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PubMed1999

A pilot study of verbal fluency in the Zulu speaking population with preliminary application to traumatic brain injury.

This study investigated the semantic verbal fluency (VF) abilities of non-neurologically impaired (NNI) Zulu speaking subjects in order to obtain normative data for this population. The data were analysed in terms of the total number of words generated in one minute, the number of words generated over four fifteen-second time periods and the strategies employed. Where possible, these results were compared to performance of South African English speaking NNI subjects. The responses of three traumatically brain injured (TBI) Zulu speaking subjects on VF tasks were obtained and compared to the NNI subjects. The NNI subjects performed significantly poorer than the current norms and poorer than the South African English speaking population. The TBI subjects generated fewer words than the NNI subjects. The strategies used by the TBI subjects were similar in type but were less efficiently used than the Zulu speaking NNI subjects. The results of this study are particularly relevant to the clinical role of speech pathologists in the multicultural and multilingual population of South Africa.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

Differential psychotic symptomatology in polyglot patients: case reports and their implications.

Polyglot psychotic patients can present with either different or less psychotic symptoms depending on the language they use. No known study has used a structured interview to assess such differences. A language history was taken on three patients who were then assessed using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale structured interview (SCI-PANSS) for schizophrenia in their two languages. All three patients were found to have different positive symptoms depending on the language used in the interview procedure by the same bilingual researcher. These findings could have important implications in terms of our assessment and treatment of psychotic patients in the NHS. They demonstrate the need to carry out a large study in order to determine how common these findings are in multilingual patients.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Looking for French-English translations in comparable medical corpora.

Cross-language retrieval of medical information needs to translate input queries into target language queries. It must be prepared to cope with 'new' words not yet listed in a multilingual lexicon. We address the issue of finding translational equivalents of such 'unknown' words from French to English in the medical domain. We rely on non-parallel, comparable corpora and an initial bilingual medical lexicon. We compare the distributional contexts of source and target words, testing several weighting factors and similarity measures. For the best combination (the Jaccard similarity measure with or without weighting), the correct translation is found in the top 10 candidates for more than 60% of the test words. This shows the potential of this technique to help extending bilingual medical lexicons.

Information Storage and Retrieval↗
PubMed2004

Quality of medical journals with special reference to the Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal.

Medical journals will continue as a main vehicle of scientific information for years to come, particularly where access to more efficient instruments is relatively limited. The quality of medical journals depends on several factors involving 3 groups of people; namely: the authors, the reviewers and the editors. The Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal (EMHJ) formulated its essential requirements for the manuscripts submitted for possible publication. These are published in every issue of the Journal, and potential authors are strongly advised to adhere to them, to avoid first-hand rejection of their progress. The reviewers' role is a keystone in maintaining the quality of a medical journal. A reviewer is required to address several important aspects of the paper under review and to resend his opinion thereon with his recommendation concerning the acceptability of the paper or otherwise. The editorial management is a crucial part of the publishing process. The editors begin action with the receipt of the manuscript, direct the various steps of evaluation, correction and re-submission, until an editorial decision is taken to accept the paper as is, accept it after modification or rejection. Editors will then make necessary text and layout editing. Due consideration is given to the statistical, multilingual and ethical aspects as well as to the overall uniformity of the terminology, nomenclatures and style throughout the volume as a whole. In February 1999, the EMHJ was accepted by the National Library of Medicine, USA, to be indexed and included in Index Medicus and MEDLINE. Such selection usually depends on several critical criteria; namely: scope and coverage, quality of content, quality of editorial work, production quality, audience and types of content. Evidently, the EMHJ has satisfactorily met all the above criteria.

Authorship↗
PubMed2004

On German-Croatian and Italian-Croatian language contact.

