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PubMed2003

Doctor-patient-interaction is non-holistic.

In recent philosophy of mind a non-holistic view on concept possession, originally developed by Tyler Burge, has emerged as an alternative to holistic analyses of language mastery. The article discusses the implications of this view for analyses of communication in doctor-patient-interaction. The central question Burge's theory gives an answer to is this: to what extent must a doctor and a patient understand a medical term in the same way in order to communicate in the sense that they express the same concept by the term? Many empirical studies have shown that patients do not, typically, understand medical terms in the same way as doctors they encounter. Holistic approaches therefore imply that doctors and patients seldom communicate. Burge's position, on the other hand, implies that it is sufficient that patients have a minimal understanding. In an important range of cases doctors can make sure that patients have a minimal understanding by being explicit about common dictionary definitions of the terms in question.

Communication↗
PubMed2003

Relationships between functional capacity measures and baseline psychological measures in chronic pain patients.

The extent to which baseline psychological measures, pain, and compensation status are related to admission and posttreatment functional capacity and employment outcome was investigated. Four pass/fail functional capacity tests based on the DOT (Dictionary of Occupational Titles) classification system and previously shown to be predictive of treatment outcome in chronic pain patients were analyzed in relation to baseline measures of depression, state and trait anxiety, and perceived stress. Statistical tests of all measures with employment level at admission to treatment, 1 month follow-up and at long-term follow-up were also performed. The results showed that pain level and/or compensation status were the primary predictors of functional capacity and employment status at follow-up. Admission functional capacity measures were also predictors of employment outcome. Depression scores at admission predicted some admission functional capacity results, however, psychological scores were not as significantly related to discharge functional capacity tests. One functional capacity test, the crouching test, was an independent predictor of short- and long-term employment outcome. Trait anxiety was the only psychological factor that was independently predictive of long-term employment outcome. In conclusion, these results suggest that psychological variables are related to measures of functional capacity measured at admission. However, psychological measures at admission are not good predictors of later functional capacity measures. Functional capacity measures are important predictors of follow-up employment outcome, but return to work cannot be predicted without taking pain into account.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Relationship between kinesiophobia and performance in a functional capacity evaluation.

Fear of movement and (re)injury (kinesiophobia) has been postulated to play an important role in the performance in a Functional Capacity Evaluation (FCE). This study was performed to analyze the relationship between kinesiophobia and performance in an FCE. Kinesiophobia and FCE performance of 54 male and 10 female patients (mean age 38.0) suffering chronic low back pain (mean length of episode 9.9 months, 93% off work) were assessed. Kinesiophobia was assessed using the Dutch Version of the Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia (scale 17-68). A lifting task and an FCE were operationalizations of avoidance. FCE results were transformed into a single measure using the classification of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (FCE-DOT, scale 1-5). Correlations between the variables were calculated. The results are: kinesiophobia mean 41.6 (SD 7.3), lifting mean 29.5 kg (SD 11.6), FCE-DOT mean 3.6 (SD 0.6). Correlations between kinesiophobia and lifting was r = 0.01 (p = 0.93) and between kinesiophobia and FCE-DOT was rho = -0.04 (p = 0.75). The results indicate that the patients were substantially kinesiophobic, yet they were able to lift a mean of 29.5 kg and were physically able to perform moderate to heavy work. The strength of the correlations was very low. The relationship between kinesiophobia and avoidance, operationalized as lifting and an FCE, could not be confirmed in this study.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Re-evaluation and in silico annotation of the Tupaia herpesvirus proteins.

