Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Conversation analysis”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

Comparative distribution and use of humour within nurse-patient communication.

There has been increasing interest in the use of humour in patient care within recent years. However, little research has been conducted to show the natural utilisation of humour, particularly from the participants' perspective, within the clinical environment. This study uses ethnomethodological ethnography and conversation analysis methods to investigate the use of humour between nurses and patients with renal failure who were learning about, and to, haemodialyse. It is believed that the project is unique in the utilisation of audiovisual video recordings to measure and describe the frequency, distribution and use of humour. Findings indicated that humour rates and the proportion of humour produced by the patients were differentially distributed between patients but, overall, not between the same patients on different occasions. In addition, in one case a significant positive relationship between the rate of humorous instances per session and time was demonstrated and another patient (D) was found to produce a significantly larger proportion of the humour over time. Further exploration of patient D's increasing use of humour revealed that one important aspect was associated with the patients anxiety and difficulties with regard to "needling'. The findings have implications for understanding the role of humour in health care communication, particularly with reference to developing formal "humorous interventions'.

Adult↗

Communicative skills in children with specific language impairments: a comparison with their language-matched siblings.

The purpose of this study was to compare the pragmatic skills of five children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI) and their Mean Length of Utterance-matched younger siblings, thus in part controlling for home language environment and expressive language level. Data were videotaped as mother-child free play in the home. Children's communicative acts were coded on three levels (social interchange, speech act, and conversational). Analysis of each level separately indicated generally comparable performance within sibling pairs. However, when the three levels were integrated into a measure of pragmatic flexibility, the children with SLI were found to demonstrate a more varied repertoire than their younger, normally developing siblings.

Child↗

HLA-C genotyping of patient with Behçet's disease in the Japanese population.

Behçet's disease has been known to be strongly associated with a particular HLA-B allele, B51. To address the possibility that the HLA-C gene, which is closely linked to HLA-B but has been poorly defined for allo-antigen specificity by the serologic method is involved in the susceptibility to Behçet's disease, HLA-C genotyping was performed for 90 Japanese Behçet's disease patients by the PCR-SSP method. The frequencies of HLA-Cw*14 and -Cw*15 were significantly higher in the patient with Behçet's disease as compared to the controls (48.9% vs. 24.0%, p = 0.0005, and 17.8% vs. 7.3%, p = 0.0434, respectively). On the other hand, the frequencies of HLA-Cw*0304 and -Cw*01 were significantly decreased in the patient group as compared to the control group (7.8% vs. 25.0%, p = 0.0027, and 23.3% vs. 37.5%, p = 0.0398, respectively). The significantly higher HLA-Cw*14 and -Cw*15 alleles may tightly correlate with the B51 antigen, and hence may have increased as a result of a linkage disequilibrium with B51. Accordingly, the HLA-C allele frequencies were compared for the B51-positive or -negative patients and controls, but there was no HLA-C allele showing a significant difference between these patient and control groups. Conversely, analysis of the HLA-B allelic distribution in association with HLA-Cw*14 revealed that in the healthy controls, B44 and B51 were present at the frequencies of 57.1% and 35.7% of the HLC-Cw*14-positive individuals, respectively. In contrast, in the Cw*14-positive patients the frequency of B44 was merely 14.0% (p = 0.0001) and that of B51 was significantly high, amounting to 82.0% (p = 0.0001). These facts suggest that the pathogenic gene of Behçet's disease is not the HLA-C gene (HLA-Cw*14 and/or HLA-Cw*15) but the HLA-B gene (HLA-B51) itself or a non-HLA gene residing in the centromeric side of the HLA-B gene rather than in the telomeric side around the HLA-C gene. This finding supports our previous mapping result, which located the susceptible gene between the TNF and HLA-B genes.

Alleles↗

Music draws attention to the left and speech draws attention to the right.

Providing free-field music input prompts right-handers to attend to their left side in a loudness-matching task that requires no musical analysis. Conversely, speech prompts rightward attention. The processes inferred are akin to the attentional asymmetry demonstrated in the syndrome of hemispatial neglect.

