilitation from a word with a regular inflectional relationship to the test word. Thus the word 'reflected' facilitated recognition of 'reflecting' almost as much as prior experience of 'reflecting' itself and, when responses were scored in terms of the root morpheme, counting 'reflect', 'reflects' and 'reflected' etc. as being correct, the morphemic effect was the same in the two cases. That this was a structural and not a semantic effect was shown by the complete lack of facilitation between irregularly related words such as 'held/holding', 'man/men', 'lost/loses'. These data suggest that there is a morphological/structural level of analysis which is pre-semantic, at which these long-term facilitation effects take place. They also pose a challenge to the cohort theory of word recognition.

Adult↗
PubMed1981

Growth induction in cystic fibrosis fibroblasts with low dexamethasone concentrations. Experience with application to genotyping.

Dexamethasone (DM) resistance was evaluated in fibroblasts from a pool of five patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) homozygotes, ten of their parental obligate heterozygotes, and seventeen age-matched controls of both sexes. The CF heterozygotes showed a mean DM resistance greater than homozygotes and both groups exhibited a higher mean DM resistance at every DM concentration than controls. However, substantial interassay variability rendered these differences in the total pooled data to non-significance. One control showed a consistently increased resistance and was possibly a covert heterozygote. It was concluded that the phenomenon of DM resistance was exhibited by CF heterozygotes and homozygotes but was not discrete enough for genotyping in the prenatal diagnosis of CF.

Cell Division↗
PubMed1981

The acoustic correlates of "speechlike": a use of the suffix effect.

The stimulus suffix paradigm has been used to establish the importance of precategorical acoustic storage (PAS) as a theoretical construct in the investigation of attention and speech perception. Morton and Chambers concluded that sounds must have typical "speechlike" properties extracted at an early stage of processing in order to act as suffixes. In this article we use the suffix effect to investigate the conditions under which a sound is treated by the acoustic system as speechlike. On the basis of our findings we then perform other studies that reaffirm the essentially precategorical nature of the memory source termed PAS by Crowder and Morton. In Experiments 1-13 we demonstrate the complex basis on which sounds are classified. Our experiments show that a completely regular sound, in which a single pitch pulse from a naturally spoken vowel was repeatedly reproduced, still produced a substantial suffix effect. In addition a natural sound had to be quite severely filtered before the suffix effect began to vanish. However, a combination of regularity and filtering proved very effective, the two dimensions dramatically interacting in neutralizing the effect of the sound as a suffix. In two further experiments (14 and 15) we show that the classification parameters can be shifted by changing the acoustic properties of the stimulus list. However, forcing the subjects to make a linguistic classification of suffix sounds did not lead to any changes in their potency as suffixes. The classification of sounds, and thus the suffix effect, is an acoustic question, not a subjective one. The distinction between subjective and acoustic influences was further demonstrated when subjects rated a variety of sounds for their naturalness and for their similarity to the original suffix (Experiments 17-22). These measures showed themselves sensitive to the filtering operations we performed but, unlike measures of suffix effectiveness, were insensitive to regularity. Another suffix that produced a full suffix effect was shown to be rated as very nonspeechlike. Contrary to recent claims, these results reinforce our view of a distinction between central, subjectively controllable factors and a strong precategorical effect that is automatic in action and is based on the decision of whether a sound is speechlike.

Adult↗