Herpesviruses represent an exceptionally suitable model to analyze evolutionary old pathogens, their competency to adapt to existing and changing molecular niches in host species, and the modulation of the gene content and function to comply with the requirements of life. The basis for numerous studies dealing with these questions are reliable statements about the gene content of herpesviral genomes and the functions of viral proteins. The recent determination of the coding strategy of the chimpanzee cytomegalovirus genome and the re-evaluation of the gene content of the human cytomegalovirus genome made it also necessary to restructure the putative transcription map of the Tupaia herpesvirus (THV) genome. Twenty-three THV-specific ORFs formerly predicted to be coding for viral proteins were deleted from the THV transcription map resulting in a gene layout that is now characterized by the presence of conserved genes in the genome center, that probably reflect the genome structure of common herpesviral ancestors, and species-specific genes at the termini. The conserved regions in the THV genome are characterized by high G + C contents between 60% and 80%, a high CpG dinucleotide frequency, and the presence of densely packed putative CpG islands. The genome termini seem to provide the requirements of large scale rearrangements and complements of the gene content to adapt to new environmental demands. With the help of the recently designed method of dictionary-driven, pattern-based protein annotation it was possible to assign putative functions to almost all potential THV proteins, e.g. 123 were found to be putative membrane or secreted proteins, putative signal domains were identified in 69, and 29 proteins were predicted to be glycosylated. The present study adds new aspects to the knowledge about the precise gene composition of herpesvirus genomes and viral protein functions that are of exceptional importance for studies dealing with the phylogeny, the evolution, vaccine vector development, virus-host interactions, pathogenesis and the determination of protein functions of herpesviruses.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Terms used to describe urinary tract infections--the importance of conceptual clarification.

Inaccuracies in medical language are detrimental to communication and statistics in medicine, and thereby to clinical practice, medical science and public health. The purpose of this article is to explore inconsistencies in the use of some medical terms: urinary tract infection, bacteriuria and urethral syndrome. The investigated literature was collected from medical dictionaries, textbooks, and articles indexed in Medline(R). We found various practices regarding how the medical terms should be defined, and had great difficulty in interpreting the status of the statements under the heading of 'definition'. The lesson to be learned, besides a reminder of the importance of clearly defined medical concepts, is that it must be explicitly stated whether what is presented as a definition is to be considered as defining criterion, as recognising criterion or as characteristic of the disease entity.

Bacteriuria↗
PubMed1985

The prediction of semantic consistency in self-descriptions: characteristics of persons and of terms that affect the consistency of responses to synonym and antonym pairs.

Subjects described themselves, using an alphabetically ordered list of 191 trait adjectives, which included sets of synonyms and antonyms, half of each type more difficult than the other half. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. In one condition, each adjective was listed with its dictionary definition; in the other condition, only the adjectives were listed. All subjects were administered a battery of demographic, cognitive, and personality measures. We analyzed both the relative consistency elicited by different pairs of terms and the individual differences in semantic consistency displayed by different sorts of subjects. Although the provision of definitions served to increase consistency (especially for the difficult antonyms), it did not decrease the range of consistency values across either synonym or antonym pairs. And, although interpair differences in semantic consistency were as difficult to predict in this study as in previous ones, individual differences were highly predictable. The implications of our many findings are discussed in the context of various hypotheses about semantic inconsistency in self-reports.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

Isms and the structure of social attitudes.

Social attitude measurement has been limited by inadequate structural models. In this study, broad, basic dimensions were sought, with the assumption that crucial variables are represented as terms ending in -ism (isms). 266 isms were extracted from a dictionary, and items were built from their definitions. In a sample of 500 college students, the most replicable item structure had 3 factors; one of these 3 factors split into 2 factors in the 4-factor structure. A replication study confirmed that Conservatism and Authoritarianism are subcomponents of the largest factor. The other factors, though highly meaningful, seem more sparsely represented in previous research. No factor was highly related to personality traits other than Openness to Experience. The factors can serve as content-validity benchmarks for developing improved measurement models in this consequential, discrete domain of individual differences.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

Convenient fixation location within isolated words of different length and structure.

When a word is visually presented in a naming or comparison task in such a way that the eye is initially fixated at different locations within the word, a very strong effect of fixation location is found. The effect appears as a U-shaped curve. Naming time and total fixation time (gaze duration) have a minimum for an initial fixation location between the third and fifth letter of the word (for words that are 5-11 letters long). When initial fixation location deviates from this optimum position, times increase at the surprisingly fast rate of 20-30 ms per letter of deviation. By manipulating the internal lexical structure of the words, we show that at least part of the fixation location effect is caused by mechanisms related to ongoing lexical processing. This is demonstrated by the fact that the fixation location effect takes a different form when the most informative part of a word (as determined by dictionary counts) occurs at the beginning or the end of the word.