Adult↗

CSF and serum metabolic profile of patients with Huntington's chorea: a study by high resolution proton NMR spectroscopy and HPLC.

We studied both cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serum of 11 patients suffering from Huntington's disease (HD) and 12 control subjects by combining high resolution proton NMR spectroscopy and HPLC. NMR spectroscopy analysis of the CSF shows a significant increase (60%) in pyruvate concentration in HD patients. No unexpected molecules were detected. Glutamate, glutamine, aspartate, proline and GABA levels were found unchanged in the CSF of HD patients, using HPLC analysis. Conversely, a significant increase (30%) in the CSF level of glycine was detected. These observations are in agreement with the metabolic hypothesis of HD physiopathogenesis. In addition, the protocol combining NMR spectroscopy and HPLC provides a straightforward evaluation of brain metabolic status and blood-brain-barrier function.

Amino Acids↗

Characterization of plasma proteome in biliary atresia.

BACKGROUND: Biliary atresia (BA) is a disorder during infancy with unknown etiology in which progression frequently leads to liver cirrhosis. Plasma proteome is characterized in this study. METHODS: Twelve paired plasma samples from 6 children with BA who received surgical correction at early stage and then liver transplantation at late stage of liver cirrhosis were studied. Plasma samples from 2 subjects without liver disorder were used as normal reference for 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis and for identification of protein spots by mass spectrometric analysis. Plasma samples from another 3 normal subjects (with a total of 5) were used for nephelometric quantification of immunoglobulin kappa light chain in comparison with patients' samples. RESULTS: Among the protein spots detected, ranging from 6 to 200 kDa mass with pIs of 3-10, significant up-regulation of immunoglobulin kappa light chain was found at the late stage of BA, which was subsequently confirmed by nephelometric analysis. Conversely, significant decrease of apolipoprotein (Apo) A-I and C-II, haptoglobin alpha2 and beta chain, and transthyretin were detected during the progression of BA. CONCLUSIONS: Increased immunoglobulin kappa light chain detected in late-stage BA characterizes adverse immune modulation in this disorder. Decreased apolipoproteins, haptoglobin and transthyretin levels might be potential markers of progressive liver injury, fibrosis and defective lipid metabolism in BA.

Biliary Atresia↗

Antimicrobial susceptibilities and analysis of genes related to penicillin or macrolide resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae.

One hundred and seventy-seven strains of Streptococcus pneumoniae derived from respiratory specimens between 1987 and 2001 were evaluated for their antimicrobial susceptibilities and distribution of genes related to penicillin and macrolide resistance. Resistance rates tended to be higher for the 1996-2001 isolates than for the 1987-1995 isolates for all beta-lactams tested. For benzylpenicillin the MIC(90) value of the isolates derived between 1996 and 2001 was 1.56 mg/L, while that of strains isolated between 1987 and 1990 was 0.05 mg/L. Furthermore, the number of strains susceptible to macrolides also decreased, but only two strains isolated in 1993 were resistant to levofloxacin of the 177 S. pneumoniae strains tested. When of genes relating to penicillin resistance were analysed using PCR with primers specific to susceptible alleles, although more than 50% of strains from 1987 to 1990 and 1991 to 1995 revealed no mutations in the pbp 1a, 2x and 2b genes, only 30.0% of strains derived between 1996 and 2001 showed no mutations in the pbp gene. Strains having mutations in all three pbp genes (1a, 2x and 2b) by the PCR method increased from only 2.2% in the 1987-1990 derived strains to 27.5% in the 1996-2001 strains. Furthermore, 64.1 and 60.0% of the isolates from 1987 to 1990 and 1991 to 1995, respectively, did not possess either the mefA or ermB by PCR analysis. Conversely, 75.0% of isolates from 1996 to 2001 possessed mefA and/or ermB. These genetic changes may explain the increase in the number of penicillin and macrolide resistant strains. We believe that it is important to evaluate changes in MIC as well as genetic mutations in order to select the most appropriate therapy for S. pneumoniae infections.