Croatia has always been a multilingual environment. The influence of German and Italian was empowered through direct political influence. During the second part of the 18th and in the 19th century native speakers of German and Italian used Croatian as a second language carrying out their duties at work. This bilingualism can tentatively be referred to as bureaucratic bilingualism. Native Croatian speakers used Italian and German as a second language in certain social areas. Such bilingualism can tentatively be called civic bilingualism. It can be assumed that starting with the 1960s civic German and Italian bilingualism no longer existed. Language contact within the daily life results in German and Italian loan words in Croatian which are still actively present and used in daily communication.

Anthropology, Cultural↗
PubMed2004

Experiments in cross-language medical information retrieval using a mixing translation module.

Given the ever-increasing scale and diversity of medical literature widely published in English on the Internet, improving the performance of information retrieval by cross-language is an urgent research objective. Cross-language medical information retrieval (CLMIR) consists of providing a query in one language and searching medical document collections in one or more different languages. Our users of CLMIR are users who are able to read biomedical texts in English, but have difficulty formulating English queries. This paper proposes a French/English CLMIR system as a mixing model for supporting the retrieval of English medical documents. Methods fall into the category of query translation approach in which we use a hybrid machine translation that combines a pattern-based module with a rule-based translator and includes three steps from pre- to- post-translation. In parallel to this hybrid machine translation, we use multilingual UMLS Methasaurus as a complementary translator. The results show that using a mixing translation module outperforms machine translation-based method and thesaurus-based method used separately.

Information Storage and Retrieval↗
PubMed2005

Desiderata for representing anatomical knowledge.

The general problem of knowledge representation for gross anatomy supporting both computers and human is rarely globally solved. Partial solutions are flourishing, but the actual and potential users are left with a lack of satisfaction and uncomfortable feeling of incompleteness. Moreover, these solutions are not ready for a sound evolution and are at risk to disappear at any moment by default of adequate maintenance. In addition, the problem is complicated by the fact that any solutions should be relevant for Natural Language Processing applications in a multilingual environment.This paper tackles with this problem and defines the basic steps for a proper knowledge representation scheme. Taking the subdomain of gross anatomy, it shows how each step has been solved and what performances and benefits are expected by such a solution. A discussion is done on the way to interface from a common source for both computers and humans.

Anatomy↗
PubMed2005

Automatic lexicon acquisition for a medical cross-language information retrieval system.

We present a method for the automated acquisition of a multilingual medical lexicon (for Spanish and Swedish) to be used within the framework of a medical cross-language text retrieval system. We incorporate seed lexicons and parallel corpora derived from the UMLS Metathesaurus. The seed lexicons for Spanish and Swedish are automatically generated from (previously manually constructed) Portuguese, German and English sources. Lexical and semantic hypotheses are then validated making iterative use of co-occurrence patterns of hypothesized translation synonyms in the parallel corpora.

Humans↗
PubMed2005

A CLIR Interface to a Web search engine.

Medical document retrieval presents a unique combination of challenges for the design and implementation of retrieval engines. We introduce a method to meet these challenges by implementing a multilingual retrieval interface for biomedical content in the World Wide Web. To this end we developed an automated method for interlingual query construction by which a standard Web search engine is enabled to process non-English queries from the biomedical domain in order to retrieve English documents.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed1993

The impact of clinical trial protocols on patient care in a community hospital.

Although clinical research is essential in cancer control, less than 5% of cancer cases in community hospitals are entered in clinical trials. Phase III studies comprise the bulk of clinical research at our community hospital. Potential research protocols are selected by the Community Clinical Oncology Program Therapeutic Investigations Committee for referral to affiliated institutional review boards. Selection criteria include assessments of the scientific validity, relevance, and importance of the research, the match between the proposed protocol and research interests and experience of the investigators, priorities of the research bases for patient accrual, and resource availability for conduct of the study. There are serious impediments to the performance of clinical trials in the multiethnic, multilingual urban community hospital setting. These include diminution of the potential patient pool for trial entry due to language barriers and other difficulties associated with patient accrual; escalating costs (insurance coverage from some carriers in not available for clinical trial participation, and some therapies may be excluded by third-party payers); underinsurance or lack of insurance in many segments of the potential patient population; declining financial support for clinical research and the variability of payments, with restrictions even for standard or conventional treatments; the widespread belief that investigational studies are too costly or are of unproven value; potential liabilities associated with withholding cancer therapy; the unresolved legal quagmire surrounding cancer care for patients just under 18 years of age; and the potential for scientific misconduct related to the performance of clinical trials.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗
PubMed2001

