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PubMed1993

Periodontal awareness: the key to periodontal health.

The maintenance of periodontal health requires an informed public and patient. Treatments will fail, and in fact will not ever start, if individuals are not aware of the differences between periodontal health and disease, the significance of these differences and the part they can play in prevention and control. Self awareness begins the process, with self care and professional assistance following. A periodontal awareness programme was started in New Zealand in 1986 aimed at improving periodontal health, through increasing the knowledge of both the public and the profession. It is on such a knowledge base that self care and assisted care programmes can be developed. This paper presents the New Zealand programme, the public and professional messages and the way these were linked. Patient self assessment and self care are emphasised. The new basic periodontal examination for the dentist and auxiliary staff begins a stepped and structured programme of assisted care. An examination of this awareness programme is presented together with future directions. Chronic inflammatory periodontal diseases are universal but the profession knows it is possible to prevent, manage and control almost all of these diseases. Awareness of the need for the right actions by patients and dental professionals is seen as the key to improving periodontal health.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

An evaluation of knowledge and awareness of disinfection and sterilization among health care workers.

Awareness of the disinfection and sterilization policy among hospital staff and their knowledge in basic principles and methods of disinfection and sterilization were studied before and after intervention using a self-administered questionnaire. Survey results showed that awareness (56.2%) before intervention was unsatisfactory. The nurses were more aware of the policy than other groups of medical personnel. Those unaware of the policy perform duties from memory or verbal instructions. A significant increase in awareness to 73.3% was observed after intervention (p < 0.05). Knowledge on methods of decontamination, disinfection and sterilization of equipment varies widely from 28.8% to 90.1%. 23.1% were unaware of the temperature used for sterilization while 72.4% did not know how containers of disinfectant should be refill. Only 14.7% knew the recommended method for washing containers. With education improvement was observed. The average knowledge improved from 44.4% to 57.3%. Our results indicated that continuous in-service education is needed to improve, supplement and update knowledge in this field after basic training. In addition orientation programs for new staff should also be aimed at creating awareness and providing information on guidelines and policies related to their duties.

Disinfection↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Coalition building: a strategy for creating HIV/AIDS awareness on a college campus.

Coalition building was a successful strategy for creating HIV/AIDS awareness on the Dillard University campus. The purpose of the coalition building was to increase University students' knowledge and awareness of HIV/AIDS. The success of coalition building is predicated upon knowing whose assistance is needed and the development of positive relationships with those individuals. Coalition building in this instance required building relationships within the internal and external environments of the University. Hence, students, their organizations, faculty and community agencies were involved. An invitation to participate in the coalition was extended to twenty-one active campus organizations represented by the Student Government Association (SGA). The Santa Filomena Student Nurses Association (SF-SNA) served as the lead student organization. Faculty liaisons were solicited during a University faculty forum. Community agencies played a significant role in HIV/AIDS awareness at Dillard. One agency provided training and curriculum development, targeting minority health care providers. A questionnaire (Assessment Tool) was developed to obtain demographic data and a self-assessment of students' knowledge of HIV/AIDS. After meetings with coalition members, a HIV/AIDS Awareness Program was conducted on the University campus. The project was funded by Project FACE of Florida A&M University Foundation. Since students responded very favorably to the project, plans were made to provide ongoing HIV/AIDS awareness on the University campus.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

[Effects of health examination and follow-up educational programs on awareness and modification of risk factors for cardiovascular disease in a Japanese urban population].

