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The Schizophrenia Cognition Rating Scale: an interview-based assessment and its relationship to cognition, real-world functioning, and functional capacity.

OBJECTIVE: Interview-based measures of cognition may serve as potential coprimary measures in clinical trials of cognitive-enhancing drugs for schizophrenia. However, there is no such valid scale available. Interviews of patients and their clinicians are not valid in that they are unrelated to patients' levels of cognitive impairment as assessed by cognitive performance tests. This study describes the reliability and validity of a new interview-based assessment of cognition, the Schizophrenia Cognition Rating Scale (SCoRS), that involves interviews with patients and informants. METHOD: Sixty patients with schizophrenia were assessed with the SCoRS and three potential validators of an interview-based measure of cognition: cognitive performance, as measured by the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia (BACS); real-world functioning, as measured by the Independent Living Skills Inventory; and functional capacity, as measured by the University of California, San Diego, Performance-Based Skills Assessment (UPSA). RESULTS: The SCoRS global ratings were significantly correlated with composite scores of cognitive performance and functional capacity and with ratings of real-world functioning. Multiple regression analyses suggested that SCoRS global ratings predicted unique variance in real-world functioning beyond that predicted by the performance measures. CONCLUSIONS: An interview-based measure of cognition that included informant reports was related to cognitive performance as well as real-world functioning. Interview-based measures of cognition, such as the SCoRS, may be valid coprimary measures for clinical trials assessing cognitive change and may also aid clinicians desiring to assess patients' level of cognitive impairment.

Activities of Daily Living↗

Overurbanization reconceptualized: a political economy of the world-system approach.

"After many years of relative neglect, the issue of 'overurbanization' in Third World countries has recently received renewed attention in the social science literature. Adopting a political economy of the world-system perspective on urbanization and development, this article critiques the theoretical adequacy of the overurbanization thesis. Conceptualizing a causal relationship between spatio-demographic imbalances (labelled 'over-urbanization') and relatively skewed and stagnant economic development is midleading. Both urban patterns and development trajectories are distorted by the international dependency of Third World nations in the world economy. The general argument is illustrated by discussing the role that the so-called 'urban surplus labor' of the 'informal sector' plays in surplus extraction under peripheral capitalism."

Demography↗

Football injuries during the World Cup 2002.

BACKGROUND: The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup is one of the largest, most popular sporting events but is associated with a certain risk of injury for the players. PURPOSE: Analysis of the incidence, circumstances, and characteristics of soccer injury during the World Cup 2002. STUDY DESIGN: Prospective survey. METHODS: The physicians of all participating teams reported all injuries after each match on a standardized injury report form. The response rate was 100%. RESULTS: A total of 171 injuries were reported from the 64 matches, which is equivalent to an incidence of 2.7 injuries per match; approximately 1 to 2 injuries per match resulted in absence from training or match. More than a quarter of all injuries were incurred without contact with another player, and 73% were contact injuries. Half of the contact injuries, or 37% of all injuries, were caused by foul play as rated by the team physician and the injured player. CONCLUSION: The incidence of injuries during the World Cup 2002 was similar to those reported for the World Cup in 1994 and in 1998. Increased awareness of the importance of fair play may assist in the prevention of injury.

Athletic Injuries↗

Independent centromere formation in a capricious, gene-free domain of chromosome 13q21 in Old World monkeys and pigs.

BACKGROUND: Evolutionary centromere repositioning and human analphoid neocentromeres occurring in clinical cases are, very likely, two stages of the same phenomenon whose properties still remain substantially obscure. Chromosome 13 is the chromosome with the highest number of neocentromeres. We reconstructed the mammalian evolutionary history of this chromosome and characterized two human neocentromeres at 13q21, in search of information that could improve our understanding of the relationship between evolutionarily new centromeres, inactivated centromeres, and clinical neocentromeres. RESULTS: Chromosome 13 evolution was studied, using FISH experiments, across several diverse superordinal phylogenetic clades spanning >100 million years of evolution. The analysis revealed exceptional conservation among primates (hominoids, Old World monkeys, and New World monkeys), Carnivora (cat), Perissodactyla (horse), and Cetartiodactyla (pig). In contrast, the centromeres in both Old World monkeys and pig have apparently repositioned independently to a central location (13q21). We compared these results to the positions of two human 13q21 neocentromeres using chromatin immunoprecipitation and genomic microarrays. CONCLUSION: We show that a gene-desert region at 13q21 of approximately 3.9 Mb in size possesses an inherent potential to form evolutionarily new centromeres over, at least, approximately 95 million years of mammalian evolution. The striking absence of genes may represent an important property, making the region tolerant to the extensive pericentromeric reshuffling during subsequent evolution. Comparison of the pericentromeric organization of chromosome 13 in four Old World monkey species revealed many differences in sequence organization. The region contains clusters of duplicons showing peculiar features.