An English and Spanish quality of life measure for rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVE: To develop a rheumatoid arthritis-specific health-related quality of life instrument, translate the English instrument into Spanish, and test the scaling assumptions, reliability, validity, and feasibility of both the English and Spanish versions. METHODS: The development of the Quality of Life-Rheumatoid Arthritis Scale (QOL-RA Scale) involved literature review, consultations with experts, 40 face-to-face interviews, and 5 focus group discussions with multiethnic and multilingual women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Translation design facilitated conceptual and linguistic equivalence. Data for the psychometrics came from telephone interviews of a sample of 107 Caucasian/English and 80 Hispanic/Spanish women with RA. The instruments were (a) the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales 2 (AIMS2), (b) the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS), (c) the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), and (d) the QOL-RA Scale. Descriptive statistics, significance tests, Cronbach's alpha technique, correlation, and factor analysis were used. RESULTS: The QOL-RA Scale, an 8-item scale, took 2 to 3 minutes to administer. Psychometric analysis revealed that the psychometric attributes and constructs of both English and Spanish questionnaires are comparable (i.e., equivalent). Both versions demonstrated the following: (a) normal distribution of the QOL-RA Scale, roughly symmetrical distributions of the items, equivalent means and standard deviations across items, and less than 10% floor and ceiling effects, (b) Cronbach's alpha coefficients of 0.87-0.90, (c) significant correlations of the QOL-RA Scale with the AIMS2 subscales, LSNS, and CES-D, ranging from 0.25 to 0.66 (P < or = 0.01), and (d) extraction of 2 factors, namely physio-psychological and socio-psychological, that explained 65% to 73% of the variance in the scale scores. CONCLUSION: The QOL-RA Scale, in both English and Spanish versions, appears to meet the assumptions of a summated rating scale and the criteria of relevance, reliability, validity, feasibility, and adaptability to several languages.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Validation of recall of breast and cervical cancer screening by women in an ethnically diverse population.

BACKGROUND: Screening mammogram and Pap smear rates are lower for women in underserved racial and ethnic groups, yet may be overestimated due to reliance on patients' self-reports. The purpose of this study was to determine accuracy of self-reports of mammograms and Pap smears in a multiethnic, multilingual population of African American, Latina, Chinese, Filipina, and White women residing in low-income census tracts of Alameda County, California. METHODS: Following a baseline telephone survey of 1,464 women regarding receipt of mammograms and Pap smears, we examined computerized and written medical records to validate the dates and locations of tests reported by women. RESULTS: Of 1,464 subjects, 94.9% reported having had a Pap smear, and 87% reported having had a mammogram. For Pap smears, in a subsample of 448 cases, we validated only 69.4% of the women's self-reports, and for mammography, in a subsample of 846 women, we validated only 75.4% of the self-reports. Validation rates differed significantly by ethnicity and site of care for both Pap smears and mammograms. CONCLUSIONS: Population estimates of breast and cervical cancer screening rates based upon patient self-reports need to be adjusted downward, by as much as one-quarter to one-third, for low-income, ethnic women.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Attitude survey of adverse drug-reaction reporting by health care professionals across the European Union. The European Pharmacovigilance Research Group.