This study in a Japanese urban population evaluated the effects of health examinations and follow-up educational programs on the risk factors for cardiovascular disease (blood pressure, serum total cholesterol, and smoking) and the level of awareness regarding these factors (e.g. having had their blood pressure and serum total cholesterol whether they checked, and knowing whether their level is high or normal, and whether they can state their own level). In both 1990 and 1991, 4,000 adults aged 30 to 79 were randomly selected from residents of S-city in Osaka Prefecture, and urged to attend the baseline health examination for cardiovascular disease at the National Cardiovascular Center. From among 1,879 persons who had received health examinations and follow-up educational programs in 1990, 600 subjects were selected at random and invited to participate in the follow-up examination in the next year. Four hundred forty five persons received the follow-up examination, and in addition, 1,791 persons attended newly the baseline health examination in 1991. Two sets of analyses were conducted. First, the 1990 baseline examination data and the 1991 follow-up examination data of 445 subjects were compared for change of awareness and risk factors. Second, the 1991 follow-up examination data and the 1991 baseline examination data were compared for difference of risk factors level. Initial awareness concerning serum total cholesterol was lower than that concerning blood pressure among people who had attended the 1990 baseline examination. After the health examination and the educational program, awareness for both blood pressure and serum total cholesterol increased significantly. Significant decreases in systolic blood pressure and serum total cholesterol were shown. But, no significant changes were observed for diastolic blood pressure and smoking rate. The means of systolic blood pressure and serum total cholesterol among subjects who received the follow-up examination were significantly lower than subjects who newly participated in the baseline examinations in 1991. Participation in health examinations and follow-up health educational programs can result in positive changes in awareness of risk factors and reduction of these factors.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Patient awareness of genetic and environmental risk factors in non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus--relevance to first-degree relatives.

Primary preventative strategies may be useful in non-insulin-dependent (Type 2) diabetes mellitus (NIDDM), where weight reduction and physical exercise may help to counteract the increased risk to first-degree relatives of affected patients. To assess the extent of patient's awareness of these and related issues, 100 NIDDM patients were selected to complete a questionnaire. Forty-four per cent had a family history of NIDDM. Forty per cent and 35%, respectively, were aware that the patient's siblings and children were at an increased risk of developing NIDDM. Sixty-three per cent and 35%, respectively, were aware that obesity and physical inactivity increased the risk of developing NIDDM. After appropriate counselling about these risk factors, all 100 patients claimed that they would be advising their first-degree relatives. However, at 4 months review, 53% of patients had informed their first-degree relatives of the increased genetic risk to them. Of these patients, 83%, 74%, and 23% had provided relevant advice on diet, weight reduction, and physical exercise, respectively, as a means of reducing the risk of first-degree relatives developing NIDDM. We conclude that only a small proportion of patients are aware of the increased genetic susceptibility of their first-degree relatives to develop NIDDM and that weight reduction and regular physical exercise can reduce this risk. But, after appropriate education, a significant proportion of NIDDM patients did inform their close relatives of these issues and this may prove to be a useful strategy in the primary prevention of NIDDM.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Assessing a CMHC's impact: resident and gatekeeper awareness of center services.

One accessible measure of the impact a community mental health center has on the community it serves is the awareness levels of both residents and gatekeeper groups regarding the center's existence and services. This broad-based study was conducted with university students at no cost to the center and included 436 residents and 175 gatekeepers. The results indicated that awareness levels for community residents and gatekeeper groups were 34% and 53%, respectively, but varied dramatically as a function of how the awareness questions were phrased. The overall awareness findings generally supported those of other studies and were discussed in light of potential normative levels, methods for conducting surveys of this nature, response rates, and the increasing need to justify existence given the diminishing funding situation.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2006

Validation of a memory inventory for the assessment of awareness of memory deficits in Alzheimer's disease in Chinese elderly.

BACKGROUND: This paper describes the development and validation of the Memory Inventory for Chinese (MIC), for measuring the awareness of memory deficits in the Chinese population with Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS: A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was adopted. The MIC was developed with focus group discussion and pilot testing. It has a patient and a caregiver version. A consecutive series of 79 new out-patients with the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke and the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorder Association (NINCDS-ADRDA) criteria of probable and possible AD and 20 non-demented elderly subjects were recruited. RESULTS: A high internal consistency was found, with Cronbach alpha of 0.89 for the patient version and 0.90 for the caregiver version of MIC. The inter-rater reliability was satisfactory. For validity assessment, the caregiver score of the MIC correlated significantly with cognitive score of the subject as assessed by the Mini-Mental State Examination (rp = -0.37; p < 0.01). The Memory Deficit Awareness Score, calculated by subtracting the patient score from the caregiver score, correlated significantly with clinician ratings of awareness of memory impairment (rs = -0.67; p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The MIC appears to be a culturally appropriate and valid instrument for the measurement of awareness of memory deficits in Chinese patients with AD. Potential applications of the MIC should be further explored in other subtypes of dementia and in prospective studies.

