A feasibility study of the use of medical clowns as hand-hygiene promoters in hospitals.

Healthcare-acquired infections (HAI) pose vast health and economic burdens. Proper hand-hygiene is effective for reducing healthcare-acquired infections (HAI) incidence, yet staff compliance is generally low. This study assessed the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary effect of employing medical clowns to enhance hand-hygiene among physicians and nurses.

Genetics of adrenocortical disease: an update.

Purpose Of Review: Disease states characterized by abnormal cellular function or proliferation frequently reflect aberrant genetic information. By revealing disease-specific DNA mutations, we gain insight into normal physiology, pathophysiology, potential therapeutic targets and are better equipped to evaluate an individual's disease risks. This review examines recent advances in our understanding of the genetic basis of adrenal cortical disease.

Factors in decision making following genetic counseling for pre-natal diagnosis of de novo chromosomal rearrangements.

A retrospective survey of genetic counselors was conducted in order to identify practice patterns and factors that influence a patient's decision making when a de novo translocation is diagnosed pre-natally. Different variables that influence patients' decisions about pregnancy management were assessed and compared. Specifically, the type of rearrangement and/or knowledge of the breakpoints, risks provided for abnormal outcome, anxiety, fetal ultrasound findings and personal reasons for parental decisions were evaluated.

Sentence priming effects in the two cerebral hemispheres: influences of lexical relatedness, word order, and sentence anomaly.

The present study examined lexical, syntactic and semantic message-level contributions to sentence priming in the left (LH) and right (RH) hemispheres. Participants made lexical decisions to laterally presented target words preceded by congruent, incongruent, syntactic, random and neutral incomplete sentences that either contained or did not contain a lexical associate of the target. In the LH, congruent associated sentences facilitated, and incongruent associated sentences inhibited, target word recognition extensively.