OBJECTIVES: This survey was conducted to assess the attitudes of medical practitioners in the European Union regarding their national spontaneous reporting scheme, to identify reasons for under-reporting and to determine what steps might be effective in increasing reporting rates. National spontaneous reporting schemes rely on health care professionals reporting individual cases of suspected ADRs to a central or regional agency. National schemes, however, vary considerably and reporting rates and patterns differ between member states. Accumulating evidence suggests that doctors' attitudes to national ADR reporting schemes are significant determinants of reporting rates. METHODS: A self-administered questionnaire and letter of invitation was sent to a random sample of approximately 1% of medical practitioners in each of nine EU member states (Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK). One month later, a reminder letter and a second copy of the questionnaire was sent to the non-responders (except Denmark and Italy). RESULTS: Response rates, and the percentage of responders who stated that they had reported previously an ADR, varied substantially between countries. Issues that appeared to discourage reporting included lack of availability of report forms; the address or telephone number of the reporting agency; lack of information on how to report; and not having enough time to report. Issues which did not apparently discourage reporting included concern about patient confidentiality; fear of legal liability or appearing foolish; reluctance to admit that harm had been caused to a patient; and ambition to collect and publish a personal series of cases. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this survey demonstrate some of the advantages and disadvantages of transnational, multilingual studies of this type, but indicate that there is scope for the further development of such techniques and their use on a wider basis in the EU and elsewhere.

Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems↗
PubMed1998

Surgeon.

It is a marvel of words and language that such disparate entities as bacteria, culture, and surgeons often find themselves in the same dish. Yet when one lifts the magic lid and pursues the ties of etymologic affiliations, one is enchanted by the fascinating thread that runs through words from their philologic beginnings to the manifold meanings acquired on the way. How many of us think, for example, of the connotations of culture and sensitivity when we order a "C & S" for a specimen of pus, when the word culture alone could take one back to mother earth or evoke the vision of parthenons of civilization; could lead to safaris of microbe hunters or to defenders of national heritage. With this essay the World Journal of Surgery begins a new feature on the roots and genealogy of surgical terms under the editorship of Professor William Gunn, author of Dictionnaire des Secours d'Urgence and the Multilingual Dictionary of Disaster Medicine and International Relief. It is appropriate for this journal that the series should begin with the word Surgeon.

General Surgery↗
PubMed1997

[Scientific role of German ophthalmology in the European telecommunication project OPHTEL].

BACKGROUND: In Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy, the OPHTEL project combines clinical centers of ophthalmology and internal medicine, an institute for medical informatics and health services research, a publishing company and different industrial partners in the EDP market. AIMS: With the aid of visual telecommunication and rapid data transfer, methods and conditions will be developed and proved so that any physician can very easily obtain sufficient information for treating his patient. Thus, the regional differences in the quality of structured health service (e.g., urban/ rural) will be overcome throughout Europe. SCIENTIFIC TASKS: A multilingual diagnostic and therapeutic thesaurus has to be worked out in order to create standards for communication and quality control. Based on literature, images and image analysis in a knowledge-based data bank, a monitoring system (containing watch-dog functions) and the basic aspects of an ophthalmological patient/disease register will be investigated. (In parallel, a technical development of synchronous and asynchronous telecommunication between eye physicians is taking place in close cooperation with the regional Bavarian project Teleopathalmology in Bavaria on-line). RESULTS: State of the art 6 months after starting the project:the knowledge-based image data bank has been founded and also an ophthalmological 8 language thesaurus and definition standard. All data transfer lines are installed. DISCUSSION: The project is taking place amid diverging sections of medicine: ophthalmology and internal medicine, health politics and data protection, individual treatment and common interest (health care), product management and office organization. Thus, the scientific quality of the transferred ophthalmological content must undergo sophisticated controls. FUTURE STEPS: Intense cooperation with the big German associations for ophthalmology (DOG, BVA) and the European ophthalmological societies concerning EDP, classification and quality control.

Computer Communication Networks↗
PubMed2002

A patient database application for Hereditary Deafness Epidemiology and Clinical Research (H.E.A.R.): an effort for standardization in multiple languages.