Aged↗
PubMed2005

Psychological mindedness and awareness of self and others.

The major goal of this study was to explore the relationship among psychological mindedness (PM) and several facets of awareness, including a general sense of mindfulness (Mindful Attention Awareness Scale; Brown & Ryan, 2003), as well as more specific awareness of self (self-consciousness scale; Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975) and others (Interpersonal Reactivity Index; Davis, 1980). Participants were 103 undergraduate students at an urban liberal arts college. Results indicated that PM (PM Scale; Conte, Plutchik, Jung, Picard, Karasu, & Lotterman, 1990) is related to mindfulness (r = .41, p < .01), private self-consciousness (r = .27, p < .05), as well as cognitive (r = .30, p < .01) and affective (r = .35, p < .01) indices of empathy. Self-consciousness and empathy explained a significant amount of variance in PM in a simultaneous-entry multiple regression. These findings support theoretical claims that PM involves awareness of self and others.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Somatic awareness, uncertainty, and delay in care-seeking in acute heart failure.

Symptom monitoring is difficult for heart failure (HF) patients. Difficulties physically sensing and determining symptom meaning may lead to uncertainty and delay treatment. Somatic awareness may provide insight into symptom monitoring ability. A model combining physical and cognitive aspects of the symptom experience was developed to examine factors affecting care-seeking among HF patients. Adults hospitalized with acute HF were interviewed and completed questionnaires measuring somatic awareness and uncertainty. HF symptom duration prior to admission measured delay. HF specific somatic awareness and symptom pattern predicted delay. Uncertainty correlated with somatic awareness, but did not predict delay. Few responded to early HF symptoms delaying until acutely ill. Development of interventions to improve symptom monitoring is needed.

Acute Disease↗
PubMed1998

Neglect of awareness.

We describe some of the signs and symptoms of left visuo-spatial neglect. This common, severe and often long-lasting impairment is the most striking consequence of right hemisphere brain damage. Patients seem to (over-)attend to the right with subsequent inability to respond to stimuli in contralesional space. We draw particular attention to how patients themselves experience neglect. Furthermore, we show that the neglect patient's loss of awareness of left space is crucial to an understanding of the condition. Even after left space has been brought into the patient's consciousness (either by local cueing on the left or by an emphasis on global properties of the scene as a whole), this awareness of left space rapidly declines. We suggest that much of the symptomology of left neglect can be interpreted as a disconnection between brain mechanisms that are relatively specialized for local (detail) visual processing and global (panoramic) processing. This failure of communication between functional (subpersonal) mechanisms then has consequences for how perceptual and representational content enters into awareness. Failure of the local contents of left space to be consciously accessed is, in turn, an important aspect of why left neglect is so difficult to remediate. Patients can "know" that they have neglect but are cut off from the perceptual awareness that would enable them to overcome their attentional bias to the right.

Attention↗
PubMed2001

Precuneus-prefrontal activity during awareness of visual verbal stimuli.

Awareness is a personal experience, which is only accessible to the rest of world through interpretation. We set out to identify a neural correlate of visual awareness, using brief subliminal and supraliminal verbal stimuli while measuring cerebral blood flow distribution with H(2)(15)O PET. Awareness of visual verbal stimuli differentially activated medial parietal association cortex (precuneus), which is a polymodal sensory cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be primarily executive. Our results suggest participation of these higher order perceptual and executive cortical structures in visual verbal awareness.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Memory errors from a change of standard: a lack of awareness or of understanding?