Animals↗

On the number of New World founders: a population genetic portrait of the peopling of the Americas.

The founding of New World populations by Asian peoples is the focus of considerable archaeological and genetic research, and there persist important questions on when and how these events occurred. Genetic data offer great potential for the study of human population history, but there are significant challenges in discerning distinct demographic processes. A new method for the study of diverging populations was applied to questions on the founding and history of Amerind-speaking Native American populations. The model permits estimation of founding population sizes, changes in population size, time of population formation, and gene flow. Analyses of data from nine loci are consistent with the general portrait that has emerged from archaeological and other kinds of evidence. The estimated effective size of the founding population for the New World is fewer than 80 individuals, approximately 1% of the effective size of the estimated ancestral Asian population. By adding a splitting parameter to population divergence models it becomes possible to develop detailed portraits of human demographic history. Analyses of Asian and New World data support a model of a recent founding of the New World by a population of quite small effective size.

Asia↗

Contending with complexity: developing and using a scaled world in applied cognitive research.

Scaled worlds preserve certain functional relationships of a complex task environment while paring away others. The functional relationships preserved are defined by the questions of interest to the researcher. Different scaled worlds of the same task may preserve and pare away different functional relationships. In this paper we use the example of Ned to discuss the use of scaled worlds in applied cognitive research. Ned is based on a detailed cognitive task analysis of submarine approach officers as they attempt to localize an enemy submarine hiding in deep water. For Ned we attempted to preserve the functional relationships inherent in the approach officer's information environment while paring away other aspects of his task environment. Scaled worlds attempt to maintain the realism inherent in the preserved functional relationship while being tractable for the researcher and engaging to the participant.

Cognitive Science↗

Families in today's world-and tomorrow's.

The world's family systems derive from the great world religions and the cultural history of civilizations. On this basis, five fundamental family systems of the world can be identified--those of East, South, and West Asia (with North Africa), sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe--together with two important interstitial or hybrid systems--of Creole America and of Southeast Asia--each with significant subvariants. The comparative overview of these seven family systems looks at their internal power relations (patriarchy), their marriage patterns and regulation of sexuality, and their fertility. Changes tend to move in the same direction across the world, but without convergence.

Africa South of the Sahara↗

The World Bank, pharmaceutical policies, and health reforms in Latin America.

Health care systems spend a relatively high percentage of their resources on the purchase of medicines, and the poor spend a disproportionate amount of their income on pharmaceuticals. There is ample evidence in the literature that drugs are very poorly used. World Bank-led health reforms aim at improving equity, efficiency, quality, and users' satisfaction, and it will be difficult to achieve these goals without making medicines accessible and affordable. The purpose of this article is to examine the adequacy of World Bank pharmaceutical policies, as recommended in various Bank documents, for Latin America and to examine the implementation of the policy recommendations. The authors found that the World Bank identified and recommended a set of pharmaceutical policies that matched the needs of the region. But, as revealed through fieldwork and a review of the literature, the recommended pharmaceutical interventions were left out of the health reforms, and most of the loans that included pharmaceutical interventions allocated funds only to the purchase of drugs. The authors formulate four hypotheses that may explain the lack of congruence between the recommended policies and the strategies financed by World Bank health reform loans to the Latin American region.

Drug Costs↗

Dependency among Third World elderly: a need for new direction in the nineties.

The current political economy of aging focuses largely on the conditions of old people in Western industrialized societies. Thus it ignores more than half of the world's elderly--those residing in Third World countries. In the first part of this article the author examines aging trends in developing countries, considering recent approaches to addressing the deteriorating economic and social conditions that shape the lives of the elderly in these countries. In the second part, a feminist perspective is used to assess the implications of these demographic trends and development strategies for women in Third World countries. It is argued that policies that place primary responsibility for care of the elderly within families are as unjust in Third World societies as they are in industrialized nations.

Aged↗

Assessment of the world food situation-present and future.

The widespread bad harvests of 1972 in various regions of the world, the consequent reduction in grain reserves, the rapid rise in food prices almost everywhere and its impact on inflation, all have served to draw renewed attention to the problem of hunger which affects millions of human beings in the world today. During the 1974 United Nations World Food Conference many important matters relating to this problem were debated: the creation of international grain reserves; problems concerning world trade of foodstuffs; the current difficulties with certain key agricultural production factors, such as fertilizers; the necessity for organizing a worldwide information system on the situation; and prospects of various harvests and threats of famine in underdeveloped countries. It is often the case that discussion of the hunger problem does not correspond to the gravity of the crisis; true causes of the present situation are not examined, and measures are not adopted that will once and for all--for the first time--abolish hunger. In view of the prospect that the real issues are often ignored, the Transnational Institute provides this analysis in an attempt to clarify what must be done to abolish hunger in the belief that this is within the reach of humanity when and if we are determined to end the irrationalities of the present economic system and the relations of domination which some individuals and countries seek to continue.

