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At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources
PubMed2006

Factors influencing consumer dietary health preventative behaviours.

BACKGROUND: The deterioration of the health status of the Romanian population during the economic transition from a centrally planned to a free market economy has been linked to lifestyles factors (e.g. diet) regarded as a main determinants of the disparity in life expectancy between Eastern and Western Europe. Reforms in the health care system in this transition economy aim to focus on preventive action. The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that impact on the individual decision to engage in Dietary Health Preventive Behaviour (DHPB) and investigate their influence in the context of an adapted health cognition model. METHODS: A population-based study recruited 485 adult respondents using random route sampling and face-to-face administered questionnaires. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Respondents' health motivation, beliefs that diet can prevent disease, knowledge about nutrition, level of education attainment and age have a positive influence on DHPB. Perceived barriers to healthy eating have a negative impact on alcohol moderation. The information acquisition behaviour (frequency of reading food labels) is negatively predicted by age and positively predicted by health motivation, education, self-reported knowledge about nutrition and household financial status. A significant segment of respondents believe they are not susceptible to the elicited diseases. Health promotion strategies should aim to change the judgments of health risk. CONCLUSION: The adaptation of the Health Belief Model and the Theory of Health Preventive Behaviour represents a valid framework of predicting DHPB. The negative sign of perceived threat of disease on DHPB may suggest that, under an income constraint, consumers tend to trade off long-term health benefits for short-term benefits. This cautions against the use of negative messages in public health campaigns. Raising the awareness of diet-disease relationships, knowledge about nutrition (particularly sources and risks associated with dietary fat and cholesterol) may induce people to adopt preventive dietary habits.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Improving text comprehension strategies in upper primary school children: a design experiment.

BACKGROUND: With respect to the acquisition of competence in reading, new standards for primary education stress more than before the importance of learning and teaching cognitive and metacognitive strategies that facilitate text comprehension. Therefore, there is a need to design a research-based instructional approach to strategic reading comprehension. AIMS: The design experiment aimed at developing, implementing and evaluating a research-based, but also practically applicable learning environment for enhancing skilled strategy use in upper primary school children when reading a text. Four text comprehension strategies (activating prior knowledge, clarifying difficult words, making a schematic representation of the text, and formulating the main idea) and a metacognitive strategy (regulating one's own reading process) were trained through a variety of highly interactive instructional techniques, namely modelling, whole class discussion, and small group work in the format of reciprocal teaching. SAMPLE: Participants in the study were four experimental 5th grade classes (79 children) and eight comparable control classes (149 pupils). METHOD: The effects of the learning environment were measured using a pretest-post-test-retention design. Multilevel hierarchical linear regression models were used to analyse the quantitative data of a Reading Strategy Test, a standardised Reading Comprehension Test, a Reading Attitude Scale, a Transfer Test and an interview about strategy use during reading. RESULTS: The data of the Reading Strategy Test, the Transfer Test and the interviews about strategy use showed that the experimental group out-performed the control group in terms of the strategy adoption and application during text reading. Whilst the experimental group also scored higher on the Reading Comprehension Test than the control group, the difference was not significant. CONCLUSIONS: This design experiment shows that it is possible to foster pupils' use and transfer of strategic reading comprehension skills in regular classrooms by immersing them in a powerful learning environment. But this intervention does not automatically result in improvement of performance on a standardised reading comprehension test.

Belgium↗
PubMed2001

Performance of helical computed tomography in unselected outpatients with suspected pulmonary embolism.

BACKGROUND: Helical computed tomography (CT) is commonly used to diagnose pulmonary embolism, although its operating characteristics have been insufficiently evaluated. OBJECTIVE: To assess the sensitivity and specificity of helical CT in suspected pulmonary embolism. DESIGN: Observational study. SETTING: Emergency department of a teaching and community hospital. PATIENTS: 299 patients with clinically suspected pulmonary embolism and a plasma D -dimer level greater than 500 microgram/L. INTERVENTION: Pulmonary embolism was established by using a validated algorithm that included clinical assessment, lower-limb compression ultrasonography, lung scanning, and pulmonary angiography. MEASUREMENTS: Sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios of helical CT and interobserver agreement. Helical CT scans were withheld from clinicians and were read 3 months after acquisition by radiologists blinded to all clinical data. RESULTS: 118 patients (39%) had pulmonary embolism. In 12 patients (4%), 2 of whom had pulmonary embolism, results of helical CT were inconclusive. For patients with conclusive results, sensitivity of helical CT was 70% (95% CI, 62% to 78%) and specificity was 91% (CI, 86% to 95%). Interobserver agreement was high (kappa = 0.823 to 0.902). The false-negative rate was lower for helical CT used after initial negative results on ultrasonography than for helical CT alone (21% vs. 30%). Use of helical CT after normal results on initial ultrasonography and nondiagnostic results on lung scanning had a false-negative rate of only 5% and a false-positive rate of only 7%. CONCLUSION: Helical CT should not be used alone for suspected pulmonary embolism but could replace angiography in combined strategies that include ultrasonography and lung scanning.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Peripheral auditory processing in normal and abnormal ears: physiological considerations for attempts to compensate for auditory deficits by acoustic and electrical prostheses.