One of the most challenging and neglected issues in medicine is the effective recording of the data obtained from the patients. The "European Work Group on the Genetics of Hearing Impairment," which has been working since 1996, proposed a few questionnaires to collect data regarding the phenotype, ENT findings, audiological examination findings and other special investigations. In this study, a computerized patient database application named "Izmir H.E.A.R version 1.0," written in Delphi 4.0 for Windows for recording the patients with hearing problems, is presented. The application consists of a modular form, including information about identity, genetic condition, proband query, audiology and vestibular tests, phenotype, pedigree and special examinations, which allows data entry on all these issues. It has been developed by using the guidelines of Hereditary Deafness Epidemiology and Clinical Research (H.E.A.R.) and by the experience gained within the last 10 years by the authors. The target population of the program is the ENT clinicians, audiologists, epidemiologists, geneticists and researchers in the field. The main idea is to create a program serving the needs of both the daily routine work and research purposes and to distribute this program to the above-mentioned specialists, to encourage them to try the first version and to find a standard and/or better way to collect data. For this reason, the program aims to be multilingual, and the currently available languages are English, German, Spanish and Turkish.

Biomedical Research↗
PubMed2025

Impacts of Climate Change and Related Weather Events on the&#xa0;Health and Wellbeing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities: A Systematic Review.

BACKGROUND: Vulnerable populations such as culturally and linguistically diverse communities (CALD), ethnic minorities and racial groups face a disproportionate burden of climate change-related health impacts due to a combination of socio-cultural and economic factors, geographic vulnerabilities and health disparities. This review synthesised the existing evidence on the health and wellbeing impacts of climate change and related weather events among CALD communities. METHODS: A narrative synthesis approach was utilised to conduct a systematic review. Three electronic databases (PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science) were searched, identifying 25 studies for appraisal and synthesis. Studies published in the English language from January 2010 to March 2024 were included in the review. RESULTS: The reviewed studies, mostly carried out in the USA, employed varied study designs, and focused on diverse CALD groups such as migrants, farmworkers and racial and ethnic minorities. The included studies addressed broader and specific climate change-related events, ranging from heat-related impacts and hurricanes to occupational heat exposure. CALD communities were found to be more vulnerable to climate change-related negative physical and mental health issues, further exacerbated by poor living conditions, limited access to healthcare, and cultural and language barriers. CONCLUSION: Future efforts by governments, healthcare agencies, employers and research institutions should prioritise multilingual risk communication strategies, providing culturally appropriate health education and healthcare access, housing improvements and the investigation of long-term health impacts of climate change and coping mechanisms adopted among CALD populations.

Climate Change↗
PubMed1995

Utilization of laboratory resources: developments in knowledge-based ordering systems.

This paper describes two rule based decision support systems. The first system is used to screen incoming test requests for adequacy on the basis of signs and symptoms volunteered by the requesting GPs. The system was tested using a database of 794 requests for a TSH test. About 17% of the test requests were correctly identified as unnecessary. In total, 0.5% of the tests were incorrectly labelled as unnecessary. This concerned 4% of the patients that appeared to have hyperthyroidism and 23% of the patients that appeared to have hypothyroidism on the basis of TSH and FT4 results. The other system is a rule-based clinical decision support system for the requesting of laboratory investigations, originally designed for use at a hospital within the UK, that was implemented in a predominantly French-speaking hospital in Belgium. This involved the modification of the system to allow multilingual operation, and also the implementation of a completely new set of investigation protocols. The purpose of this study was to assess the transferability, both of the system itself, and of its benefits. The system was introduced gradually and has only recently been in full operation. However, the findings from the first months of routine use of the system indicate that the transfer of the system to a different clinical environment has been successful. Although it is too early to assess fully the impact on laboratory utilization, the clinicians believe that it is improving the appropriateness of investigations.

Artificial Intelligence↗