Anti-Bacterial Agents↗

Multi-tasking in practice: coordinated activities in the computer supported doctor-patient consultation.

UNLABELLED: The paper provides detailed descriptions of general practitioners (GPs') interactions, both with their computers and their patients, with the aim of facilitating the detailed understanding of how GPs use their computers while in consultation with patients. The focus is on the coordinated activities of the doctor and patient and the multitasking that is required during consultation. The data consists of primary care doctor-patient consultations for asthma and angina where clinical scenarios, supported by dummy electronic and paper records for use by the doctor, were played out. Although not 'naturally occurring', the mock scenario is a traditional medical training technique. OBJECTIVE AND METHODS: This paper describes and demonstrates a data transcription methodology, involving seven discrete levels of activities, developed to account for the intricate multitasking that occurs in a GP consultation. The transcription method, developed to support the evaluation of a prototype medical prescribing decision support system (Prodigy) for use by general practitioners in consultation with patients, builds on data description techniques from conversation analysis (CA) and video analysis (VA). CONCLUSIONS: It is suggested that the methodology described could also be applicable to other scenarios involving the observation of human-computer-human interaction.

Decision Support Systems, Clinical↗

"Pain talk" in hospice and palliative care team meetings: an ethnography.

BACKGROUND: Specialist palliative care nurses have considerable expertise in pain management and this expertise can contribute to tension in the boundary between specialist nurses and non-specialist doctors. OBJECTIVES: This article reports on how specialist palliative care nurses contribute to team talk about pain and the rhetorical strategies they use to develop their reputation and credibility in pain management. DESIGN AND SETTINGS: This is an ethnographic study involving the collection of naturally occurring data from eight palliative care team meetings. The study is concerned with team meetings in hospice, community and hospital palliative care settings. METHODS: Data was collected by audio recording eight team meetings in hospice, hospital and community palliative care settings. The data were analysed using a grounded theory approach followed by application of the tools of discourse and conversation analysis. RESULTS: The findings indicate that specialist palliative care nurses use rhetorical strategies such as contrastive rhetoric, telling atrocity stories, veiled criticism and neutralism as a platform for building a reputation in managing pain. Furthermore they situate their expertise in pain management by direct contrast with problems related to non-specialist practice in pain management. CONCLUSIONS: The team meetings are a safe place, a collegial setting for specialist nurses to challenge non-specialist medical practice and to manage the specialist/non-specialist boundary. The findings have implications for further research related to the specialist nurse/non-specialist doctor boundary and for education of specialist nurses and GPs.

Anthropology, Cultural↗

Non-antibiotic treatment recommendations: delivery formats and implications for parent resistance.

This study draws on a database of 570 community-based acute pediatric encounters in the USA and uses conversation analysis as a methodology to identify two formats physicians use to recommend non-antibiotic treatment in acute pediatric care (using a subset of 309 cases): recommendations for particular treatment (e.g., "I'm gonna give her some cough medicine.") and recommendations against particular treatment (e.g., "She doesn't need any antibiotics."). The findings are that the presentation of a specific affirmative recommendation for treatment is less likely to engender parent resistance to a non-antibiotic treatment recommendation than a recommendation against particular treatment even if the physician later offers a recommendation for particular treatment. It is suggested that physicians who provide a specific positive treatment recommendation followed by a negative recommendation are most likely to attain parent alignment and acceptance when recommending a non-antibiotic treatment for a viral upper respiratory illness.

Anti-Bacterial Agents↗

The structure of patients' presenting concerns: the completion relevance of current symptoms.

This article uses conversation analysis to investigate the problem-presentation phase of 302 visits between primary-care physicians and patients with acute problems. It analyzes the social-interactional organization of problem presentation, focusing on how participants recognize and negotiate its completion. It argues that physicians and patients mutually orient to the presentation of current symptoms--that is, concrete symptoms presented as somehow being experienced in the here-and-now--as a locus of transition between the patient-controlled problem-presentation phase of the visit and the physician-controlled information-gathering phase. This is a resource for physicians to distinguish between complete and incomplete presentations, and for patients to manipulate this distinction.