The processing of complex acoustic signals, such as speech, by the normal peripheral auditory system is described in terms of the properties of individual cochlear nerve fibres and the effects of lateral inhibition in the cochlear nucleus. The implications of the peripheral filtering of signals is indicated in psychophysical terms. In cochlear pathology, these filtering characteristics deteriorate, and the implications arising from the consequent deterioration in auditory frequency selectivity are outlined for the coding of loudness and for the analysis of speech. These considerations suggest theoretically ideal methods of compensation for recruitment by multichannel instantaneous compression, and for deterioration in format analysis by dichotic frequency partition. Finally, the implications for a minimal design for artificial electrical multi-electrode array stimulation of the cochlea in order to impart speech information to the profoundly deaf, are explored. Single wire stimulation, on the other hand, should be able to impart useful prosodic and minimal speech feature information to aid in lip reading and in the acquisition of speech.

Animals↗
PubMed1978

Variations among glyV-derived glycine tRNA suppressors of glutamic acid codons.

Glutamic acid codon suppressors in 18 isogenic strains of Escherichia coli have been further characterized as to map location, dominance, growth rates in various media, suppression of the GAG codon, and tRNA profiles after reversed-phase column chromatography. In general the evidence supports the conclusion that all of these suppressors are due to mutations in glyV55, the gene for a GGA/G-reading mutant form of glyV tRNA, and that they represent several different classes that may correspond to at least as many different nucleotide changes. Furthermore, 17 of the 18 suppressors can coexist in a haploid genome with a glyT suppressor that is devoid of GGA-reading ability. This result indicates the retention by those glyV suppressors of some ability to respond to GGA as well as the acquisition of the ability to read GAA, and suggests the possibility of "wobble" in the middle position of the anticodons of those tRNA's.

Chromosome Mapping↗
PubMed1987

Reading twisted text: implications for the role of saccades.

These experiments investigated how the quality of saccadic skill limits the acquisition of visual information during a reading task. Subjects read text in which the spatial pattern of saccades was varied by reversing the order of words in a line, the order of letters in a word, or both. Some of these transformations drastically altered the customary visual appearance of words. To distinguish visual from oculomotor influences on reading, letters, in some conditions, were rotated 180 deg to produce text in which the customary visual appearance of words was destroyed while the order of words and letters remained unchanged. We found that the directional pattern of saccades had relatively modest effects on reading speed under the instruction to read accurately. The size of saccades had large effects on reading speed. Text in which familiar patterns of letters were destroyed, either by changing letter-order or letter-orientation, was read by sequences of small (less than 30') saccades made to look at every letter, or every alternate letter. Separate tests of letter recognition showed that these small saccades were necessary because recognition of letters drops sharply as a function of eccentricity in the absence of familiar letter patterns. Frequent small saccades slowed reading in that durations of the pauses before saccades increased when saccade size fell below 30-60'. We found a similar pattern of increased saccadic latency with decreasing saccade size when subjects used saccades to track a point whose motion mimicked their own reading eye movement patterns. The long latencies before small saccades in the point-tracking task showed that saccadic programming difficulties contributed to the long pause durations before small saccades during reading. The observed difficulty in programming small saccades means that valid inferences about the duration of visual or cognitive processes cannot be drawn from the temporal pattern of saccades unless the relative difficulty and time required to program different spatial patterns of saccades is taken into account.

Eye Movements↗
PubMed1989

Beginnings of reading. The effects of the preschool reading center.