Agriculture↗

How International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies undermine labor power and rights.

Based on reviews of hundreds of loan and project documents from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, this article provides detailed evidentiary support for critics who have long claimed that the international financial institutions require Third World countries to adopt policies that harm the interests of working people. After reviewing loan documents between the IMF and World Bank and 26 countries, the authors show that the institutions' loan conditionalities include a variety of provisions that undermine labor rights, labor power, and tens of millions of workers' standard of living. These include downsizing of the civil service and privatization of government-owned enterprises; promotion of labor flexibility: the notion that firms should be able to hire and fire workers, or change terms and conditions of work, with minimal regulatory restrictions; mandated wage rate reductions, minimum-wage reductions or containment, and spreading the wage gap between government employees and managers; and pension reforms, including privatization, that cut social security benefits. These labor-related policies take place in the context of broader IMF and World Bank structural adjustment packages that emphasize trade liberalization, with macroeconomic policies that further advance corporate interests at the expense of labor.

Civil Rights↗

A World-Wide Web radiology teaching file server on the Internet.

OBJECTIVE: Radiology departments have traditionally used film-based collections of interesting cases for teaching purposes. Film-based files are expensive to create and duplicate, and they physically occupy considerable space. As one solution to these problems, our department created an on-line radiology teaching file in digital format. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our teaching file resides on a Macintosh Quadra 700 computer that is connected to the Internet, a worldwide network of interconnected computers, via our campus Ethernet network. Our digital teaching file images and text are composed in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and are made available to the world with Webserver software known as MacHTTP. These teaching files are accessed using World-Wide Web (WWW) client software such as Mosaic, MacWeb, or Netscape. RESULTS: Our digital teaching file is available at no charge to anyone in the world with access to the Internet and WWW client software. Our radiology residents can access this file via several workstations in our department. Mosaic is an easy-to-use interface, and the use of our digital teaching file has increased significantly. In the 3 months since its creation, our teaching file has been accessed not only by our radiology residents but also by hundreds of other users in 33 countries. CONCLUSION: Use of Mosaic and the WWW format has resulted in an easy-to-use hypertext interface to the Internet, which allows even persons with little computer experience to navigate through the Internet, read text files, view images (stills and movies), and download files by merely pointing with the mouse and clicking on items of interest. This has allowed us to maintain a central teaching file that is physically small and easy to share with all the hospitals in our system. We invite the worldwide radiology community to access these files and to submit cases from their own teaching files to share with the rest of the world.

Computer Communication Networks↗

Jan Mikulicz-Radecki: one of the creators of world surgery.

This paper presents the life and achievements of Professor Jan Mikulicz-Radecki and his contribution to European and world surgery. He was born in 1850. Four periods can be distinguished in his surgical career: (1) Vienna period, 1875-82, when he worked by the side of the great Theodor Billroth: he introduced a number of new diagnostic and operative techniques, aseptic and antiseptic procedures, published research papers. He made the first endoscope for examining the esophagus and stomach. (2) Cracow period, 1882-87, when he was head of the Department of Surgery: he inaugurated his work with a lecture in Polish, which started: Gentlemen, I have been accused that I do not know the Polish language--which is my mother tongue to me as well as to any of you. He published papers on the use of iodophorm for healing wounds, was the first surgeon who sutured a perforated gastric ulcer (1885) and invented pyloroplasty (1887), nowadays called Heinecke-Mikulicz pyloroplasty. (3) Konigsberg period, 1887-90: he improved the technique of gastric resection, worked on surgery for peptic ulcer and advocated aseptic and antiseptic procedures. (4) Wroclaw (Breslau) period, 1890- 1905: Mikulicz was appointed head of a newly founded Surgical Department. He rebuilt it and designed one of the largest and most modern operating theaters in Europe that time. He introduced silk gloves for operations for the first time in the world. In 1892 he described bilateral swelling of salivary and lacrimal glands, called Mikulicz's syndrome; in 1902 he published his experience with two-stage colon resection; and in 1904 he described ostitis fibrosa cystica juvenilis. Called "a king in the kingdom of surgeons", he was one of the fathers of the world's modern surgery; having a brilliant surgical mind, he was a pioneer of many new operations and an inventor of surgical tools, permanently assimilated in the world's surgery.

Digestive System Surgical Procedures↗

[History and causes of acupuncture advancing towards the world].

