Predictability influences stopping and response control.

Using a continuous tracking task, the authors examined whether stopping is resistant to expectancies as well as whether it is a representative measure of response control. Participants controlled the speed of a moving marker by continuously adjusting their response force. Participants stopped their ongoing tracking in response to auditory signals on 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of trials.

Reprogramming of interceptive actions: time course of temporal corrections for unexpected target velocity change.

The authors investigated the time course of reprogramming of the temporal dimension of motor acts in a task requiring interception of a moving target. The target moved at a constant velocity on a monitor screen; in part of the trials, target velocity was unexpectedly increased or decreased. Those modifications were produced at different moments during target displacement, leaving periods of time from 100 to 800 ms for movement timing correction.

Physical interaction of two cancer-testis antigens, MAGE-C1 (CT7) and NY-ESO-1 (CT6).

Cancer/testis (CT) antigens are the protein products of germ line-associated genes that are activated in a wide variety of tumors and can elicit autologous cellular and humoral immune responses. CT antigens can be divided between those that are encoded on the X chromosome (CT-X antigens) and those that are not (non-X CT antigens). Among the CT-X antigens, the melanoma antigen gene (MAGE) family, defined by a shared MAGE homology domain (MHD), is the largest.

Compatibility effects in stopping and response initiation in a continuous tracking task.

Two experiments explored stopping performance using a new stimulus-response compatibility effect spanning action initiation and stopping. Participants tracked a sometimes-moving, sometimes-stationary target by controlling the speed of a response marker via a force sensor. In the compatible condition, participants pressed the sensor in response to the target moving and stopped pressing in response to the target stopping.

Will "no blood" kill Jehovah Witnesses?

A 46-year-old Indonesian woman presented with signs and symptoms suggestive of an ovarian tumour and was advised to have surgery with exploratory laparotomy and removal of the mass. She agreed but refused blood transfusion any time in the course of her treatment or procedure, as she was a Jehovah Witness. As there was a high risk of intraoperative haemorrhage, steps were taken to reduce any consequent complications due to the surgery.

Use of visual information in the correction of interceptive actions.

Use of visual information in interceptive actions requiring large-scale changes to movement timing was investigated. The task consisted of intercepting a moving target on a monitor screen through an angular arm movement. In half of the trials, the initial target velocity of 8 cm/s was unexpectedly decreased to 4 cm/s or increased to 12 cm/s, leaving 800 ms to target arrival after velocity change.

Comparison and validation of three measures of quality of life in patients with pulmonary hypertension.

Background: Pulmonary hypertension, when advanced, markedly limits exercise capacity, activities of daily living and quality of life (QoL). No measure of QoL has yet been validated for the assessment of pulmonary hypertension. The aim of the study was to compare the validity of the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure (MLwHF) questionnaire, the Short Form-36 (SF-36) questionnaire and the Australian Quality of Life (AQoL) measure for assessing pulmonary hypertension treatment.

Determinants of offline processing of visual information for the control of reaching movements.

The authors investigated the use of visual feedback as a form of knowledge of results (KR) for the control of rapid (200-250 ms) reaching movements in 40 participants. They compared endpoint accuracy and intraindividual variability of a full-vision group (FV) with those of no-vision groups provided with KR regarding (a) the endpoint in numerical form, (b) the endpoint in visual form, or (c) the endpoint and the trajectory in visual form (DEL). The FV group was more accurate and less variable than were the no-vision groups, and the analysis of limb trajectory variability indicated that their superior performance resulted primarily from better movement planning rather than from online visual processes.

Sensorimotor adaptation in response to proprioceptive bias.

Studies investigating visuo-motor adaptation typically introduce sensory conflicts by manipulating visual information (prisms, cursor gains). The purpose of the present study was to determine whether similar adaptation would be observed when a conflict is created through distortion of the proprioceptive sense, rather than through visual distortion. We used a coordinated movement task that required participants to release thumb and index finger at a specific elbow angle during passive elbow extension.

Updating of an internal model without proprioception: a deafferentation study.

This study sought to determine whether intact proprioception is required to adapt to a novel kinematic environment. We compared adaptation with a rotated visual feedback between a deafferented patient and healthy participants. They performed reaching movements towards visible targets while vision of the cursor was rotated by 30 degrees with respect to hand position.

Startle produces early response latencies that are distinct from stimulus intensity effects.

Recent experiments pairing a startling stimulus with a simple reaction time (RT) task have shown that when participants are startled, a prepared movement was initiated earlier in comparison to voluntary initiation. It has been argued that the startle acts to trigger the response involuntarily. However, an alternative explanation is that the decrease in RT may be due to stimulus intensity effects, not involuntary triggering.

Gross motor skill acquisition in adolescents with Down syndrome.

The purpose of this study was to assess whether verbal-motor performances deficits exhibited by individuals with Down syndrome limited their ability to acquire gross motor skills when given visual and verbal instruction together and then transferred to either a visual or verbal instructional mode to reproduce the movement. Nine individuals with Down syndrome (6 males, 3 females) performed 3 gross motor skills. Both visual and verbal instructional guidance was given to the participants over a 4-day period.

On-line control of pointing is modified by unseen visual shapes.