This study examined the effects of the daily Reading Center in a preschool classroom on 16 children over a school year. Objective variables, related to the Center and derived from the interface between the concepts of developmentally appropriate practice and emergent literacy, were measured. The Center was found to be developmentally appropriate since it was child-centered in terms of the interaction with children, adults and materials, voluntary participation, child-selected words and individualized instruction based on a pretest for 20 beginning reading skills (i.e., emergent literacy). Concurrently, the Center had features of a teacher-centered activity with the implementation of a rather specific instructional procedure. The experimental children showed marked gains in their acquisition of the 20 beginning reading skills while their matched controls, in other classrooms, who did not have the Reading Center experience, showed a slight increase. The advantages are discussed of a detailed behavior analysis on related independent, dependent, and accompanying measures for a thorough understanding of the results.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2003

[Low-dose chest CT with millimetric thin slices: myth or reality?].

PURPOSE: To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of millimetric thin slices low dose chest CT. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Forty one patients underwent a chest CT thin slices (1 mm every 10 mm) exploration using both a 170 milliamperage and a low dose acquisition using 80 mA. The examination were read by 2 senior radiologists specialized in chest imaging without knowledge of acquisition parameters and in a random order. A statistical analysis of interobserver agreement was performed using Kappa analysis. Doses of both acquisition were estimated by compagning the dose length product calculated by the CT software and be using a simulation software. RESULTS: Excellent interobserver and intermodalities agreements were found. A 53% decrease in dose was estimated with the low dose modality compare to the normal dose. CONCLUSION: Low dose thin slice chest CT using 80 mA has a similar diagnosis accuracy as standard dose thin slice chest CT and delivers half dose of irradiation.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Book reading styles in dual-parent and single-mother families.

BACKGROUND: Whereas many studies have investigated quantitative aspects of book reading (frequency), few have examined qualitative aspects, especially in very young children and through direct observations of shared reading. AIM: The purpose of this study was to determine possible differences in book-reading styles between mothers and fathers and between mothers from single- and dual-parent families. It also related types of parental verbalizations during book reading to children's reported language measures. SAMPLE: Dual-parent (29) and single-parent (24) families were observed in shared book reading with their toddlers (15-month-olds) or young preschoolers (27-month-olds). METHOD: Parent-child dyads were videotaped while book reading. The initiator of each book-reading episode was coded. Parents' verbalizations were exhaustively coded into 10 categories. Mothers completed the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory, and the children were given the Bayley scales. RESULTS: All parents differentiated their verbalizations according to the age rather than the gender of the child, but single mothers imitated female children more than males. Few differences in verbalizations were found between mothers and fathers or between mothers from single- and dual-parent families. Fathers allowed younger children to initiate book-reading episodes more than mothers. For both age groups of children, combined across families, verbalizations that related the book to the child's experience were correlated with reported language measures. Questions and imitations were related to language measures for the older age group. CONCLUSIONS: The important types of parental verbalizations during shared book reading for children's language acquisition are relating, questions and imitations.

Books↗
PubMed1998

[Sense and nonsense with respect to the gene for dyslexia].

Genetic studies recently reported linkages between two chromosomal regions and two phenotypes of dyslexia. These findings should not be taken to mean that the gene for dyslexia has been discovered. It is argued that a gene for dyslexia is improbable. The difficulty in learning to read is of a multidimensional nature, of which the features are not yet unequivocally known. Deficits and strategies of the child learning to read still have to be disentangled and environmental as well as biological variables define the condition. Furthermore, as reading is a rather novel acquisition of mankind, an evolutionary explanation seems rather questionable.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Picture archiving and communication system bandwidth and storage requirements.

The purpose of this work was to determine the requirements for image storage and network bandwidth for a total digital department in a moderate sized academic radiology department. Data from the radiology information system was combined with image production information to produce a model of image acquisition. Destinations of images to reading rooms were studied to determine the final distributions of film. All findings were used to model the flow of data that would be expected if the images in the department were completely digital. Using today's standards, the department would produce approximately 15.7 Gbytes of data per day or 3.5 Tbytes of data per year if all acquisitions were digital. The peak acquisition rate would be 1.8 Gbytes per hour with a sustained rate greater than 1 Gbyte per hour for most of the working day. The anticipated bandwidth for the total digital department exceeded the capabilities of the existing picture archiving and communication system equipment. A distributed networked archive solution was shown to optimize access to images by radiologists and referring clinicians.

Computer Storage Devices↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The effects of goal setting and self-instruction on learning a reading comprehension strategy: a study of students with learning disabilities.