Acupuncture therapy is one of the original innovations in traditional Chinese medicine. The study of acupuncture has gradually advanced towards the world since 1970s. In these years the most important events might be the influence of acupuncture anesthesia, the attention of the World Health Organization, the establishment and development of the World Federation of Acupuncture and Moxibustion Societies, and the consensus development conference on acupuncture held by the National Institutes of Health in America, and so on. The reasons why acupuncture is accepted by the world are both the convinced curative effects and the scientific foundations, due to the great efforts of medical stuff in China guided by the principle of integration of traditional Chinese and western medicine. This article poses several proposals about further extending the influence of acupuncture. In brief, acupuncture research is one of the few fields that authentically impact the western scientific technology. It is of very important responsibility in the new century to impulse the acupuncture study to further progress and expand the international influence of acupuncture.

Acupuncture Therapy↗

Health promotion and world peace: a developmental perspective.

To facilitate the inclusion of world peace as a health promotion issue, a theoretical framework is presented that describes a possible relationship between continued personal growth and development and world peace. In this framework, personal health and growth are related to the evolution of human consciousness beyond the adult ego. This personal growth is then viewed as a contribution to the multiple conditions necessary for world peace. Consequently, world peace can be viewed as a personal health issue as well as a social and political issue. So viewed, peace becomes a personal and professional concern in health promotion.

Attitude to Health↗

Impact of coronary heart disease on world leaders.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that from 1965 to 1996, coronary heart disease was a frequent natural cause of death among world leaders. OBJECTIVE: To assess incidence of and death from coronary heart disease among world leaders and to determine the effect of this disease on office-holding ability. DESIGN: Archive search of worldwide English-language and translated press and media reports from 1970 to 1999 for reference to coronary events. SETTING: U.S. federal government medical analytic unit. PARTICIPANTS: National principal decision makers in countries with populations greater than 250 000. MEASUREMENTS: Reports of angina, heart attack, myocardial infarction, and arrhythmia attributed to coronary artery disease; use of cardiac procedures; receipt of foreign care; death; and removal from office. RESULTS: 64 leaders had initial coronary heart disease events while holding their nation's highest office. Initial event rates decreased from the 1970s to the 1990s (1.9 events per 100 person-years vs. 1.1 events per 100 person-years). Survival, use of procedures, and receipt of foreign care increased over time. Most leaders who survived an acute event continued to function in office. CONCLUSIONS: Incidence of and death from coronary heart disease among office-holding world leaders has decreased over the past 30 years, possibly because of increased use of cardiac procedures. A coronary event in a world leader is unlikely to presage a change in government.

Aged↗

Tuberculosis, HIV and the developing world.

This article reviews the immunology, genetics, epidemiology and treatment of two of the most important infectious diseases in the world, HIV and tuberculosis (TB). The pandemic of TB has been greatly magnified by the advent of the HIV epidemic. In the developing world, probably 50% of HIV seropositive individuals are co-infected with TB. The TB epidemic has expanded both because of increased susceptibility of patients to new tuberculous infection and also because of the greater chance of a primary complex leading to disseminated disease. The evidence that TB has had any effect on the HIV epidemic is less clear in the developed world with effective antiretroviral therapy. In resource-poor countries, many HIV infected individuals die prematurely of TB. Both organisms infect immunologically competent cells, and the control of infection in both has a large genetic component. The complex immunological response and process of cytokine release has a marked impact on both control of disease and the pathological effects of infection. Treatment of TB was associated with the development of resistance until the need for combination chemotherapy was recognised. It was then realised that one of the major factors making treatment of TB difficult was poor long-term adherence. Exactly the same sequence of events in terms of our understanding of the treatment of HIV infection has occurred more recently. These two infections undoubtedly present the most serious challenge to public health across the world, and are likely to be controlled only by a global mobilisation of resources not seen since the end of the last European war.

Antiretroviral Therapy, Highly Active↗

A vision for world-class quality in health care.

When we talk about world-class health care, we are finding that we are in a position where the purchasers of our services find there is little or no value for the health-care dollars they are spending. Even the father of American Quality, W. Edwards Deming, has listed the high cost of health care as one of the seven deadly diseases, so we know that we are in trouble. According to a 1989 study, the public tells us that 32% of the time the value of health care they receive is good to excellent, and 65% of the time it is fair to poor. When we look at what our physicians say, 76% of them believe that we get good value for health-care dollars as opposed to 23% who think it is fair to poor. As I have been thinking about what world-class quality would mean, one of the things that comes to mind is the fact that health care is now consuming 15% of the gross national product. We are approaching an expenditure level of one trillion dollars. If our results were good, we could feel comfortable resting on our laurels, because for those we serve in the American health-care system, we serve them very well. But our results are not good. We are 23rd in the world in infant mortality, and we are 16th in the world for life expectancy. The real tragedy in the American health-care system is that 37 million Americans are uninsured. Obviously this cannot continue.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Models, Organizational↗