Shapes that are rendered invisible through backward masking are still able to influence motor responses: this is called masked priming. Yet it is unknown whether this influence is on the control of ongoing action, or whether it merely influences the initiation of an already-programmed action. We modified a masked priming procedure (Schmidt, 2002) such that the critical prime-mask sequence was displayed during the execution of an already-initiated goal-directed pointing movement.

Inferring online and offline processing of visual feedback in target-directed movements from kinematic data.

Vision plays an important role in the planning and execution of target-directed aiming movements. In this review, we highlight the limitations that exist in detecting visual regulation of limb trajectories from traditional kinematic analyses such as the identification of discontinuities in velocity and acceleration. Alternative kinematic analyses that involve examining variability in limb trajectories to infer visual control processes are evaluated.

Kaposi's sarcoma occurring in a cardiac transplant patient on tacrolimus.

Kaposi's sarcoma is a relatively rare but potentially fatal malignancy which affects immunosuppressed individuals. It has been found to occur especially in association with cyclosporine and tacrolimus use and with concurrent cytomegalovirus infection. When detected and treated early, it usually carries a good prognosis and responds well to measures increasing immunocompetence.

In vitro inhibition of human influenza A virus replication by chloroquine.

Chloroquine is a 9-aminoquinolone with well-known anti-malarial effects. It has biochemical properties that could be applied to inhibit viral replication. We report here that chloroquine is able to inhibit influenza A virus replication, in vitro, and the IC50s of chloroquine against influenza A viruses H1N1 and H3N2 are lower than the plasma concentrations reached during treatment of acute malaria.

Temporal uncertainty does not affect response latencies of movements produced during startle reactions.

Previous research has shown that a startle 'go' stimulus, presented at a constant latency with respect to a warning stimulus, is capable of eliciting an intended voluntary movement in a simple reaction time (RT) task at very short latencies without involvement of the cerebral cortex (Carlsen et al. in Exp Brain Res 152:510-518, 2003; J Motor Behav 36:253-264, 2004a; Exp Brain Res 159:301-309 2004b; Valls-Solé et al. in J Physiol 516:931-938, 1999).

Anchoring strategies for learning a bimanual coordination pattern.

Anchoring has been defined as synchronizing a point in a movement cycle with an external stimulus (W. D. Byblow, R.

Decay in visuomotor representations during manual aiming.

The time course of the decay of spatial representations used for planning and controlling manual aiming has not been established. The authors' purpose in the present investigation was to generate a psychometric function for memory-guided reaching movements. Eight university-aged students performed a reciprocal tapping task for 10 s.

Glycoprotein A34, a novel target for antibody-based cancer immunotherapy.

To identify novel, tissue-restricted cell surface proteins in cancer which can serve as targets for antibody-based diagnostics and therapeutics, a translated version of the expressed sequence tag database (tblastn) was mined for transcripts with similarity to the glycoprotein A33 (GPA33) colon cancer antigen. A novel human transcript, termed A34, was identified which encoded a putative cell surface protein, GPA34, which is approximately 30% identical to GPA33 and other members of the junctional adhesion molecule (JAM) family. Conventional end-point and quantitative real-time RT-PCR showed that A34 mRNA expression is highly tissue-restricted, as it is expressed predominantly in stomach and testis.

Spinal cord stimulation significantly improves refractory angina pectoris-a local experience spinal cord stimulation in refractory angina.

Background: Severe refractory angina pectoris can occur in end-stage coronary artery disease despite maximal medical and revascularization therapy. Spinal cord stimulation is an under-utilized but well-established modality for the treatment of intractable angina pain.

Aim: To illustrate the practical, beneficial and effective use of spinal cord stimulation as a treatment option for refractory angina in a local context.

Mycotic coronary artery aneurysm detected by gallium67 scintigraphy.

A 71-year-old man presented with fever and positive blood cultures for methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus 4 days after an uncomplicated intra-luminal abdominal aortic aneurysm repair. Investigations looking for a source of sepsis including computerized tomography scans, transoesophageal echocardiography, a bone scan and repeated chest X-rays, did not reveal an infective focus. Gallium(67) scintigraphy, however, showed a focus of tracer uptake in the region of the aorto-cardiac junction consistent with the presence of an abscess.

No automatic pilot for visually guided aiming based on colour.

It has been claimed that visually guided limb movements are automatically corrected in response to a change in target location but not when the same change in target is cued through a colour switch (Pisella et al. 2000). These findings were based solely on limb endpoint data.

Cancer-testis genes are coordinately expressed and are markers of poor outcome in non-small cell lung cancer.

Purpose: Cancer-testis genes mapping to the X chromosome have common expression patterns and show similar responses to modulators of epigenetic mechanisms. We asked whether cancer-testis gene expression occurred coordinately, and whether it correlated with variables of disease and clinical outcome of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Experimental Design: Tumors from 523 NSCLC patients undergoing surgery were evaluated for the expression of nine cancer-testis genes (NY-ESO-1, LAGE-1, MAGE-A1, MAGE-A3, MAGE-A4, MAGE-A10, CT7/MAGE-C1, SSX2, and SSX4) by semiquantitative PCR.