This study examined the contributions of instruction in goal setting and self-instruction, separately and combined, on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of a reading comprehension strategy by fourth-through sixth-grade students with learning disabilities. A previously validated strategy involving the use of story structure to analyze and remember story content was taught to 47 students with learning disabilities using the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model. Comparisons were made among students with learning disabilities in four conditions (strategy instruction, strategy instruction plus goal setting, strategy instruction plus self-instruction, and strategy instruction plus goal setting and self-instruction). Result indicated that instruction in the reading strategy produced meaningful, lasting, and generalizable effects on students' story comprehension skills. Furthermore, the comprehension performance of the students with learning disabilities after strategy instruction was indistinguishable from that of a social comparison group of normally achieving students. Explicit instruction in goal setting and self-instruction, however, did not augment the comprehension performance of students with learning disabilities.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1997

Modeling reading, spelling, and past tense learning with artificial neural networks.

The connectionist modeling of reading, spelling, and past tense acquisition is discussed. We show how the same simple pattern association network for all three tasks can achieve perfect performance on training data containing many irregular words, provide near human level generalization performance, and exhibit some realistic developmental and brain damage effects. It is also shown how reaction times (such as naming latencies) can be extracted from these networks along with independent priming and speed-accuracy trade-off effects. We argue that all the remaining problems with these models will be solved by supplementing them with an appropriate connectionist semantic route.

Humans↗
PubMed2001

Designing fault-tolerant distributed archives for picture archiving and communication systems.

PURPOSE: Distributed archives in a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) environment can provide added fault tolerance and fail-over capability, as well as increased load capacity at a more economical price than traditional 'high-availability" systems. Systems can be configured with varying levels of fault tolerance, depending on the amount of redundancy desired. There is, however, a direct correlation between the level of hardware redundancy and cost to implement. This presentation details the system design for fault-tolerant distributed archives as well as several options for redundancy, referencing implementation of a fault-tolerant archive system at the University of Utah. METHODS: The distributed archive system described here is based on Image Devices' image archive software, which can be implemented on multiple individual archive servers in order to distribute archive functionality and operational load. The configuration and implementation of the individual servers together make up the distributed archive system and does not impact the ability of the system to be scaled to meet future requirements. Several implementation and configuration options exist, including the ability for servers to maintain replicated databases containing patient and image information. Thus, each archive can be aware of all information and the location of this information within the distributed archive system. RESULTS: The goal is to produce systems that will still be operational in the event of any single point of failure, ie, a network connection failure between facilities or the failure of a single archive server within the distributed system. During normal operation, workload for image acquisition, image routing and image query requests will be distributed between the archive servers. If the system is deployed in a multifacility environment, each archive server can be configured to be responsible for the acquisition and image distribution management within that server's local facility. If the system is deployed in a single facility environment, load can be distributed evenly between the archive servers based on an understanding of the workload requirements generated be each acquisition and display device in the system. In the event that an archive server fails, other archive servers within the system will have the ability to provide some or all of the failed server's functionality. The degree of fail-over capability is dependent on the archive server's configuration as well as hardware redundancy employed. Three levels of fault-tolerant design can be achieved with this system architecture: (1) duplicate work capability only; (2) duplicate work capability and short-term image cache; (3) duplicate work capability, short-term image cache, and longterm image archival. Using the basic fault-tolerant design above, we have implemented a multifacility distributed archive system at the University of Utah. This system was implemented at a fraction of the cost of true "high-availability" archive architectures yet provides constant up time for the PACS system. If the network connection between the two locations goes down, each site is still fully functional for soft-copy read, as well as image acquisition and distribution. If either of the archive servers goes down, the image sources are redirected to the other archive server. The operational server then handles image distribution for both locations. Access to images in the short-term image cache is available to both archive servers and is not affected by loss of the network connection or remote server. Because there is ony one long-term archive device, the ability to retrieve images from long-term storage is the only function compromised by a network or server failure. CONCLUSION: By implementing distributed archives in a PACS environment, it is possible to achieve a highly fault-tolerant system without the expense of high-availability hardware and software. The design concepts outlined here can be applied to any PACS system that supports distributed archive functionality.

Computer Systems↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Two-dimensional time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography of renal arteries without maximum intensity projection: a prospective comparison with angiography in 21 patients screened for renovascular hypertension.