Memory errors occur when the context standard that is used when judging target behaviors is different from the category norm standard that is available later when the behaviors are recalled. Is insufficient awareness the reason for this change-of-standard effect? Two kinds of awareness were maximized in each of two studies: (a) awareness of the relation between the judgment and the context--telling subjects to be sure to use the non-target persons for comparison when judging the target person (salience); and (b) awareness at recall of the earlier judgmental context--asking subjects to recall the non-target persons before recalling the target person (reinstatement). Context reinstatement reduced memory errors. But when context reinstatement and salience were combined, the memory errors reappeared. In Study 2, an attempt at debiasing failed. The change-of-standard effect is explained in terms of a "natural" tendency to use the current categorical meaning of a judgment to reconstruct the referent of its past contextualized meaning.

Awareness↗
PubMed1997

Phonological awareness deficits in developmental dyslexia and the phonological representations hypothesis.

The claim that the well-documented difficulties shown by dyslexic children in phonological awareness tasks may arise from deficits in the accuracy and the segmental organization of the phonological representations of words in their mental lexicons is receiving increasing interest from researchers. In this experiment, two versions of the phonological representations hypothesis were investigated by using a picture naming task and a battery of phonological measures at three linguistic levels (syllable, onset-rime, phoneme). The picture naming task was used to identify words for which dyslexic and control children had accurate vs inaccurate phonological representations, and performance in the phonological awareness tasks was then compared for the words which had precise vs imprecise representations. Findings indicated that frequency effects in the phonological awareness tasks at all levels disappeared for dyslexic and control children once representational quality was taken into account, and that the availability of sublexical units for analysis appeared to differ according to (1) the accuracy and retrieval of the phonological representation and (2) the linguistic level tapped by the phonological awareness task.

Awareness↗
PubMed1999

Training phonological awareness with and without explicit attention to articulation.

One hundred twenty-two second- to fifth-grade (7- to 11-year-old) children with reading difficulties studied phonological awareness with or without explicit attention to articulation and with or without manipulation of sounds. They all studied identical phonics and read stories on the computer with speech and decoding support for difficult words. Regular-instruction controls received regularly scheduled language-arts or reading activities. After 40 h of training, children in all three trained conditions outperformed controls on all tests except math. Conditions that manipulated sounds showed advantages over the condition without explicit practice manipulating sounds, but only on the two measures of phonological awareness. Articulatory awareness training yielded no unique benefits during this training period. Individual differences in response to treatment related to initial levels of phonological awareness, naming speed, IQ, and grade. The similar outcomes of the three conditions suggest that specific variations in good phonological training may be less important than once thought for most children with reading difficulties.

Attention↗
PubMed2002

It doesn't matter whether onset and rime predicts reading better than phoneme awareness does or vice versa.

Hulme et al. argue against our hypothesis that there are two routes from onset and rime awareness to reading: an indirect route whereby onset-rime awareness feeds into the development of phoneme awareness which in turn affects children's reading, and a direct route by which onset-rime awareness makes an independent contribution to children's reading. The evidence that Hulme et al. present against this hypothesis is not convincing, partly because our hypothesis actually predicts most of their results and partly because of weaknesses in the design of Hulme et al.'s study and in the unusual procedures that they employed.

Awareness↗
PubMed2000

Staff awareness of oral polio vaccine vial monitor in Chandigarh.

This study highlights the awareness of pulse polio centre staff about polio vaccine vial monitor (VVM) during a National Immunization Day in Chandigarh. Out of the 79 staff members interviewed, only 53 (67%) had ever heard of the VVM and were further interviewed. Fifty (94.4%) staff members were aware that VVM is present on vaccine itself and majority (79.2%) told that it is the inner square with outer circle. Only half were aware of its function and 71.7% knew how to read it. It was observed that awareness among health staff [Health worker (F)/ANM] and volunteers was very poor. There is a need for effective training of staff before subsequent PPI to maintain an effective cold chain.

Awareness↗
PubMed2001

[Depth of anesthesia, awareness and EEG].