Fixation, Ocular↗
PubMed1991

Relations of job characteristics from multiple data sources with employee affect, absence, turnover intentions, and health.

Much of the evidence in support of job characteristics theory is limited to incumbent reports of job characteristics. In this study, job characteristics data from three independent sources--incumbents, ratings from job descriptions, and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles--were used. Convergent validities of incumbent reports with other sources were quite modest. Although incumbent reports of job characteristics correlated significantly with several employee outcomes (job satisfaction, work frustration, anxiety on the job, turnover intentions, and number of doctor visits), the other sources showed few significant correlations, except for number of doctor visits. Caution is urged in the use of incumbent self-reports of job characteristics as indicators of actual work environments. New methods for studying job characteristics are suggested.

Absenteeism↗
PubMed1991

Influence of job characteristics on the acceptability of employee drug testing.

Measures of the acceptability of employee drug testing were obtained from a sample of college students (N = 371) and a second sample of nontraditional, older college students (N = 112) and were correlated with job-analysis data from the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) and Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) databases, and with measures of perceived danger from impaired performance in each job. Both PAQ and DOT data accounted for variance in ratings of acceptability. Perceptions of danger were the best single predictor of acceptability and appeared to mediate the relationships between job characteristics and the acceptability of employee drug testing.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Job-specific applicant pools and national norms for personality scales: implications for range-restriction corrections in validation research.

This article compares variability in national norms to variability in job-specific applicant pools for personality scales. Across 23,231 job applicants for 111 jobs, we found that job-specific applicant pools were slightly less variable than broad normative data (by about 4%) based on a national norm sample of 40,474 job applicants. For some personality variables, the amount of variability reduction correlated with work characteristics as captured by the Data, People and Things scales of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (US Department of Labor, 1977). Most correlations were small in magnitude. In general, the small reductions in job-specific applicant pool variability provide evidence that researchers' decisions to use manual norm group standard deviations in range restriction corrections has not appreciably inflated the personality-criterion relationships studied. Implications for attraction and gravitation to jobs are discussed.

Choice Behavior↗
PubMed2005

The factor structure of Greek personality adjectives.

Personality descriptors--3,302 adjectives--were extracted from a dictionary of the modern Greek language. Those terms with the highest frequency were administered to large samples in Greece to test the universality of the Big-Five dimensions of personality in comparison to alternative models. One- and 2-factor structures were the most stable across variable selections and subsamples and replicated such structures found in previous studies. Among models with more moderate levels of replication, recently proposed 6- and 7-lexical-factor models were approximately as well replicated as the Big Five. An emic 6-factor structure showed relative stability; these factors were labeled Negative-Valence/Honesty, Agreeableness/Positive Affect, Prowess/Heroism, Introversion/Melancholia, Even Temper, and Conscientiousness.

Culture↗
PubMed2006

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat: spontaneous expressions of medal winners of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

Facial behaviors of medal winners of the judo competition at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games were coded with P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen's (1978) Facial Affect Coding System (FACS) and interpreted using their Emotion FACS dictionary. Winners' spontaneous expressions were captured immediately when they completed medal matches, when they received their medal from a dignitary, and when they posed on the podium. The 84 athletes who contributed expressions came from 35 countries. The findings strongly supported the notion that expressions occur in relation to emotionally evocative contexts in people of all cultures, that these expressions correspond to the facial expressions of emotion considered to be universal, that expressions provide information that can reliably differentiate the antecedent situations that produced them, and that expressions that occur without inhibition are different than those that occur in social and interactive settings.

Affect↗
PubMed1989

Focal congenital anomalies of the retinal pigment epithelium.