PURPOSE: We compared magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) with conventional angiography to establish its value as a screening test in the workup for renal hypertension. METHODS: Twenty-one patients underwent MRA and angiography within a three-day interval. Fifteen patients were suspected of having renovascular hypertension on the basis of clinical findings; the remaining six had multivessel atherosclerosis with renal insufficiency. MRA was performed on a 1 Tesla magnet in three planes: axial, coronal and perpendicular to the axis of each renal artery, by means of several contiguous or overlapping individual slice acquisitions. The two examinations were read by the same two independent observers, before and after an interval of 3 months. RESULTS: Conventional angiography showed 48 renal arteries. All main and three of six accessory renal arteries were correctly identified by MRA, as well as 11 of 14 significant stenoses or thromboses. Overreading of stenoses by MRA was observed in 4 cases. There were two false negatives for the two readers. The sensitivity and specificity of MRA for the detection of stenoses of the main renal arteries were found to be 70 and 78% respectively, for the first reading and 85 and 86% for the second reading. CONCLUSION: MRA is considered a useful noninvasive method to determine the need for conventional angiography in patients in whom renal artery stenosis is suspected.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Explicit memory, procedural learning and lexical priming in Alzheimer's disease.

Different aspects of memory functions were studied in two groups of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in normal elderly controls. The tests included: explicit memory tests with free and cued recall, and recognition measures; learning of a motor skill; learning of a perceptual skill with verbal material; a priming task with the word stem completion paradigm. The data confirmed that, besides severe impairment for all measures of explicit memory, AD patients were able to learn and retain normally a motor skill in the rotor pursuit task, even across a long retention interval. Moreover, sparing of procedural learning was not restricted to motor tasks, since patients learned normally a mirror-reading task, demonstrating (a) rapid acquisition of the procedure, and (b) acquisition of item-specific information for repeated words. This last effect is accounted for in terms of repetition priming effects rather than of explicit memory strategies, since patients had also normal repetition effect in the word stem completion paradigm.

Aged↗
PubMed1988

Improved computer-assisted reading of identification and shortened MIC data for reporting on urine specimens at a Berlin university hospital.

Results of bacteriological analyses of urine specimens from patients of Steglitz University Hospital at Berlin Free University are transmitted directly from the laboratory reading station to a mini-computer by means of an input tablet and a menu-driven programme. First, an identification of each specimen is entered on reception and printed out to form a working list. After culturing, the microorganisms are inoculated into microdilution plates for susceptibility testing and differentiation of Enterobacteriaceae. At the reading station, the urine data acquisition programme stores the observed CFU/ml values as well as up to 6 pathogens for each specimen. For each pathogen susceptibilities to 30 antibiotics are tested and reported for up to 4 levels of sensitivity. Enterobacteriaceae are speciated largely according to the results of 17 biochemical tests. User-programme interaction can be monitored on an LCD. Two correction facilities are provided: (1) within the current specimen, or (2) by recalling earlier specimens. Antibiotic usage patterns and species coding may be modified without reprogramming by editing the configuration files for (1) usage of the menu, (2) species coding, and (3) substrate-species combinations. The results are printed on self-adhesive labels, which are returned to the senders of specimens on the conventional request forms.

Bacteria↗
PubMed2004

Retroelement dynamics and a novel type of chordate retrovirus-like element in the miniature genome of the tunicate Oikopleura dioica.

Retrotransposable elements have played an important role in shaping eukaryotic DNA, and their activity and turnover rate directly influence the size of genomes. With approximately 15,000 genes within 65-75 megabases, the marine tunicate Oikopleura dioica, a nonvertebrate chordate, has the smallest and most compact genome ever found in animals. Consistent with a massive elimination of retroelements, only one apparently novel clade of non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposons was detected within 41 megabases of nonredundant genomic sequences. In contrast, at least six clades of non-LTR elements were identified in the less compact genome of the tunicate Ciona intestinalis. Unexpectedly, Ty3/gypsy-related Tor LTR retrotransposons presented an astonishing level of diversity in O. dioica. They were generally poorly or apparently not corrupted, indicating recent activity. Both Tor3 and Tor4b families bore an envelope-like open reading frame, suggesting possible horizontal acquisition through infection. The Tor4b envelope-like gene might have been obtained from a paramyxovirus (RNA virus). Tor3 and Tor4b are phylogenetically clearly distinct from vertebrate retroviruses (Retroviridae) and are more reminiscent of certain insect and plant sequences. Tor elements potentially represent a so far unknown, ancient type of infectious retroelement in chordates. Their distribution and transmission dynamics in tunicates and other chordates deserve further study.

Amino Acid Sequence↗