Inapparent adverse intraoperative wakefulness is still a relevant problem in modern anaesthetic routine. It can be associated with serious negative effects on the postoperative recovery of the patients. Several different procedures have been developed to monitor and therefore avoid intraoperative situations of wakefulness during general anaesthesia. The most promising methods are the PRST-score, calculated from changes in the blood pressure, heart rate, sweating and tear production, the so-called isolated forearm technique, spontaneous EEG and its derived parameters such as spectral edge frequencies or BIS and finally mid-latency auditory evoked potentials. The observation of clinical autonomic signs, even including the calculation of the PRST-score does not seem to be valid enough to indicate or predict intraoperative wakefulness. The isolated forearm technique can be regarded as the most reliable tool to detect intraoperative wakefulness, but it can only be applied for a very limited period of time. The processed EEG with the median frequency, spectral edge frequency or bispectral index are important scientific tools to quantify central anaesthetic effects especially to develop pharmacodynamic-pharmacokinetic models of anaesthetic action. But they seem to be less suitable to indicate situations of intraoperative wakefulness or awareness. The mid-latency auditory evoked potentials are depressed dose-dependently by a series of anaesthetic agents, which correlate with the occurrence of situations of intraoperative wakefulness and awareness. There is a hierarchical correlation between certain values of the MLAEP and intraoperative wakefulness defined by purposeful movements, amnesic awareness with only implicit recall and conscious awareness with explicit recall. For some of the most commonly used anaesthetics reasonable threshold values of the MLAEP for the different states of consciousness have already been determined. Future studies in broad patient populations with all of the different routinely used anesthetics and procedures will have to finally identify the importance of the recording of mid-latency auditory evoked potentials as a routine method to assess the depth of anaesthesia.

Anesthesia↗
PubMed2001

Intensive and prolonged health promotion strategy may increase awareness of osteoporosis among postmenopausal women.

The aim of the study was to measure the results of a 15-year health promotion strategy towards osteoporosis, in an urban community of subjects over 45 years old, in terms of osteoporosis awareness and handling. To this end an ancillary study to a large survey of the Belgian population's self-perceived health status was carried out. A rectangular sample of 4800 individuals over 45 years old was randomly selected in two Belgian cities, among the affiliates of the two main health insurance providers. One of the cities (Liège) had been, since the early 1980s, the target of a constant health promotion strategy, directed to both the medical community and the general population, aimed at increasing osteoporosis awareness in women after the menopause. During the same period, no particular steps were taken in the other city (Aalst) to increase osteoporosis awareness in the community. In our study, the participants were asked to spontaneously report any chronic, serious and/or severe disorders that they had been suffering from, for at least 6 months, during the previous 12 months. They also provided a list of drugs they were taking at the time of the survey. Osteoporosis was reported to be a disease affecting 1.5% of men in Aalst and 1.3% of men in Liege (p = 0.61). For women, osteoporosis was reported to be present in 4.8% in Aalst and 10.8% in Liege (p<0.001). Self-reporting of osteoporosis prevalence in Liege was statistically significantly higher in women aged 45-64 years, 65-74 years or over 75 years (p<0.001). Obesity, alcohol consumption or physical activity were equally distributed between women from Liège and Aalst. Prescription drugs used for osteoporosis had been delivered to a similar proportion of men in Aalst and Liège. In women, a statistically significant difference in these prescription drugs was observed between Liège and Aalst, both for the overall population (p<0.001) and in each of the age classes (p<0.001 for 45-64 years and 65-74 years; p<0.009 for over 75 years). A continuous long-term health promotion strategy, directed toward both physicians and the general population, thus appears to increase awareness about osteoporosis in women over 45 years and/or in the medical community. This is reflected by an increase in self-reported prevalence of osteoporosis and in the prescription of drugs aimed at prevention and treatment of this disorder. Whether these observations reflect an appropriate diagnosis and a proper handling of the disease remains to be evaluated by objective diagnostic tools such as bone densitometry and by an evaluation of the effectiveness of prescription practices in postmenopausal women.

Aged↗