The terms, 'hamartoma', 'choristoma', 'phacoma' (mother-spot), and 'naevus', are used to describe benign developmental tumours or placoid lesions. Stedman's Medical Dictionary defines a hamartoma as: 'A focal malformation that resembles a neoplasm grossly and even microscopically, but results from faulty development in an organ; it is composed of an abnormal mixture of tissue elements, or an abnormal proportion of a single element, normally present in that site, which develop and grow at virtually the same rate as normal components, and are not likely to result in compression of the adjacent tissue (in contrast to neoplastic tissue).' A choristoma is defined as 'a mass formed by maldevelopment of tissue of a type not normally found at that site.' Phacoma is defined as, 'a hamartoma found in phacomatosis,' a group of hereditary diseases characterised by hamartomas of multiple tissues. A naevus is a, 'birthmark; a circumscribed malformation of the skin, especially if coloured by hyperpigmentation or increased vascularity; it may be predominantly epidermal, adnexal, melanocytic, vascular, or mesodermal, or a localised overgrowth of melanin-forming cells arising in the skin early in life.' Ophthalmologists have adopted the term to refer to developmental melanocytic lesions of the uveal tract, but heretofore have not used it to describe developmental melanocytic, glial, or vascular lesions of the retina. The purpose of this report is to summarise the author's observations and concepts concerning focal lesions that probably are developmental tumours and placoid lesions composed of either entirely or in part retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). Two of the lesions are tumefactions and may properly be termed 'hamartomas'. Four of the lesions are placoid and might better be described as naevi. Two are composed of hypertrophied RPE cells engorged with melanin granules, one is presumed to be hypertrophied RPE cells filled with a white pigment of unknown nature and one is composed of RPE cells containing no pigment. Three are widely recognised, three others are not.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

A computer assisted follow up system for spinal cord injury patients.

The comprehensive care of patients with traumatic spinal cord injuries (SCI) necessitates, among other things, a structured, life-long follow up. The high consumption of medical care in chronic SCI patients, often a result of diseases affecting many different organ systems, soon causes the cumulated medical documentation to be extensive and therefore hard to survey. The possibilities for rational patient management, adequate quality assurance, and clinical research may improve considerably by computerisation of medical records. A computerised medical records system for SCI has recently been developed, using a semistructured medical record format for data input and a medical entity dictionary for facilitated data storage and retrieval. The principles for developing this computer-assisted follow up system are described.

Humans↗
PubMed2003

Aspiration.

Aspiration lands in the dictionary between aspidistra and aspirin - a Victorian parlour plant and an anti-inflammatory with new-found cardiac and DVT prevention qualities. What do we make of that as a sign of the times?

Aspirations, Psychological↗
PubMed2001

Is obesity a disease?

BACKGROUND: There is disagreement about whether obesity should be considered a disease, as can be seen by inconsistent usage and the advocacy of conflicting views in popular and scholarly articles. However, neither writers who refer to obesity as a disease nor those who question whether it is a disease have generally provided a definition of disease and then offered evidence that obesity does or does not fit the definition. METHOD: The characteristics of obesity were examined to determine whether they fit the common and recurring elements of definitions of disease taken from a sample of authoritative English language dictionaries. FINDINGS AND INTERPRETATIONS: Obesity, defined as a body mass index (BMI, kg/m(2)) or percentage body fat in excess of some cut-off value, though clearly a threat to health and longevity, lacks a universal concomitant group of symptoms or signs and the impairment of function which characterize disease according to traditional definitions. While it might nevertheless be possible to achieve a social consensus that it is a disease despite its failure to fit traditional models of disease, the merits of such a goal are questionable. Labeling obesity a disease may be expedient but it is not a necessary step in a campaign to combat obesity and it may be interpreted as self-serving advocacy without a sound scientific basis.

Body Mass Index↗
PubMed2004

Comparison of topological descriptors for similarity-based virtual screening using multiple bioactive reference structures.

This paper reports a detailed comparison of a range of different types of 2D fingerprints when used for similarity-based virtual screening with multiple reference structures. Experiments with the MDL Drug Data Report database demonstrate the effectiveness of fingerprints that encode circular substructure descriptors generated using the Morgan algorithm. These fingerprints are notably more effective than fingerprints based on a fragment dictionary, on hashing and on topological pharmacophores. The combination of these fingerprints with data fusion based on similarity scores provides both an effective and an efficient approach to virtual screening in lead-discovery programmes.

Algorithms↗