Acute Disease↗

Quantification of historical dust exposures in the diatomaceous earth industry.

Quantitative estimates of dust exposure in a diatomaceous earth (DE) mining and milling operation have been derived based on air sampling records for the period 1948-1988. A total of 6395 records was included in the analysis. Conversion of results obtained by particle counting, expressed as millions of particles per cubic feet (mppcf) of gravimetrically from a filter cassette and expressed as mg m-3 total, were converted to mg m-3 respirable dust using a conversion factor derived from data obtained during the same periods at the plant. Conversion factors were calculated as the average difference of means on the log scale in order to provide stable and consistent conversions and as a ratio of arithmetic means so that the results could be compared with similar studies. After converting the available data to mg m-3 respirable dust, geometric mean (geometric standard deviation) concentrations were 0.37 (2.43) during the 1950s and 0.17 (2.35) during later periods. Exposures were estimated using two linear models, one estimating the changes in concentration over time, and the other providing job-specific mean exposures during the more recent period. Extrapolation of the estimates to periods prior to the availability of any data was done using a subjectively-determined scaling factor. The average estimated respirable dust concentrations for 135 jobs were 3.55 (+/-1.25), 1.37 (+/-0.48), 0.47 (+/-0.16) and 0.29 (+/-0.10) mg m-3 prior to 1949, 1949-1953, 1954-1973 and 1974-1988, respectively. Despite the limitations of the available data, the estimation procedures used are expected to provide reasonable quantitative estimates of silica-containing dust exposure for subsequent exposure-response analyses.

California↗

Closing medical encounters: two physician practices and their implications for the expression of patients' unstated concerns.

When patients visit primary-care physicians, they frequently have more than one concern. Patients' first concerns are solicited by physicians at the beginnings of encounters. A challenge to health care is how to get patients' additional concerns raised as topics of discussion. If patients' additional concerns are addressed, it tends to occur at the end of encounters. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this article identifies and describes the interactional organization of two physician-initiated communication practices that are used to negotiate the closure of the business of encounters and a transition into the activity of closing encounters themselves. These practices have different implications for the topicalization of patients' additional concerns.

California↗

Participating in decisions about treatment: overt parent pressure for antibiotic medication in pediatric encounters.

This article examines how parents and pediatricians negotiate antibiotic prescribing decisions in cases where parents overtly advocate this medication. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, this paper examines audio and videotaped acute care pediatric encounters and discusses four primary ways in which parents raise antibiotics in pediatric encounters. These formulations vary in their directness with indirect formulations being more common. The article argues that both parents and physicians are oriented to antibiotics as negotiable in and through their interaction. Finally, in contrast with existing research, this study suggests that overtly advocating for antibiotic treatment is relatively unusual; future research will need to incorporate an understanding of the effect of both explicit and implicit ways parents communicate pressure for prescription treatment.

Adult↗

"I'll give up smoking when you get me better": patients' resistance to attempts to problematise smoking in general practice (GP) consultations.

This paper focuses on general practice consultations where the issue of patients' smoking is raised and problematised by general practitioners (GPs) by linking it to their presenting or ongoing medical conditions. The data are taken from a larger study in one country of the UK, of the factors influencing discussion of smoking between GPs and patients who smoke. Consultations have been examined informed by the conversation analysis literature, with a focus on patients' resistance to doctors' problematisation of smoking. It is argued that, despite evidence from other areas of health care that advice is most effective when it is personalised, and despite GPs' expressed views that a preferred way of topicalising smoking is to make links to a patient's current medical problems, this is not generally the case in these consultations. Linking smoking to current problems commonly results in explicit resistance from patients of a kind that is rarely seen in other medical consultations. It is postulated that this results from the moral implications of linking a person's health status with their own behaviour, thereby undermining their claim to legitimate illness and to medical help.

Family Practice↗

Nurse-patient power relationship: preliminary evidence of patients' power messages.

The interactive relationship that is based on sharing power and control is the goal of health counseling practice. This research examined the nurse-patient power relationship and emphasized the patient's perspective. Health counseling sessions, 38 in number, were videotaped, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed by using an adaptation of conversation analysis (CA). The purpose of this research was to describe in detail how patients' minimized power asymmetry during hospital counseling. The results indicate that power is a complex and polysemic phenomenon that can be created jointly. Nurses' power is associated with their medical knowledge, which also patients construct. However, patients have several options to construct their power and influence the flow of interaction, for example, directing the counseling with questions, interruptions, and extensive disclosure, in which also nurses participated. The results are discussed in terms of earlier research on power messages and implications for a future power sharing practice.

Adolescent↗

A real-time ratiometric method for the determination of molecular oxygen inside living cells using sol-gel-based spherical optical nanosensors with applications to rat C6 glioma.

The first sol-gel-based, ratiometric, optical nanosensors, or sol-gel probes encapsulated by biologically localized embedding (PEBBLEs), are made and demonstrated here to enable reliable, real-time measurements of subcellular molecular oxygen. Sensors were made using a modified Stöber method, with poly(ethylene glycol) as a steric stabilizer. The radii of these spherical PEBBLE sensors range from about 50 to 300 nm. These sensors incorporate an oxygen-sensitive fluorescent indicator, Ru(II)-tris(4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phenanthroline) chloride ([Ru(dpp)3]2+), and an oxygen-insensitive fluorescent dye, Oregon Green 488-dextran, as a reference for the purpose of ratiometric intensity measurements. The PEBBLE sensors have excellent reversibility, dynamic range, and stability to leaching and photobleaching. The small size and inert matrix of these sensors allow them to be inserted into living cells with minimal physical and chemical perturbations to their biological functions. Applications of sol-gel PEBBLEs inserted in rat C6 glioma cells for real-time intracellular oxygen analysis are demonstrated. Compared to using free dyes for intracellular measurements, the PEBBLE matrix protects the fluorescent dyes from interference by proteins in cells, enabling reliable in vivo chemical analysis. Conversely, the matrix also significantly reduces the toxicity of the indicator and reference dyes to the cells, so that a wide variety of dyes can be used in optimal fashion.

Animals↗

Modulation of the activities of catalase-peroxidase HPI of Escherichia coli by site-directed mutagenesis.

Catalase-peroxidases have a predominant catalatic activity but differ from monofunctional catalases in exhibiting a substantial peroxidatic reaction which has been implicated in the activation of the antitubercular drug isoniazid in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Hydroperoxidase I of Escherichia coli encoded by katG is a catalase-peroxidase, and residues in its putative active site have been the target of a site directed-mutagenesis study. Variants of residues R102 and H106, on the distal side of the heme, and H267, the proximal side ligand, were constructed, all of which substantially reduced the catalatic activity and, to a lesser extent, the peroxidatic activity. In addition, the heme content of the variants was reduced relative to the wild-type enzyme. The relative ease of heme loss from HPI and a mixture of tetrameric enzymes with 2, 3, and 4 hemes was revealed by mass spectrometry analysis. Conversion of W105 to either an aromatic (F) or aliphatic (I) residue caused a 4-5-fold increase in peroxidatic activity, coupled with a >99% inhibition of catalatic activity. The peroxidatic-to-catalatic ratio of the W105F variant was increased 2800-fold such that compound I could be identified by both electronic and EPR spectroscopy as being similar to the porphyrin cation radical formed in other catalases and peroxidases. Compound I, when generated by a single addition of H(2)O(2), decayed back to the native or resting state within 1 min. When H(2)O(2) was generated enzymatically in situ at low levels, active compound I was evident for up to 2 h. However, such prolonged treatment resulted in conversion of compound I to a reversibly inactivated and, eventually, to an irreversibly inactivated species, both of which were spectrally similar to compound I.

Amino Acid Substitution↗